ELLEN JOHNSON, President of American Atheists will be among the guests interviewed by veteran news and features journalist Barbara Walters this coming Tuesday, December 20, 2005 on an ABC special documentary, “Heaven — Where Is It? How Do We Get There?” The program airs on the ABC television network from 9:00 PM – 11:00 PM ET — check local listings.
Ellen didn’t get much camera time. That’s the way the media cookie
crumbles. But the last quarter of the show spent a surprising amount of time discussing skeptic challenges to religion.
More favored was Michael White (http://www.utexas.edu/research/isac/lmw/), a religion/classics professor at U. Texas at Austin. I knew him as the head of the religion department when I was at Oberlin College. Even at that liberal, often very antireligious school, he loved finding and antagonizing rare Christian students who’d grown up making the mistake of accepting as fact everyday religious myths. (An article 16 years later at http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=9680 shows he’s
still doing it). His popular book is “From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries & Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060816104).
On the satirical Jewish account of Jesus, “Sepher Tolduth Yeshu”:
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~freethought/foote/toldoth/tjtitle.htm (1885 edition)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1578849160 or https://lightning.he.net/~atheists/catalogue/shop/prod7026.php (AA Press’s extraordinarily comprehensive “The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources”) by Frank Zindler, with a bit of grunt work by me
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OBB/is_3_41/ai_105160324
(Zindler discusses the book)
Josh
r4d
Actually the height requirement for fighter pilots varies with the type of plane they fly and is there not for G force conciderations, they have G suits to counteract that, but because if they are above a certain height and have to eject then they will have both legs cut off at the knees as they leave the plane. As I remember in the F4 Phantom the max height was 6’4″. I don’t know about todays planes like the F15.
Just some more useless information I have stored. Maybe I should read a book?
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/>
Hey,
I have my beleifs and I realy want to see what other people beleive. I kinda want to comment on some of the comments actually.
First, if God created us, the bible says that he gave us the choice to worship him, and that he deserves, but doesn’t demand our worship. Christians beleive that God saved them from eternal damnation. Don’t you think they would want to thank him for it? Also, forever worshiping God in heaven doesn’t seem wrong to Christians because the bible says that heaven is everything wonderful, and right. To most christians, this means a party and spending time with their idol (like if you are a huge fan of an actor/actress and they just forgave you for the $1 million you took-spending along time with them seems awesome)! And to them, it’s not teenagish at all. It is very real.
I had no idea that Muslems got sex after they died… I thought God created sex. Weird.
I think that too many people concentrate on their own beleifs so much that they don’t get out and try to understand what and why other people beleive what they do. I have been watching and talking to some Christians and they are very strong in their faith. Some people aren’t as strong, but others really feel that Jesus is the son of God and that he conquored death to save us all from the bad things we have done, and essentially, hell. So far no other religion has caught my attention as much as them.
I am not saying we should all beleive the bible, that is every person’s choice, but I think that as a group of people, we need to be more open and educated about what others beleive so we can understand why they beleive it.
Thanks for listening!
If you were a student in school and your teacher said that 2+2=4, you want to know why. Even if they are wrong, we should undterstand their thinking.