Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2016

A Deceptive Humanist Christmas Song

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen The late Greg Lake, most notably of the progressive rock bands King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer had a "Christmas" song that wasn't. The lyrics were written by Peter Sinfield. There are conflicting accounts and misconceptions about "I Believe in Father Christmas", that it is a Christmas song, it was never intended to be such ("...about a loss of innocence and childhood belief"), Vietnam war protest, it's an atheist song, it's not atheist but rather "humanist" (as if there's a difference), and so on. I'll allow that it has excellent music and thought-provoking lyrics. Sinfield wrote lyrics for ELP and King Crimson, and Lake wrote many lyrics himself, including all of those on ELP's Tarkus album . One of these was " The Only Way (Hymn) ", a mocking anti-theistic and anti-Christian song , including the lyrics, "Don't need the word now that you've heard. Don't be

The Day I Disagreed with Albert Mohler

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen If I made a personal rule not to listen to or read material from people who are smarter than me, I wouldn't have much to do. Instead, I saddle up and ride the harder trail, trying to learn some things from people I can't hold a candle to in the area of intelligence. When disagreeing with someone, a good exercise is to be able to show why you are doing so, even if it only benefits yourself. Sometimes, other people may respect that you gave reasons for your contrary view, because it shows that you're thinking. Image credit: Morguefile /  Kenn W. Kiser This has to do with a topic that is sometimes controversial among Christians. In the October 26, 2016 episode of The Briefing  podcast , Dr. Albert Mohler was discussing the issue of cremation. He was agreeing with the Roman Catholic Church that cremation is not acceptable for professing Christians. One of the reasons is that pagans do it, cremation is not in the Bible, and also, Christians tradit

Make Writing Interesting

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen Way back yonder, in days of old when nights were cold, I wanted to be a science fiction writer, and took courses on writing. These included college nonfiction writing, and a required course on speechifying (even in 1980, I was speaking out against falsehoods in evolution). One simple thing that stuck with me was to write as if your audience was about 13 years old. (I think one of the creationist sites I read has a general style guide, when not doing hardcore science, to write as if the readers were precocious teenagers.) This seemed like a good approach when attempting to inform people. Then I'd go to my next class and wade through a textbook that was "written at a college sophomore level". Seemed like a contradiction to me. Unfortunately, the classes on writing do not work in this medium. Online articles have different criteria because people have not only demands on their time, but often have short attention spans. Part of the problem with s