What's New Archive ● 2009 ● March
What's New on the Secular Web?
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March 19, 2009
New in the Kiosk: The Psyche of Al-Qaeda (2009) by Dr. Khalid Sohail
To have a better understanding of the psyche of Al-Qaeda we need to understand the ideology, personality and political strategy of the organization's leaders as well as their followers. Their vision of Islam was not limited to a few countries--it was to be implemented across the whole world according to God's wish as expressed in the Quran, and they were determined to make that wish a reality. They dreamed of world domination.
March 6, 2009
Added The Untenability of Theistic Evolution (2009) by Bart Klink to the Creationism - Evolution page under Science and Religion in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
Theistic evolution (TE), the theological view that God creates through evolution, combines evolutionary biology and religion in a way that pretends to avoid a conflict between these two disciplines. This view is held to a greater or lesser extent by the Roman Catholic Church and major Protestant denominations, and is even propagated by some nonreligious scholars. In this essay Bart Klink argues that evolution is irreconcilable with theism, particularly Christian theism, on both philosophical and theological grounds.
Added a Why do you call yourselves infidels? entry to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
There are at least two different ways to answer this question. One way is to provide a historical answer. Another is to provide a philosophical one.
March 5, 2009
New in the Bookstore: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (2009) by Bart D. Ehrman.
Picking up where his Misquoting Jesus left off, Ehrman addresses the larger issue of what the New Testament actually teaches--and it's not what most people think. Here Ehrman reveals what scholars have unearthed:
• The authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was and how salvation works
• The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later
• Jesus, Paul, Matthew, and John all represented fundamentally different religions
• Established Christian doctrines--such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the trinity--were the inventions of still later theologians