Albert Einstein: Views on God

There is confusion among some people as to what Albert Einstein's views on religion and God were. Yes, he sometimes used the term "God", but he meant something very different from what many religious people mean when they use that word.

Albert Einstein was not a follower of any organized religion, and he clearly did not believe in the kind of personal God that many religious people believe in. Consider the following quotes from Einstein:

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."

“It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously."

“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.”

How to Fix No default launcher running in Android system

No radiation needed on how to fix your Android Phone ICS without the control launcher running  in the system. You don't need to land on a mysterious field of planet Mercury to find the fix.

"Since I had a short break from my normal mode, I decided to experiment changing different launcher for my Android ICS device. More or less, I changed to 6 different launchers when finally I had  to chose one as default, then I saved it but the new set launcher was not running in the setting in fact, I clicked it and saved it as default.  In my aeronautical case due to my personal mental dysfunction, my device became useless without a launcher running. lol!

I rebooted my android but I got a blank dark screen! lol!! All I got left was the status bar but it didn't work basically, even if I received SMS. So how did I fix it?

Blind faith among Muslims and Christians

I once taught a Muslim high school student who was one of the brightest in the class. But the subject of the dinosaurs came up one day, and he flat out told me he didn't believe in them. Upon further questioning he said that he did, however, believe that giant humans roamed the earth several thousand years ago because the Koran says so. (Some Christians believe the Bible also has such references, as in Genesis 6:4).

When I pointed out that there's no evidence for the belief that giants roamed the earth, but there's a ton of evidence for the dinosaurs, he replied that it doesn't matter - the Koran cannot be wrong.

This was certainly not the first time I'd been exposed to this kind of mindless blind faith in a supposedly holy book. It reminded me very much of a lot of Christians in my home country, the United States.

"Christ Myth" Scholars Strike Back at Bart Ehrman

Ever since Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? came out in March 2012 arguing for an historical Jesus, the "Christ myth" scholars he criticized in his book have struck back hard. Their latest endeavor is a new book called Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist", which is a collection of refutations from several different scholars including Robert M. Price, Richard Carrier, Acharya S (D.M. Murdock), Earl Doherty, and Frank Zindler.

When Ehrman's book was published it was almost immediately lambasted by scholars who hold the mythicist position, also called the Christ myth theory - the view that Jesus was not an historical figure, but was instead a mythical/fictional character who only later became historicized.

Historian Richard Carrier wrote a blistering critique of Ehrman's book on his blog titled "Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic" in which he says the book is "filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and badly worded arguments. Moreover, it completely fails at its one explicit task: to effectively critique the arguments for Jesus being a mythical person."

Snake-handling Churches in America

Snake-handling is a religious ritual practiced in a small number of Pentecostal churches in the Appalachian Mountains and southeastern region of the United States. These Christians handle live poisonous snakes as part of their worship services.

The main scripture used to support the practice is Mark 16:17-18, which has Jesus saying:

"And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

Bart Ehrman's "Jesus, Interrupted": New York Times Bestseller

I recently came across a book that does an excellent job of explaining the enormous gap in knowledge that exists between Bible scholars and the rest of the population, which is Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). This is one of Ehrman's four New York Times bestsellers, which explains why he is one of the most well-known Bible scholars among the general public.

In this book Ehrman recounts his personal journey as a conservative evangelical Christian who went to Princeton Theological Seminary to earn a doctorate, and was determined to hang on to his belief that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But at Princeton he was exposed to the critical-historical methods of research into the writings that make up the Bible for the first time, and this experience would forever change his entire view of what the Bible actually is.

He explains in detail how and why he changed his views on the Bible. In short, when one is exposed to higher education in this field, you discover things you've never heard before, and the evidence is simply overwhelming. It also just makes far more sense than the simplistic approach to the Bible taught in fundamentalist churches. I can identify with Ehrman because I had the same experience 16 years ago when I first started doing this kind of research.

True/False Bible Trivia Questions For Kids

This is not just a Bible question for kids, adults also often raise these kind of questions online: "How do Christians know that the Christian Bible is actually their god's word?". I picked a few answers from Yahoo and I'll leave it all to you. How would you answer that question?

One person wrote, "I have read the bible day and night when I was a kid. It was a compulsory reading by my grand parents. Thank god I finished it before I learned my roman numerals and I know the story by heart. In fact I have several favorite characters in the Bible, like Moses the great leader of Israel, Samson- the long-haired strong man/ Jonah, famous for being swallowed by the whale and Satan, a good angel named Lucifer who turned evil by wanting to make himself into God. Of course the infamous character the mastermind of the killings and slaughtering people with a pseudonym "God" or "Lord" in the Old Testament."

Here is a random answer from someone: "We don't. In fact, I have become quite suspicious of the Bible recently. Actually, I first had issues with the Bible when I read a passage in the old testament as a teen on the issue of rape. It made me mad at God. I went through years of not even owning a Bible, because I never read it anyway. But I kept on with my prayers, and through many hard times could tell that God was with me. So now, I don't blame God, I put the blame on the humans where it belongs. There are some extremely crazy and hateful things in that book, and those hateful words are not the word of God. I do like the words in red. The man they say spoke those words was definitely a very wise and loving man."