Three articles I read recently contain such valuable lessons for critical thinking that for my end-of-month analysis I want to summarize them for you and extract for you the general lessons you can learn from them, so you can apply them to every question in your life...
“Truly I tell you, this generation shall certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” we’re told the Lord said, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with...
You can catch up on the strange world of Christian preterism (a view lately gaining a lot of attention, and causing a lot of panic among Evangelicals), especially “full preterism,” at Wikipedia. But in the ultra-quick: Don Preston holds that Jesus not only...
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...
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...
I will begin this month by completing my political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. I explained what I am doing and set the ground rules in Part 1, and there...
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...
I will close this month and begin the next with a political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. This is a blackbox analysis. Meaning, I’m not concerning myself...
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 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...
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...
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...
Baylor Theologian Thomas Ward has published and promoted a nice little book on an obscure niche of metaphysical theology called Divine Ideas. Ordinarily I wouldn’t waste a minute on this (because usually intersectarian debate is my idea of wasted lifespan). But...
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...
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...
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...
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.