Vaccines, Medicine, and the Birthright

A CO Woman's Baby Was Cut Out of Her. Is Our Society That Bad?

I read a disturbing story recently about a woman who cut the baby out of a pregnant woman in Colorado. There are really awful headlines like this all the time. Often, I don't take the time to connect with the story and so these tragedies hardly even register - but this one really affected me. If I had seen this headline on a different day, I might not have taken the time to read the details and allow myself to be horrified by it, and it would have been just another story - nothing out of the usual, really, because bad things happen everywhere all the time.

If there's no God, then why is the Creation beautiful?

Today, after opening several browser tabs of various news stories that had bubbled up to the top of the internet and weeding through them, I found myself with two left which stood in obvious opposition. One of them was a piece from Aeon Magazine about strictly observant Orthodox Jews turning atheist, but being unwilling to tell anyone out of fear of isolation from their tight-nit communities. As so many of the increasingly popular "longform" news stories these days, it drew me in with the super personal account of one man's struggle, from which it takes periodic breaks to discuss the broader scope of the phenomenon and also interject parallel accounts from others experiencing very nearly the same thing, and by the end of it these people all come together somehow  to stand in solidarity together over their common dilemma/goal/whatever - it really is a compelling storytelling method!

I could give an analysis of the whole story because it was quite stimulating, but I'll focus instead on the issue which relates to the other browser tab that I was left with. As I read through the various personal accounts, perhaps the unifying thread is that all of these people seemed to stumble over what they perceived to be an incongruence between the first few chapters of Genesis and science.

Are You Charlie Hebdo?

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Life in the Sacrifices

When you think of the biblical sacrifices, what comes to your mind? In the simplest sense, I tend to think of an animal dying to appease God. You kill the animal, burn it, and God forgives your sin - isn't that the point of offerings? If you've been following along on my blog, then you know there's much more to understand from God's offertory system!

Last time, I wrote in detail about the role of death in the sacrifices. Jesus Christ's death is the death pictured by the sin offerings of the Old Covenant, and this is the most basic point of our understanding in our relationship with God: that Jesus had to die for our sins to be forgiven, so that we could be reconciled. But is the sacrificial system all about death?