Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) has some interesting quotes on faith and reason: "For, as Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second century: 'Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason -- nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason'" (138). Or, from Clement of Alexandria: "Do not think we say these things [Christian doctrines] are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason." (138) The idea that faith is the opposite of reason is a fairly recent idea, and would have stunned most Christians from the time of Christ through the Middle Ages. It is based on a (willful?) misunderstanding of what was meant by "faith." So, for instance, when  Bertrand Russell writes , ...

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." In late February, UConn was slogging through a somewhat mediocre season. They looked like they would probably make the NCAA tournament, but "everyone" would have expected a first or second round knock-out. At that point, their coach, Kevin Ollie (a devout Christian whose mother is a minister), was asked how he thought the rest of their season would play out. He replied "I think we will win the national championship." What an absurd , ridiculous answer! A few days later, his team would get blown out by Louisville, 81-48. They looked like a team that could barely get the ball past half court, let alone win more than a single game in the NCAA tournament. But Ollie's faith was not a statement about the Bayesian probability that his team would triumph. He was not, as many people who ridicule the idea of faith typically contend, irrationally believing that, say, uni...