Dr Paul Allen

Mark 1:29–34 Doctors note that sometimes people can have a psychologically induced illness, and if they get a new purpose or direction for living, they show relief from the symptoms—they don’t need the illness anymore. For some others, the “placebo effect” can have visible results. That is, if you think you’re going to get better, you often do get better. And when people came to Jesus, they believed he could heal them, so he did. But the fact remains: Regardless of how he did it, Jesus did heal them. Of course, even if you hold to this explanation for some cases, that doesn’t explain all of Jesus’ healings. Often a psychosomatic healing takes time; Jesus’ healings were instantaneous. Many times people who are healed psychologically have their symptoms return a few days later, but we don’t see any evidence of this in the gospel accounts. And Jesus healed conditions like blindness and leprosy, for which a psychosomatic explanation isn’t very likely. In addition to these, h...

English: Stamp of Moldova; Mircea Eliade (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In 1832, when The Beagle docked in Southern Australia on the way to the Galapagos Islands , Charles Darwin witnessed naked Aboriginals dancing themselves into delirium all night long. You can now see this scene at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert, attended by sixty thousand hi-tech moderns, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. But Darwin, a notable father of Secular Humanism, was shocked, finding the native display “a most rude, barbarous scene.” Once ever so secularly humanist, moderns now find orgiastic sexuality and occult spirituality quite acceptable. Who or what produced this massive change in Western culture ? Many influential sources can be named: Darwin, spiritualized by Teilhard de Chardin ; the goddess worship of radical feminism; the occultism of theosophist Madame Blavatsky ; the political radicalism of Gramsci, Marcuse and Saul Alins...

Image via Wikipedia Why do you do what is right, rather than what is wrong? That is hardly a new question. It troubled the minds of the ancients. Some felt that humans are naturally drawn to virtue, but they were hard-pressed to explain why some individuals seemed to resist this impulse. Others argued that society had to make a firm impression upon the young, inculcating a desire for virtue and character that was more external than internal. Fast forward and the Victorians in Britain were convinced that a lack of virtue could be traced to either heredity or deprivation. Assuming the British middle class as normative, the Victorians offered the advice famously advocated by Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio — “Let your conscience be your guide.” Experience indicates, consistent with what the Bible teaches, that this advice has limited value. The conscience is a human capacity for sure, part of the moral sense that testifies of the  imago Dei , but it is just as  Image via Wikipedi...

Image via Wikipedia "I'm spiritual, not religious." The number of people who self-identify using the long-popular phrase "spiritual but not religious" is still growing.  In 1998, 9 percent of American adults told the General Social Survey they were spiritual but not religious.  By 2008, it had risen to 14 percent. Among those ages 18 to 39, the increase was even more dramatic, and 18 percent now say they are spiritual but not religious.  The growth is not because people are less likely to identify as religious, but because nonreligious people are more likely to say they are spiritual, says Duke sociologist Mark Chaves. Part of the phrase's popularity can be attributed to its sex appeal . No, really. A social psychologist at Britain's Southampton University looked at 57 studies covering 15,000 experiment subjects, and reported in  Personality and Social Psychology Review  that North Americans find "intrinsically religious" people desirab...