Tag Archives: Image of God
Scientists refer to the immaterial human characteristics of consciousness, intentionality, and human agency as emergent properties. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) In…..
The vast majority of humans believe in a god or spirit of some kind or other so the problem today isn’t god’s existence but rather his/her/its identity. Sadly, we have become spiritually lazy and instead of doing the hard work of discovering who this god is we create one to our own liking. We take our divine preferences to the marketplace…..
You are alive! The very fact that you are reading this blog means you are a living, breathing human being. I think we all too often view our existence as life + X and miss the quite astonishing fact that before all of our cultural accessorizing, we are alive. We get so distracted acquiring things that we think will make us happy that we fail…..
In my last blog, I discussed how we could use the idea of the uniqueness of man as an evangelical bridge to our postmodern youth. We discovered that Millenials are obsessed with human uniqueness and make extraordinary efforts to preserve the right to be different. I pointed out that while we both embrace individuality, we differ on its source. Christians believe humans are special because…..
If we want to reach our postmodern youth then we need to change our evangelistic approach. The rarefied air of traditional apologetics has left our young people divinely light-headed, therefore, we must bring them back to earth to regain their balance and then teach them to dig around in the dirt of common experience to find hidden heavenly treasure. In my previous blogs, we soiled our knees by…..
We often get hot and bothered over the theological and philosophical arguments for God’s existence, but seem oblivious to the fact that the only creatures arguing about it are humans. We get so distracted by the academic evidence that we fail to see the significance of academicians. The planet is an evidence locker filled with 7 billion walking, talking…..
We are in danger of losing our identities as unique beings created in the image of God. Our culture, fearing divine restrictions on its self-indulgent lifestyle, tries to remove God from the planet, but in the process strips off the very image that makes us human. Fearing religious maximalism, it doesn’t even allow divine minimalism.
The reason…..
I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I … am … a … man.
(Joseph Merrick)
The 1980 film The Elephant Man chronicled the life of Joseph Merrick, a young Englishman who suffered from the severely disfiguring disease neurofibromatosis. He lived his short adult life as the main attraction in a Victorian freak show that traveled throughout Europe. At one point in the film, he tried to escape the show but was found…..
