Studies on the Fringe of Christianity
Do you believe in devils and demons? Do you believe in invisible spirits who roam the earth entrapping people to do Satan’s will? Do you believe these entities are very real intelligent living beings, or do you believe they are they just metaphors used for people with evil personalities? Once someone asked me how, in …
Fruit of the Spirit Series: Galatians 5:22-23 One day, long ago, someone approached me after a sermon and said, “We humans are nothing other than just one of many animals on earth. We were just lucky that our brain evolved higher and, therefore, set us apart from every other creature on the planet.” To that …
I’ve been around a while on this planet; I was born in the early 1940s and I’ve seen a lot of changes since then. In childhood, I remember phones that had no dial and we told the operator what number we wanted to call. We had no refrigerator, but only an ‘icebox’ for which we …
In the United States of America we currently have a two-party political system. Right now, 75 percent of Republicans (conservative) and 30 percent of Democrats (liberal) feel that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. No matter what errors, lawbreaking, or trickery will eventually surface, it will still take some serious change to restore faith in …
What is baptism? Why, and how, is it done? A dictionary states that baptism is a “Christian sacrament marked by ritual use of water and admitting the recipient to the Christian community,”1 and an encyclopedia gives a bit more information. Baptism, it says, is a Christian rite of admission and adoption, almost invariably with the …
A friend in college once told me, “I’ll be really happy when I get a new car. As long as I’m driving around in this old clunker, I feel like a failure and people think of me as a failure. A new car will show them I’m not.” Well, I bet he did get that …
In a prior article, I wrote about a time when someone asked me, “Do you believe in aliens?” I answered, “Yes, I believe that.” Then he asked another question, “Do you think they are here now?” Once again, I answered, “Yes.” He was, of course, not talking about legal or illegal migrants from other countries …
I was once asked by an atheist, “Why do Christians talk about blood so much?” I guess some people think we have a strange and unhealthy relationship or interest in blood. But to Christians, blood is more than just delivering nutrients and oxygen to the cells in our body and removing their waste products. Having …
The full story of Mary’s marriage, pregnancy, and birth of her son can be found in two books of the Bible: the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. For those who want to read (or reread) the story, the accounts are in Matthew 1:18–2:23 and Luke 2:1–40. This scripture is the wonderful Christmas story, concerning Mary’s …
Could Mary, mother of Jesus, really have been a pregnant virgin? Although a basic tenet of Christianity, many still find the virgin birth a stumbling block in their faith. We will take a scientific look at this extraordinary event. This is an article that has been in the making for twenty-five years. Well, not continually, …