Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 32

In this installment Jacob meets some heavenly messengers on a camping trip to earth. He comes up with a plan to handle his approaching brother only to later abandon it. Finally, he has a nocturnal romp with a divine being resulting in a limp, a name change, and a whole lot of interpretive difficulty. Did you think the story in the last installment was a little difficult for conservative Bible expositors to wrestle with? Well, LET'S GET READY TO RUM....hold on a sec....I don't want to have to send a fat check to Michael Buffer. Let's just get started.

My Sandcastle Faith

Source: Wikipedia

Neil Carter has a post over at the Recovering from Religion blog wherein he shares a snapshot of his personal journey from an old journal entry.* I think I kept a journal for about a minute when I was fourteen or fifteen and gave it up about the time I got my first job. I haven't looked at it in forever, but I'm sure it's filled with mostly angsty adolescent nonsense about girls I liked who didn't seem to like me back. Neil's journal entry reflects the thoughts of a contemplative twenty-nine-year-old father of three reflecting on the very nature of reality. Probably a bit more weighty by comparison.

Afterlife Demographics

In addition to Neil Carter, I count several of the blog moderators over at Godless in Dixie among my friends. Yeah, I'm name-dropping. People know me. Deal with it. Anyway, one of those mods is an ex-Christian who goes by the handle Thought2Much. His name, of course, is a reference to the reason why he deconverted. Now, before you get in a huff, thinking Christian, don't assume that this in any way implies that I'm saying Christians don't or can't think. You are unlikely to ever hear me say that I think all Christians are stupid or incapable of deep thought and reflection. After all, my last stop on the faith train was hardly a brand of anti-intellectual Christianity.

What I am referring to is thinking too much about certain doctrines or propositions found within Christianity that, when brought to conclusion, lend themselves to some silly things that often make one sit up, give pause, and question the validity of the entire scheme. There are plenty of these we could look at, but this time around I'd like to focus on what happens when we combine some standard Christian assumptions about the afterlife and view the end result.