Considering answers to those faith-questions we all ask…
Category: Philosophy
Some of the most difficult words of Jesus for us to accept - believers or unbelievers - speak of blessing and gain through loss, weakness and failure. "Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39). "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3); "... many who are first will be last, and the last first" (Matthew 19:30).
When you hear people make claims such as "Jesus Christ never existed" you find yourself being challenged. You've been a professing believer for X years, you go to church, you shape your life at least loosely around what you claim to believe, but you've never taken the trouble to find or memorize hard historical or archaeological evidence to back up your faith. With an awareness of this common failing in the back of my mind I recently benefitted from a podcast produced by the Associates for Biblical Research, titled, "Jesus Outside the Bible - The Top Ten Historical References" (
Where do our thoughts come from? Experts of all stripes who view the world from a totally naturalistic viewpoint insist that every thought is a production of the brain - a physical organ. Those of us who believe in something beyond the brain know there's more to the human mind than just meat, chemicals and electrical signals. I'll take that statement one step further: the "meat", the chemical interactions and the electrical signals are vital tools for our spirits to operate in a physical world.
In the seventeenth chapter of Revelation John is shocked to his core at the sight of a woman riding a dragon or "beast". She is named, "Mystery Babylon, mother of Harlots", and the horror of her appearance easily matches her title. The beast has seven heads and ten horns. As I've noted in previous parts of this series, the beast's seven heads represent kingdoms or empires in chronological order, and as a rule in Scripture they're epitomised by specific kings who defined those kingdoms or are icons of them.
The question of whether abstract art has a place in the Christian world came up in a discussion I had recently. Art is near to my heart (and rhymes with it) so I decided to gather a few initial thoughts here. This is not intended to be a detailed or refined article - it's a precis: an abstraction of my thoughts in no particular order, and a little disorganized.
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 