Category: About the Bible

The sin-eater

Written March 2019

In season three of Netflix’s “The Blacklist” FBI agent Elizabeth Keen remembers something horrific she did in her past and finally understands why the mysterious Raymond Reddington (Red) was trying to keep it from her.

“I was trying to be your sin-eater,” he tells her.

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Robots and Eternity

Written in 2016

In the world of artificial intelligence, things that our grandparents would have found hard to even imagine have already become a reality and the pace of progress in the field “is close to exponential”, according to billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, entrepreneur Elon Musk.Continue reading

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Bandersnatch: choices, choices

Published in 2019

Netflix’s recent production Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is unique in that it that is the first interactive movie – allowing the viewer to make a choice at several intervals as to what the lead character will do next and how the story ends.

It cleverly questions how much control we really have over our lives and highlights how even the most banal of decisions may have unforeseen consequences. It could also be construed to be subtly underplaying our responsibility on how our lives turn out: implying that our choices are so constrained by outside forces that we are all just victims of our culture, genetics and upbringing.Continue reading

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Lifeboat

My teenager was asked by a boy at school this week “I’m an atheist does that mean that I am condemned to hell?” She wasn’t sure what to say – as a Christian she knows that the Bible teaches that apart from belief in the atoning death of Jesus on the cross we all go to hell, but how to say that in a way that doesn’t sound harsh and judgemental?

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What does ‘Jesus loves you’ mean?

Most of us have heard the phrase “Jesus loves you”. It sounds ‘nice’, non-judgemental and kind, but what does it actually mean? If God loves everyone, no matter how you behave or what you believe then does it matter how we behave or what we believe? “Jesus loves you” is a phrase that does not actually appear in the Bible and, although it is true and seemingly simple to understand, the word “love” has been so diluted and redefined by our culture that saying “Jesus loves you” is often either meaningless to people or misunderstood.

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