Reading Time: 6 minutes Without an afterlife, where will humans find purpose and meaning? Groundhog Day explores the possibilities with a cinematic parable.
Neil Carter
Neil Carter is a high school teacher, a father of four, and a skeptic living in the Bible Belt. A former church elder with a seminary education, Neil now writes mostly about the struggles of former evangelicals living in the midst of a highly religious subculture. Follow him @godlessindixie
Posted inParenting & Family
Marriage advice to a half-believing couple: Hang on to each other
Reading Time: 8 minutes Not too long ago, a friend of mine unsubscribed from the Christian faith. His wife did nothing of the sort, however, and now she is worried about how their three small children will turn out. Their extended families are both devoutly evangelical, so you can guess how they feel about my friend’s apostasy. Sometimes the […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
When your Supreme Being turns out to be an illusion
Reading Time: 4 minutes A friend once expressed surprise that I would leave the Christian faith if my experience was largely positive. Not only was I devoted as a follower of Jesus, but I even had a few years of experience in various kinds of ministry, most of which were positive as well. So why on earth would I […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
What good are atheists in a world steeped in religion?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religion News Service posted an article recently about the group exodus of nonreligious bloggers from Patheos over the last few weeks, along with the launch of OnlySky, a new multimedia platform aimed at reaching an ever-broadening population who are no longer looking for heaven to solve our problems. When we look up, we see only […]
Posted inReligion
Hosea was no hero
Reading Time: 7 minutes Yahweh promised them they wouldn’t have to develop advanced weaponry or curry the favor of neighboring nations because he himself would protect them. Their primary weapons were thoughts and prayers, and for some reason those weren’t enough to keep Israel from being invaded and taken over again, and again, and again.
Posted inThe Secular
Christians need their faith to be true
Reading Time: 7 minutes When you leave the Christian faith, people come out of the woodwork to impugn your motives for leaving. First I was informed that I did it so that I could have more sex, then I was told I did it to make money. Someone else said I must have a problem with authority because I […]
Posted inPolitics
Why the church keeps getting Covid wrong
Reading Time: 5 minutes I live in the Deep South, and now that the Delta variant is here, I’m back to wearing a mask again wherever I go. School started back for us last week, and masks are mandatory because our district doesn’t have any wealthy white people bullying the school board into disregarding the pleas of every hospital […]
Posted inGeneral
Why the gospel doesn’t work on exvangelicals
Reading Time: 8 minutes People like me are like flies in the ointment of evangelical theology. We did all the things they told us to do, we gave our hearts and our lives entirely over to Jesus, yet in the end we still found their belief system lacking. It’s not supposed to happen that way. We must have done […]
Posted inPolitics
Four ways Tim Keller’s gospel falls flat
Reading Time: 11 minutes In the penultimate chapter of his Reason for God, Tim Keller attempts to pull together all the loose threads strewn about this apologetic work, weaving them together into a coherent vision for the world. He offers his belief system as a superior alternative to the one the rest of the world wants you to accept, […]
Posted inReligion
But why does there have to be blood?
Reading Time: 8 minutes With only three more chapters to go in Tim Keller‘s The Reason for God, it appears the pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan has abandoned the central thesis of the book. Perhaps we came to this with unrealistic expectations, but halfway through the book Keller confesses he believes everyone really knows there is a God, then […]