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 | Descriptions of the major religions found in North America, and |
| Descriptions of the "hot" social topics with a religious, spiritual or moral aspect. |
Over the next year we hope to work on most of the topics listed below.
Planned major projects:
We are currently writing three major groups of essays:
| Polygamy: We suspect that this may become the next "hot" topic in North American society. We have a menu on polygamy which is linked to a series of essays on patriarchal-structured plural marriages within the Mormon movement. We hope to add other essays describing egalitarian plural marriages. | ||||||||
| Atonement: This is regarded by many theologians as the central tenet of the Christian faith. The atonement involves the healing of the gulf between God and humanity as a result of the life -- an particularly the death -- of Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus Christ). Different wings of Christianity teach different rationales about the atonement. There have been many changes in teaching down through the years. We have covered to date the major historical teachings on this topic, but need to enlarge this section to include new proposed explanations for the atonement that are less violent and that are based more on the life of Jesus than his execution. | ||||||||
| Genocide: 9/11 brought holy war to the shores of North America.
But holy war and genocide are ancient traditions. The Hebrew Scriptures (Old
Testament) describes three major genocides and one small-scale genocide:
The book of Revelation of the Christian Scriptures (New Testament), literally interpreted, predicts a massive genocide for our future which involves in excess of two billion deaths. In a series of essays, we will try to compare and contrast these mass murders with the injunction by Jesus to love one's enemies and overcome evil with good. | ||||||||
| Afterlife: An enhancement of our section on life after death, to
include in depth essays on:
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| Christianity:
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| Interfaith: A series of essays comparing various faith groups' beliefs on who will attain heaven and similar topics. We plan to compare various first century Christian movements, various present-day denominations, other religions, etc. | ||||||||
| "Stop the bloodshed" We have dozens of ideas scattered through our web site that discuss ways of promoting religious tolerance, applying the Golden Rules, ending religiously-based oppression, etc. We plan to consolidate these ideas into a single essay or group of essays on how to make the world a better, more peaceful place. |
Planned minor projects:
These are the new essays that we plan for our web site. Of course, plans are often overtaken by events in the real world which necessitate the creation of essays on totally new topics.
We have listed the topics them in alphabetic order, not necessarily in the order in which that we expect to write them.
| Abortion: Information about the beliefs of non-Christian religions about abortion. | ||||||||||||
| Anti-semitism: We plan to attach essays which describe anti-semitism in the Bible to our menu on this topic. | ||||||||||||
| Atheism:
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| Buddhism: We need to prepare essays on some of the Buddhist
traditions that we have not yet covered. Also needed are:
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| Christianity:
This is a big topic, because about 75% of North Americans follow this
religion:
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| The founding fathers of America: Some say that they were staunch Christians. Others say that they were mostly Deists who worshiped a God who was very different from the Trinity than Allah, the God of the Muslims. Some describe them as Atheists. The truth is out there. | ||||||||||||
| Freemasonry: A history. | ||||||||||||
| God: We plan to create a section in our web site that deals with different concepts that people have about God. It will be linked to existing essays that deal with Atheism, Agnosticism, Deism, Humanism, etc. But we will prepare more detailed essays which describe Theism, Pantheism, Panentheism, and other visions of deity. | ||||||||||||
| Hinduism: The historical source of the caste system in India | ||||||||||||
| Homosexuality:
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| Inerrancy of the Bible: We have received a list of 19 apparent inconsistencies in the Bible and a challenge to show that all of them can be harmonized in such a way that biblical inerrancy is still a valid belief. We plan to try. We note a lot of emphasis on discrepancies between the Jesus' genealogy as defined in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as proving biblical errancy. We plan to study this as well. | ||||||||||||
| Islam: Our essays on Islam emphasize the peaceful, spiritual aspects of the religion. But, as in all religions, there is also a dark side. In particular, we want to deal with the teachings of an 18th century Muslim reformer, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. His teachings have been hijacked and altered by radical, violent and intolerant Muslim fundamentalists to justify terrorism. | ||||||||||||
| Jesus: Josh McDowell, and others, have presented non-Christians with a trilemma: that Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic or Lord. We hope to describe these options and search for additional options. | ||||||||||||
| The Kabbalah: We have started to study this topic many times; however, our minds rebel each time. | ||||||||||||
| Nature: Write an essay comparing conclusions about nature by conservative Protestants with beliefs of scientists. This would include such diverse topics as origins of species, origins and spread of languages, the great flood, indwelling demonic spirits, the nature of sexual orientation, the cause of natural disasters, etc. | ||||||||||||
| Occult: Augment our essay on the Ouija board to add information on the psychic circle board. | ||||||||||||
| Original sin: The concept that all humans have been adversely affected by an event in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve allegedly ate a forbidden fruit. | ||||||||||||
| Origins: Age of the earth: Describe alleged problems that creation scientists have found with radio carbon dating, specifically C-14 and U-238. | ||||||||||||
| Prophecy: Predictions of the future based on studies of the Great Pyramid | ||||||||||||
| Rastafarianism | ||||||||||||
| Religion in the U.S.: The Pew Forum periodically publishes the results of surveys of religious beliefs among American adults which contains some fascinating information. | ||||||||||||
| Shamanism | ||||||||||||
| Tolerance: Should one be tolerant of intolerant groups? | ||||||||||||
| Theocracy: The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 | ||||||||||||
| Violence: The problem of religiously-inspired violence which seems to plague organized religions -- particularly monotheistic faiths. It takes various forms from physical attacks to murder to mass murder to genocide. |
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Home page > New essays > here |
Originally written: 2004-JUN-08
Latest update: 2008-MAY-26
Author: B.A. Robinson
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