I’ve discovered a couple good blogs I hadn’t seen before. One is Salvo Blog (Signs of the Times). They provided this further link to a report from another good-looking blog, Mindful Hack, which examines the tale of Phineas Gage, a story you probably heard or read in college (I know I did), and demonstrates that it doesn’t necessarily mean what that guy in the tweed jacket with the arm patches told you it meant.

Let’s face it. Being a Christian can be embarrassing. Among the embarrassments is all the too-good-to-be-true stories Christians believe, repeat in sermons, and forward by e-mail (for instance the classic “Astronomers Discover Joshua’s Missing Day” legend, which I recall first reading in a religious magazine back around 1960).

“What’s the harm in a nice story that strengthens people’s faith?” some may ask. Nothing, as long as fiction is plainly marked as fiction. A central argument used by our enemies is that the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is an “urban legend” (not a very apt term, but I can’t think of a better) of the same sort. “People started telling this story about somebody seeing Jesus alive,” they say, “and people believed it and repeated it, and it got more elaborate as it got repeated, and eventually you’ve got the Christian religion.” We need to keep the distinction between truth and fiction clear and solid, as much as humanly possible, in all our communications, if we want to be able to say, “He is risen indeed!” with integrity. Our skepticism about false stories today doesn’t prove that our predecessors weren’t fooled in the past, but it keeps our thinking clear. I fear that a lot of people who call themselves Christians today don’t really care whether the gospel story is historically true or not.

The Phineas Gage story demonstrates that materialists aren’t immune to the same temptation, for all their airs of objectivity. My college professors believed it on the received authority of other professors and textbook authors. The same goes for the heartbreaking story of David Reimer, a sort of human sacrifice on the altar of feminism, who used to be cited, back in my college days, as proof of the malleability of gender roles.