Reading time: About 4 to 5 minutes. The central question in the two-thousand-year-old Catholic cannibalism debate is whether Roman Catholics or any other sect of Christians deserve to be called cannibals. The simplest way of defining the word cannibal is “a person who eats the flesh of other human beings”. We can trace the roots […]
Reading time: About 4-5 minutes. What do you know about the Roman catacombs? If you’re like me, I’m guessing not a whole lot. At least, not until I some research. You probably know they were located underground and used for burials. You may have also been taught they were places were early Christians hid to […]
The Bible’s Mystical Numbers. Reading time: 6-7 minutes. I’ve always been intrigued by the numbers the Bible writers used repeatedly. To me, the Bible’s mystical numbers seemed to be code words with hidden meanings. Where they only significant in Jewish-Christian tradition or did those numbers have similar meanings in other cultures? This post is my […]
Heresies in Early Christianity: Reading time about 6-7 minutes. Early Christianity outside Europe This is the third of a four-part series of posts about the origin of the Christian Church, or more accurately, churches. So far, I’ve written about the transformation of Saul, the persecutor of Jesus’s followers, to Paul, the dedicated Christian apostle. I […]
The Mysterious Paul of Tarsus. Reading time: About 5 minutes This is the first of a four-part series I’m entitling the “Real Christian” Tetralogy. In this first segment. I’ll ask many questions because of my vast confusion with Paul of Tarsus. Some of these questions may be readily answerable and others may not be. I’ll […]
Militarization of Christianity: Reading time about 8-10 minutes. About twenty years ago, our family attended the patriotic Fourth of July extravaganza at our church. After all the flag waving, chest-thumping, and patriotic songs were over, and we were in our car, my daughter asked me a question. “Dad, why does our church celebrate the military […]
Desecrating the Host: Reading time about 3 minutes The word host comes from the Latin word hostis, meaning victim. The Roman Catholic Church uses the term in reference to their communion wafers. Therefore, desecrating the host refers to assaulting or damaging a communion wafer. Catholics believe the elements of communion or eucharist—the bread and […]
Reading Time: About 4 minutes Most of us aren’t aware of the fascinating history of something we use every day—the Gregorian calendar. Pope Gregory XIII introduced it in 1582 to modify the inaccurate Julian calendar that was devised in 46 BC. Julius Caesar had introduced the Julian calendar to replace Rome’s ten-month calendar from 750 […]
Christmas falls on its current date of December 25 for a reason, and it may not be the reason you think. In December, in the most northern regions of the globe, daylight is a precious commodity. We do everything possible to replace our diminished sunlight with artificial light, fireplaces, and candles. There is something very […]
The Garden of Eden I’ve always been very confused about where humans originated. When I was a child, and my mind was a blank slate, I was taught that Adam and Eve were the first man and woman on earth. I learned that they lived in a garden called Eden, which was somewhere in what […]