(written with Cora Howell) Have you ever heard someone say that you should follow the Golden Rule? Even if you don’t follow the Bible or its teachings, I bet most of you would know that rule as being something along the lines of loving your neighbor as yourself or treating others how you want to…
Category: bible
Readings and analysis from the Holy Bible
The Garden of Eden
Hail and welcome. I’m back again today revisiting the content of my earliest essays, and for this one we’ll be focusing on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as it appears in the second and third chapters of the Book of Genesis. The first things we want to ask when…
The First Day of Creation
I thought it might be fun to revisit the topics and themes of my earliest episodes, starting with my first essay, “Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath.” It’s been almost five years now and both my knowledge and my writing skills have improved immensely, and my perspective and positions have shifted as well. The circumstances certainly warrant a second look at things.
The Dialectic of Christian Fascism
Today I’ll be arguing that this progression is amplified by a dialectic within certain threads of modern Christianity, an internal contradiction that pushes those threads further and further in a fascist direction.
Judas
The story of Judas may have been the first thing I noticed about Christianity that didn’t quite add up.
The Faith of a Satanist
We certainly should not follow Kierkegaard so far into faith that we abandon reason, but we must recognize that this was the failure of Kierkegaard and his beliefs and not of faith, which he saw clearly. Rather, we must ask, given our belief in reason, in what may we have faith?
The Soul in Ancient Thought
Reading the Phaedo, it struck me how similar Plato’s ideas about the soul are to those of Christianity, and this in turn led me to an investigation in which I compared ideas about the soul and the afterlife held by the ancient Hebrew people to those held by the early Christians, and those in turn to those presented in Plato’s dialogues and the other works of Ancient Greek philosophy.
King David
How is it that evangelical Christians, who have long advocated for America to more fully endorse their strict and bigoted interpretation of Christian morality, simultaneously endorsed someone who is so clearly morally destitute by their standards, or by any standard?
Satan As a Moral Exemplar
What is the ethical standpoint of Satanism? Being that Satanism is generally less codified than other religions and exists in several different forms, there are many possibilities. My goal here is to explore a few of them and to arrive at a possible ethical framework that naturally follows from Satanism in general, as well as from my own particular satanic theory.
The Book of Job, pt. 2
Part 1 of this series covered much of the background of the Book of Job, some matters of translation, and the first two chapters, which cover much of the story of the book as it is commonly told. From here we’ll proceed through the parts of the story that have remained largely untold.