Reading Time: 8 minutes One of the big mistakes non-believers make–especially those who’ve never been believers themselves–is to assume that all Christians are Biblical literalists. Most Christians are not literalists and would find the idea of the entire Bible being literally true to be purely nonsensical. We’re going to be talking about some of the claims Christians make that aren’t mythological, but first I wanted to briefly mention something that I think could otherwise get lost in the shuffle.
Biblical Literalism
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Weekend Edition: Stuff I Wish I’d Seen
Reading Time: 9 minutes There’s a lot of weird stuff lurking in the unread pages of the Bible. Here are some of the strangest stories–ones I wish I’d seen when I was Christian.
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The Vast Comfort of Literalism
Reading Time: 11 minutes Ever wonder how someone converts into fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity? Here’s how I ended up there.
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Another Liar For Jesus Has Been Denied.
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi! Did you enjoy your feast of tears? (Fat-free and zero calories!) Today we’re going to serve up the next course by looking at the curious case of John Freshwater, a middle-school science teacher and fundagelical zealot from Ohio who has finally gotten fully denied his attempts to coyly–and illegally–introduce religious indoctrination into his classroom. […]
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Sometimes I Feel Like I Dodged a Hail of Bullets.
Reading Time: 9 minutes I’m reading this piece about IHOP and feeling a shiver go down my spine every few paragraphs. I want to share how it feels to be an ex-fundamentalist reading about a fundamentalist cult gone horribly wrong. IHOP in this context means “International House of Prayer,” and I wish I could still be so innocent as […]
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When We Can’t Both Be Right
Reading Time: 10 minutes Sometimes it happens that two people have two completely opposing opinions about something. We can take identical lists of objective facts, filter them through a big variety of cultural conditioning, expectations, mores, and personal inclinations, and come out with an opinion that might totally differ from someone else with the same exact list of facts. […]
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The Cosmic Freakout Over Cosmos
Reading Time: 11 minutes I shouldn’t be surprised anymore about how poorly fundamentalists understand the word “faith.” They don’t have the faintest idea what it really means, so they tend to twist the word’s various false meanings around and around as necessary to try to force their way into other people’s lives. I don’t seriously think they have the […]
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The Four Facts of the Resurrection (Aren’t).
Reading Time: 14 minutes I was shocked to see it worded like that, like it was some kind of done deal that everybody–“even the rather skeptical ones”–knows. But the fact that she’d put the phrase in quotes like that meant, ostensibly, that she’d gotten it from somewhere. So I went digging–and found out a lot of stuff that Christians like her probably wouldn’t ever want their kids to learn.
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I’ve Got 65 Problems, but Apologetics Ain’t One.
Reading Time: 11 minutes Today we’re going to talk about how older Christians are dealing with the growing tide of disengagement among their younger adherents. When I talk about “disengagement” among Christian youth, I’m talking about the steady rise in people walking away from formal activities within their old religion. People who disengage from religion stop praying, reading their […]
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Christianity’s “Duh Mode”
Reading Time: 11 minutes Even if it’s totally contradictory, people will believe anything–if the person talking about it sounds sure enough of themselves. Today, I’ll show you what I mean by the phrase Duh Mode, and why it’s so important to people trying to understand Christians.