Ye Olde Viral: Penn Jillette vs. Piers Morgan

I personally think Penn Jillette and Piers Morgan would both be fantastic contributors to the New Inklings.  The following video is an excerpt from Morgan’s show when he interviewed Jillette about Jillette’s book, “God, No!”  I love what Jillette says about strong conversation being a must when talking about religion and theology.

Is strong conversation a must when it comes to theological discussions?  What value does a place like NI have in such conversations – a place for strong, yet civil, conversation?  Converse in the comments.

The Spiritual Side of Steve Jobs

It would be an understatement to say that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple who died last week at the age of 56, made an impact.  No one has been more influential in the realm of personal technology than Jobs.  Within minutes of his passing, Facebook and Twitter blazed with homages to Jobs.  Words like innovator, leader, genius, and visionary were used to describe Jobs and his legacy.

While most remember Jobs for his technological prowess, fewer talked about Job’s spiritual beliefs.  He was a Buddhist.  CNN tackled the subject in a recent article.  Consider the following segment:

“I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren’t random,” Jobs said in a 1997 interview with Time, providing a glimpse into his complicated belief system that extends well beyond the Buddhist teachings.

Karma is another principle of the religion, but it didn’t appear to be a system Jobs lived by. If he feared karma coming back to bite him, the sentiment wasn’t evident in his public statements about competitors and former colleagues, calling them “bozos” lacking taste. Those who worked for Jobs described him as a tyrant they feared meeting in an elevator.

“You’d be surprised how hard people work around here,” Jobs said in a 2004 interview with Businessweek. “They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”

Some engineers who worked tirelessly on the original Mac emerged from the project estranged from their spouses and children.

In other words, Steve Jobs wasn’t perfect.  He was guilty of hypocrisy.  So am I.  So are you.  We all are.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Is Jobs’ legacy flawed due to his apparent hypocrisy?  How does the hypocrisy of others influence your view of religion?  Sound off in the comments.

Ye Olde Viral: Pat Robertson and Alzheimer’s

Several weeks ago, 700 Club founder and utterer of controversial soundbites Pat Robertson stuck his foot in his mouth with the following comment about married people and Alzheimer’s:

How do you react to Robertson’s statements, regardless of what you do or do not believe?

Why I Believe What I Believe

Since we’re relaunching the site, we’re going to spend a few weeks discussing each viewpoint.  Today, Aaron chimes in with three reasons he believes in the Christian God:

I’ve been immersed in Christianity all my life.  My faith is my own.  I don’t believe because my parents told me to.  I have researched the core beliefs of Christianity, and have found them to be true.  Here are the three main reasons I believe what I believe, the reasons that make Christianity reasonable:

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE UNIVERSE

From the complexity of subatomic particles to the almost daily discoveries from the edges of the universe that we can currently observe, to say our universe is complex is an understatement.  Take our planet.  Earth just happens to be in the “butter zone” of our solar system where life not only survives, but thrives.  Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere are unmatched (as far as we know) for thriving life.  The complexity of all living things, from their life processes to the makeup of DNA, continues to amaze and astound us.  Knowing that we’ve only begun to unlock the complexities of the human genome and how it works boggles the mind.  Does this prove that the Christian God exists?  No.  But science cannot explain how life supposedly arose from non-living substances.  Science also has yet to explain how something came from nothing.  To me, it requires more “faith” to believe that matter is eternal or that our version of the universe is just one of innumerable cycles of the universe than it does to believe in the existence of God.

MANKIND’S LONGING FOR SOMETHING GREATER

Every civilization in history has had some belief in deity.  The point of this post isn’t to argue which beliefs are right or wrong.  It is simply to affirm that mankind in general has always believed in the divine.  Those who have chosen not to believe have always been in the minority.  Does this prove that the Christian God exists?  No.  But it may be a clue that we were designed to connect with that which created us.

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

This is the reason I believe in the Christian God and no other.  We’ve dealt with the resurrection in multiple posts (Part 1, Part 2, the Conversation).  To summarize, the resurrection of Jesus is attested to by the gospel accounts in the Bible, extra-biblical accounts from ancient secular historians, eyewitness testimony, the willingness of the original apostles of Jesus to die for proclaiming his resurrection, the explosive growth and cultural impact of the early church–all of these point to the plausibility of the resurrection of Jesus.  If it is true, then it deserves our consideration.  And if it is true, then no other belief system can match it because no other belief system has a God who has died and come back from death in real time and space history.

Why do you hold your theological views?  Let’s start the conversation in the comments.

The Bar is Open for Business (Again)

Dear faithful readers of NI:

After a longer than expected summer siesta, we’re reopened for business.  We’ve made a few changes:

NEW CONTRIBUTORS
In addition to Aaron and Franny, we now include Dave (Christian), Justin (Atheist) and Andrew (spiritually promiscuous) among our ranks.  Having multiple viewpoints will only add to the spice and variety of our content.

NEW LOOK
Yeah, it’s not a big deal, and we may change it again down the road.  But the “bar” has been remodeled.  It still has that new paint smell.

NEW TAGLINE:  ”DRAFTS, NUTS, AND THEOLOGY”
With five contributors, we needed something better than “Two Christians, an Agnostic, an Atheist, and a Spiritually Promiscuous Dude Walk into a Bar.”  So we came up with this.  Think drafts as in beer or posts, nuts as in bar nuts or the NI contributors, and theology as, well, what we muse about.

NEW FORMAT
Most importantly, this will benefit us and you.  In the past, we published two posts per week.  Each post dealt with a differing viewpoint of one subject.  We then added a third post to start the conversation.  Long story short, that was way too much work for us and too much waiting for you.  Now, one contributor will post per week, and you’ll be able to jump into the conversation immediately.  No more waiting!  We will continue with our Ye Olde Viral segment to end each week, and one of our contributors will add something in the middle of the week to spark some additional conversation.  Hopefully this will increase the conversation and make things smoother for all our patrons.

We still have the Rabbit Room, which has a listing of all our conversations.  So feel free to look around and get reacquainted.  If you’re new to NI, we kindly ask you read the Pub Rules before the conversation begins anew tomorrow.

It’s good to be back.  Come back tomorrow for our first conversation.

Sincerely,

The New Inklings