Reading Time: 8 minutes A pastor recently said people are leaving their faith because it’s sexy. But if approval had really been our goal, we’d have stayed.
Leaving Religion
Exploring the sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating process of leaving religion.
Posted inReligion
SPIRITUAL WARFARE: Catholic edition
Reading Time: 8 minutes Out of every strange practice in Christianity, spiritual warfare might just be my favorite of all. Just hearing a Christian use the phrase puts a great big silly happy smile on my face and laughter in my heart. Spiritual warfare is one of those super-context-dependent Christian practices. When removed from its very specific context its practitioners look like they’re playing a Happy Pretendy Fun Time Game — which they always were.
Posted inLeaving Religion
How Phanatik’s faith pool drained
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last week, popular Christian rapper Brady Goodwin, aka Phanatik, announced his deconversion. He released a video on his Facebook account describing how it happened. And his extimony perfectly illustrates a concept I call the faith pool. Today, let me show you what this concept means and how it worked for Phanatik.
Posted inCulture
Culture warriors just wrecked an old denomination
Reading Time: 7 minutes In 2012, the RCA began to break apart over homosexuality. One faction –the more mainline end — wanted inclusion. The other — the culture warriors — wanted to the denomination to be bigots-for-Jesus. That breakup completed this month, with 43 congregations full of culture warriors leaving. They’re joining a new denomination, ARC (Alliance of Reformed Churches). All this, over a culture war evangelicals lost over a decade ago!
Posted inLeaving Religion
From angry to meh: How I became a not-so-angry atheist
Reading Time: 3 minutes For a long time, I kept my doubts about the god I was taught to believe in hidden. Whenever it came up, I changed the subject or just went with the flow. I bowed my head for grace at my family’s Thanksgiving table. Moved my lips with the words to the Lord’s Prayer on the […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
Why I lied about being a believer
Reading Time: 3 minutes I grew up with the idea that lying is bad. In most cases at least. I found out the hard way that telling Aunt Marie that her holiday gelatin mold was, well…. off-putting, was not the time to tell the truth. Of course, I was somewhere around six or seven and “off-putting” was not the […]
Posted inLeaving Religion
Jesuit evangelist demands: tolerate ‘the intolerant,’ darn it
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m guessing that Catholic leaders’ massive misogyny, entrenched sexism, and endless horrific bigotries are indeed quite a dealbreaker for younger adults. I’d worry about someone who didn’t consider that stuff a dealbreaker.
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 inLeaving Religion
Testimonies: Why false stories backfire spectacularly
Reading Time: 11 minutes With the base cunning of a narcissist, Biff recognized — probably very quickly — that boring testimonies don’t exactly open doors in evangelicalism.
Posted inLeaving Religion
The richest man in Utah just quit the Mormon Church
Reading Time: 3 minutes “The church is actively and currently doing harm in the world,” wrote billionaire Jeff T. Green