By Bob R of a priori blues -- T his video of "Doctor" Tim LaHaye of the ( Left Behind, Book 1 ) Left Behind series fame) talking about Barack Obama ushering in the end times gives me an opportunity to reiterate the "you hate what you are" truism regarding Fundamentalists. As always, with Fundamentalists, you can count on one thing:  They accuse the "other" of what they are most guilty of themselves.  They claim that people "worship" Obama, and that's part of why they think he's the anti-Christ.  (Remember that McCain/Palin ad calling Obama "the One ", which is code for calling him the Antichrist according to the Left Behind series?) But, the truth is, they're just projecting their own tendency to worship their heroes on to the rest of the world, ignoring the fact that the outside world isn't part of their group because it isn't interested in demagoguery and hero worship. Here's what they did when ...

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By Bob R -- On my Blog called " apriori blues " I include a series called "Our Daily Brood". I'm a graduate of Wheaton College's Ancient Languages Department, and I was trained to read and interpret the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. Hence the fact that I am now an Ex-Christian. The following article is one of my Daily Brood posts, regarding the Gospels and common (and intentionally enforced) misconceptions about them. Image via Wikipedia A s a student of the Bible, one of my pet peeves is the literature that has cropped up around the notion that the Gospels are biographies of a man named Jesus.  The conventional wisdom goes that, like biographies or even memoirs (since the belief in the doctrine of Inspiration requires that one essentially believe that God somehow wrote the Bible using human agents), that the gospels offer us a fairly accurate, if not entirely, literally, historically, chronologically accurate portrayal of the Life and Times of Jesus t...

by Bob R. of a priori blues -- T his cover story of this month's issue of Christianity Today , whose subtitle is "A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction", is called " The Jesus We'll Never Know ." This title is playing off the title of a popular book by Christianity Today reporter Phillip Yancey, called The Jesus I Never Knew , which was a quaint, devotional little book about "meeting Jesus again for the first time" and all that happy stuff.  Yancey's book was one of dozens if not hundreds of books from the popular devotional genre written in the guise of objectivity or journalism or science, but intended to do nothing more than prop up the existing, Evangelical/Fundamentalist ideas about "the Historical Jesus", and why it really, really, really is rational to believe that a human being walked on water that wasn't frozen, made wine without grapes, or woke up none the worse for wear after being brain dead for three days.  I belab...