Dr Paul Allen

Painting by Rembrandt of Paul, one of the most notable of early Christian missionaries, who called himself the "Apostle to the Gentiles." Paul, a Hellenistic Jew, was very influential on the shift of Christianity to Gentile dominated movement. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Even though thousands of Jewish people embraced Jesus in the early days of the Christian church (three thousand in Acts  2:41 ; at least another two thousand in Acts 4:4), some also claimed that Christians aimed to “destroy [the temple] and change the customs that Moses delivered to us” (Acts  6:14 ). Nevertheless, the first and greatest Christian missionary , a Jew himself and former Pharisee, the apostle Paul , protested that he was “saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: that the Messiah must suffer and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles ” (Acts 26:22–23). Great Sorrow, Unceasing Anguish ...

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Logic and facts can only ‘take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief’.  Human logic may be rationally adequate but it’s also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there’s more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it. It elicits and invites rational consent but does not compel it. Sadly some of those who boast of being freethinkers are simply imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, unaware of the radical changes in our understanding of rationality that have emerged in the last 50 years. Many New Atheists will quite reasonably want to protest at this point. From a New Atheist perspective, it’s not that human reason discovers God by reaching beyond reason, but that naive human beings invent God. More than that: they invent a nasty ...