Quotes from Robert M. Price

Fundamentalists offer us a "loving" God who is some kind of divine stalker.

Speculation is not knowledge.

This mammoth picaresque novel1 quickly dispels our haunting dread that it might be just another attempt (we've seen plenty) to fatten up a basic skeleton of a premise by packing on the flab of fungible soap-operatic blubber, connecting the microdots with a mile-wide magic marker.

Those who thus seek to screen an idol from criticism only betray their own suspicions about the worthiness of the totem they worship.

and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin.

And then we find ourselves facing a prospect Brown did not consider. If the youth of Jesus was filled in fictively only once the sonship was pushed back to physical conception and birth, mustn't the stories of the ministry have been similarly fabricated only once the sonship had been pushed back from the resurrection to the baptism? This was exactly the suggestion of Paul Couchoud, to which we shall return.

The same disastrous death occasioned 2 Peter 3:3-4, "scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, 'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.

In some ways, the sources available to the critic are wider and fuller than those available to the believer, the dogmatician, the apologist, for the former risks looking into literary sources that the New Testament evangelists may have used. Since this implies the fictive character of at least some gospel elements, believers will not go venturing down those particular paths.

Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.

Whatever can be threatened, whatever can be shaken, whatever you fear cannot stand, is destined to crash. Do not go down with the ship. Let that which is destined to become the past slip away. Believe that the real you is that which beckons from the future. If it is a sadder you, it will be a wiser one. And dawn will follow the darkness sooner or later. Rebirth can never come without death.

I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!

It means that your birth, with all your particulars, is a wildly improbable event, and hence precious. You won the sweepstakes by being born at all. Think of all the wallflower sperm and egg cells. You made it, buddy. Whew! What a staggering wonder! What a thing to rejoice in! The lottery wasn't fixed! God didn't rig it! You won fair and square! What a miracle!

One hardly need believe that the events in your life are actually planned as bolts from the blue, sent special delivery from a deity who is testing and training you like a lab rat! And that is what we are saying when we fretfully ask, "What can God be trying to teach me through this tragedy?

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

The answer is simple: if you cannot find meaning inherent in life right now, as you live it in this visible world, the addition of an infinite amount more of the same isn't about to somehow make it any more meaningful! Add a whole string of zeroes to a zero and watch what happens.

An inspired and infallible passage whose meaning you cannot be sure of is not much more useful than an uninspired, fallible passage.

But if subjective pietism is not the real crux of this all-important Gospel, if it is instead belief in the plan of salvation, how are we not dealing with "salvation by (cognitive) works" and Gnosticism (salvation by special knowledge)? Fundamentalists hotly deny it, but isn't it finally a matter of believers in the right religion being saved and everyone else being disqualified?

I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent.

The lesson of Left Behind is a warning to repent the sin of critical thinking, which the fundamentalist, eager for people to embrace the Gospel of irrational nonsense, equates with "intellectual pride.

Warren is stuck in Sunday School-level, pretheological fundamentalism. It is religious infantilism of the kind that Freud to conclude that religion is nothing more than neurotic wishful thinking and the refusal to grow up. I believe there is a good bit more to religion than that, but I'm afraid Freud was right about Warrenism. It is a pinata, made of brightly colored paper, filled with sweet candy, and too easily knocked apart.

For Ehrman as for Schweitzer, Jesus must be acknowledged to have been a failed apocalyptic seer, whipping up excitement about the imminent end of the world and predicating upon that false prophecy his demand for repentance. Both Jesus scholars showed great courage in refusing to euphemize or sugarcoat the shocking truth.

it appears that inherited (I should say stale) evangelical apologetics has almost completely displaced any serious attempt to seek the most likely meaning of gospel texts in their own right, in their ancient contexts.

Born-again living seemed to me just a crutch which no longer facilitated healing and growth, but actually protracted immaturity.

Now for me, music is indeed a spiritual experience. It may be hypnotizing or violently stimulating. I listen to and appreciate all kinds of music, from folk, to jazz, to classical, to hard core rock.