Data Over Dogma

What does it mean to be "saved" in that uniquely Christian sense? It makes sense, if you're going to talk about a savior, that you would have people that that savior is saving. But where does this idea come from, and to whom does it apply. Heaven knows, even various Christian sects can't agree on this, but as is our wont here on the Data Over Dogma show, we're going to dig in to the topic, and mak...

Have all of the prophecies about Jesus' death and resurrection already happened? Did the apocalypse come and go, and now we're just coasting? Here's the thing about prophecies: the good ones are never specific enough! Sure, every now and then someone will come along and give exact dates and times for when some apocalyptic event is going to happen, but those guys are inevitably just proven wrong. T...

Forget the fourth of July- if you want real fireworks, you gotta check out the incendiary interview between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz. It was... a lot. But when two insufferable gasbags collide that hard, you're going to get a gas giant explosion. Just be glad you couldn't smell it. One of the points of contention had to do with Israel, and Cruz's insistence that the Bible commanded him (and all...

Ooooh! Dan McClellan has a bee in his bonnet, and her name is Allie Beth Stuckey! This week we're looking at the parable of the sheep and the goats. In it, sheep are good, and goats are bad, and the Lord has some sorting to do. How do you get to be a sheep? Feed, house, clothe, and generally take care of your brothers and sisters. But that presents a problem for Allie Beth: who are her brothers an...

What's your ethnicity? Who else is included in that group, and why do you draw those boundaries where you do? Well, this week we're bringing in hired-gun Bible expert Dr Aaron Higashi to walk us through the rich and sometimes confusing concept of ethnicity, and some of the surprising ways ethnic heritage plays out in the Bible (the Israelites ARE Canaanites? Whaaaaa???!) . Then, we're going to del...

Were the authors of the Bible just writing firsthand accounts of events that actually happened? That's a pretty tough case to make. As a matter of fact, we have very good reason to believe that many of the stories of the bible have shared roots with many other stories/myths of ancient southwest Asia and northern Africa. This week, we'll look at many of those stories, and discuss their parallels an...

Welp it's June, and that means LGBTQIA+ Pride month! At least that's what it means for many. For a minority of people, June is national grumpy homophobe month. One thing about the grumpy set is that they really love to use the Bible to shore up their dogmatic belief that gay folks (and trans and bi and all the other acronym-represented people) are going against God. So let's talk about it. Our fir...

For episode 116, we're venturing into the spooky world of divination! Many a Christian pastor has railed against this practice, but what if the medium used for divining isn't a rod or a stick, but THE BIBLE ITSELF!? Does that take the curse off it? Make it worse? Will it work to provide other-worldly guidance in your life? Is it forbidden? We... well, we might answer some of these questions... But...

This week we're getting all apocryphal, and diving headlong into Maccabees. Specifically, we're discussing the story of a mother and her sons in 2 Maccabees, chapter 7. This is the inspiring (?) tale of a family defying tyranny by refusing to eat, and all being brutally murdered for their trouble. And while the story itself is quite harrowing (and graphic!), it's small moments along the way that a...

Well kids, this one's a doozy! This week we're talking about a controversial Biblical practice that is still done by many today (and the truth is that it should probably be more controversial than it is). That's right, this week we're talking circumcision! It's such a strange practice, if you think about it, cutting off a piece of your child's flesh. And it leaves us with a load of questions: Wher...

Remember when you were a kid, and your parents told you not to used certain words, but then sometimes THEY would use those words, and you didn't think that was ok because it seemed like a double-standard, but there was nothing you could do because they were big and you were small so you secretly said those words with your friends as a rebellion, but then your next-door neighbor overheard you and s...

Have you ever been confused about why Easter happens when it happens? End of March? Mid April? July? And as if it's not already complicated enough, the eastern church celebrates on a different day than the western church. Except the days that they don't... Thank goodness for our phone calendars, because without them, none of us would have any idea when to break out the Peeps and Cadbury eggs! Well...

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The way many people talk about immigration in the United States, you'd assume that it was an apocalyptic event. And actually, many of the most extreme voices in our society are literally saying as much. But this is not the first time American immigration has been linked to Biblical apocalypse. This week, we're bringing in Dr. Yii-Jan Lin, whose new book Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of...

It's a sin so egregious that Christians weren't allowed to do it, BY LAW, for centuries! But now? Totally fine. Everybody participates. No big deal at all! The next time you meet a Bible literalist who is certain that you have to follow the laws of the Bible to the letter, but who is also pretty excited about capitalism, ask them about usury, and watch them fall all over themselves to pretend like...

Anybody want to take a long walk in the desert? Well, this week we've brought in Angela Roskop Erisman to guide us through the wilderness! In her new book, The Wilderness Narratives: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation, Dr Erisman discusses the exodus as you may not have heard it discussed before. Far from being the actual writings of a literal Moses, Dr Erisman uses genre analysis to...

This week, we don't want to make it bad, so we're going to take a sad song and make it better. The book of Jude may only be one chapter, but it's jam-packed with stuff for this show to talk about. Who wrote it, and when? Who was it written to? What grumblers is it mad about? We'll attempt to answer all these questions and more. Then, speaking of grumblers, we have some of our own to deal with! Whe...

This week we welcome "deep skeptic" pastor Jeremy Steele to the show. Jeremy has spent recent years building an online congregation of people who don't feel seen or understood by the traditional church. He's here to tell us about life as a pastor, how he gathered his flock, and why people who are deconstructing the theologies they were raised with might still need a community like his. You can fin...

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big fight! In the red corner: personal finance guru and guy who makes millions by making poorer people feel bad about their debt, Dave "how's your retirement fund looking?" Ramsey. And in the blue corner: with a much lighter pocketbook but much heavier t-shirt collection, Dan "alright let's see it" McClellan. What could a Bible scholarship show possibly have to...

Christians have had a missionary zeal since the beginning. From the dawn of Christianity, the mandate to share the "good news" has been a central theme of Christian life. But what is a Christian to do when it is clear that the audience they want to share the gospel with would react poorly to much of what's in the Bible? Well, at least in one case, the solution was just redact the heck out of it. O...

Come celebrate round numbers with us as we embark on our 100th episode of Data Over Dogma! And what, you might ask, are we doing to mark this grand event? Have we carefully crafted a clips show looking back on the best moments of the last 100 weeks? Have we mindfully chosen topics that relate to the number 100? Well, no. No we haven't. It's just a regular show. Sorry. That said, it's an interestin...

If you think you had it rough living in your sibling's shadow, just imagine how James, the brother of Jesus must've felt! Well, today James gets his due. We'll discuss who he was, what he did, and what it might mean theologically, that Jesus wasn't an only child. Then, if you listened to this show for more than a few episodes, you're likely to have heard Dan McClellan mention "the Masoretic text"....

Jesus went to hell! Briefly. He gave the place a look-see after he died, and then left to go be resurrected. Or at least that's the claim that some theologies make. Where did the idea that Jesus visited hell come from? Is it Biblical? I mean, it would have to be, wouldn't it? People wouldn't just make up something like that long after the Bible had been written just because, right? Right? And spea...

Would you be mine, could you be mine, won't you be my neighbor? If you know that song, then you know that at least one person understood Jesus' answer to the lawyer. Far fewer seem to now. But that's in the second half of our show! First, we're exploring some imaginative pretending that would almost be cute if so many people hadn't taken it seriously. It's the amazing amateur (read: fake) archeolo...

This week we're talking government on the Data Over Dogma show, and woof! It's a doozy! First, we're going into the belly of the beast and talking to and actual, honest-to-goodness United States congressperson. Eric Swalwell has a D next to his name, which, if you ask some in our country, means he's a godless communist. In fact, he's a professed Christian who is nevertheless concerned about the da...