Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Despite religious rhetoric to the contrary, morals, ethics and laws do not necessarily derive from the Bible. In a group, there are selective pressures that tend to keep people in line. If a member of your tribe is killing other members of your tribe, then the tribesmen will not trust him, and will either kill him, or force him to leave the tribe (banishment), thus making it very difficult for the murderer to pass his genetic/ideological values to the next generation. This is just an example, but there are many more. There is no need for God to sit at the ethical bar; society does that for us as an emergent property of living in large groups. Religion provides ethical laws given by someone else which are followed out of faith. There is nothing wrong with that. Organized religion can be a powerful force for good. One test of a good ethic is to switch the roles of the individuals and see if the situation is still fair. Another important realization is that there are many valid ways peop...

With the 1964 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation—predicted by Big Bang theorists in the 1940s—the Big Bang theory became the preeminent cosmological model. The question was no longer, did the universe have a beginning? The question became, how did it happen? As more and more astrophysicists focused their attention on what happened in the first few moments, months and years of the universe, some Christians became upset that the new theoretical models didn't match up with their interpretation of Genesis  ( the Jewish account of creation is similar). Just as many astrophysicists felt that the expanding universe theory was a ploy to inject religion into science, many Christians have come to feel that the Big Bang is an effort to undermine the biblical account of creation. Other Christians, however, feel that the Big Bang is indeed consistent with the Bible’s account and they welcome such compelling evidence for the creation of the universe. The Big Bang wasn't a ...

Did the Bible "originally state" that there is a place like Hell? In the Old Testament, there was no "place of eternal damnation." There was Sheol, where everybody--good or bad--went after they died. Things got messier from there. When the Hebrew text was translated into Greek, "Sheol" was replaced by "Hades." Then, when evolving Jewish and Christian beliefs began to emphasize resurrection, Hades became a place where only the nasty folks went. OK, so there were two different names for this place. Now let's introduce a third, Gehenna, which early Christian teaching said was a fiery hell to which the wicked would be sent after judgment. The root of the word refers to the Valley of Hinnom, a location "south of Jerusalem, where trash fires burned incessantly and where ancient human sacrifices had been offered to Canaanite gods." The Book of Revelation took this a step further by saying those evil folks would be "thrown into a lak...