Interpreting the Bible: the story so far

February 11th, 2013

I have looked at six topics so far in this series on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. Before I move on to draw some conclusions, I want to sum up what I have learnt so far.

Read more .....

Conversion & deconversion statistics

February 10th, 2013

Recently I’ve discussed some stories of atheists who once were christians and christians who once were unbelievers. Here’s some statistics on how religious belief is changing in various countries.

Read more .....

Conversion stories: another part of the picture

February 9th, 2013

I have commented before on people who decide they no longer believe in Jesus (see Atheists who once were christians, Pastors who once were christians, and Why do some christians give up belief?). But this is only one side of the story. At the same time, a significant number of people from a non-religious background […]

Read more .....

A tale of two covenants

February 4th, 2013

This is the sixth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. The Bible is divided into two ‘Testaments’. It is obvious that the Old Testament tells about Hebrew history and religion before Jesus, while the New Testament tells about the coming of Jesus and what happened next. But is […]

Read more .....

The Bible as story

February 1st, 2013

This is the fifth post in a series on Interpreting the Bible in the 21st century. People say and write a lot about the Bible. But here is something interesting: the way we write about the Bible is very different from the way the Bible itself is written. Most of the books, newspaper articles and […]

Read more .....

How Jesus and the apostles interpreted the Old Testament

January 21st, 2013

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. We have seen that the Bible doesn’t claim as much for itself as some christians do. Now I test these conclusions by examining how Jesus and his apostles treated their Bible – our Old Testament.

Read more .....

What does the Bible say about itself?

January 11th, 2013

This is the third in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. It is important we begin not with what people say about the Bible, but what it says about itself.

Read more .....

Tony's Chocolonely – serious chocolate!

January 8th, 2013

Regular readers will know that one of my ’causes’ is ethical chocolate – chocolate that is grown by free farmers who are paid a fair wage, and not by trafficked children working more or less as slaves. (For background, see Ethical chocolate update.) So it was with great delight that I received a weighty package […]

Read more .....

Interpreting the Bible

January 5th, 2013

I have argued (Everyone disbelieves some parts of the Bible) that, while most christians say we follow the Bible as our standard of what to believe and do, in fact all of us make exceptions for certain parts. So how do we decide how to interpret the tricky parts of the Bible?

Read more .....

I'm a guest blogger

January 4th, 2013

Since I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve visited many other blogs and met people, believers and unbelievers, who have been variously friendly, encouraging, challenging or critical. Tim is one of those people (friendly and encouraging mainly), and he invited me to write a guest post at his blog, “Just one train wreck after another”. (You’ve […]

Read more .....

A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.