Is This Possible!? Giving an Amazon Sales Event a Try

I don’t imagine this is possible, but I was curious enough to try: if I can generate $1500 in sales through my Amazon Associates link, they will give me a “bonus” of $45. A whole forty-five dollars! In addition to my usual commissions on those sales...

A Golden Example of Antichoicers Lying to Your Face

Just this week a student in one of my online classes answered a test question with a real-world example of trying to manipulate people using numbers and graphs, which they had to debunk. The example they chose (from the course text, Levitin’s Field Guide to...

We Have a Home!

Thank you to everyone who donated or brought me paying work to help us make closing costs on a new home. I appreciate everyone’s support. Our timeline was tight but we did it. Our rental home being sold, we had to vacate by end of this month. But we closed on a...

You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…

I’ve been working in the field of philosophy for decades. It has literally been my religion. I spent half my life researching it and developing my own comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based philosophy, which became my 2005 book Sense and Goodness without God: A...

James Tabor and the Mainstream Paul

James Tabor recently wrote two guest posts on Bart Ehrman’s blog in preparation for an academic conference on the historical Paul. One is better than the other, but both are illustrative of everything right and wrong about biblical studies as a...

Baptism: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.

A very helpful patron just bought me an expensive but crucial new book on the origins of Christian baptism: Donghyun Jeong’s Pauline Baptism among the Mysteries: Ritual Messages and the Promise of Initiation (De Gruyter, 2023). It establishes what we have long...

Please Help Get Me Some Fast Work to Buy a Home!

My family has been hit with the need to buy a house six months earlier than our financial plan, because our rental home is being sold. We may have to move within sixty days even. Which means we need cash for closing costs, stat! There are various ways you can help...

The Argument from Non-Locality

It is common to just assume God is timeless and spaceless. But I aver that’s logically impossible. You Have to Exist Somewhere to Exist at All If God has no location, then by definition there is no location at which God exists. And if there is no location at...

That Phenomenally Stupid Article by Bill Cooke

The Center for Inquiry is clearly in sad decline. They just published a wildly incompetent article on Jesus mythicism by Bill Cooke, “Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists,” in their magazine Free Inquiry (44.5, August/September 2024). It was pretty...

James Valliant’s Bogus Theory of a Roman Invention of Christianity

It took me a long time to suffer through Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James Valliant and Warren Fahy. But my verdict is now in. Its thesis is bogus. Its method of argument is tediously amateurish. And its only significant evidence...

All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark

I’ve often noted that even the very first Gospel we know of (the one eventually source-credited to someone named Mark), despite often being described as the least fantastical or the most mundane narrative of Jesus, is in fact wildly fantastical, and does not...

How Far Left Is Too Left?

I’m a hardcore lefty. I still encounter people surprised by that. But I also often get asked how far is too far. Today I’ll paint that out for you. This will explain how far left I go—and why I don’t go further, and neither should anyone. At...