Reading Time: 7 minutes The teachers organizing our elementary school’s Christmas pageant expected me to do something humiliating. My refusal sparked a crisis.
Their fatal mistake was calling my mother.
Biography
Posted inBooks
Learning on the last page what a book is about: ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’
Reading Time: 4 minutes When We Cease to Understand the World is an excellent but very odd book. Kernels of fact are surrounded by glittering shells of variegated fiction. As a genre, it feels different than historical fiction. It might rather be labeled biographical fiction, or fictive biography, or truth that never occurred. I got through the whole book before I found […]
Posted inReligion
Baptists think they know exactly how to avoid deception
Reading Time: 11 minutes Back when I was Pentecostal, I found myself debating a pair of Southern Baptist guys. At the time, I believed in speaking in tongues, and I rejected the Trinity. They were deeply concerned that I’d go to hell over this huge deception, so they sought to persuade me I was wrong. I’m sure you’ll be […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Why Christians push a false narrative of hopelessness
Reading Time: 12 minutes Christians’ false narrative of hopelessness represents a big part of their current marketing to their target customers. But in truth, it only worsens the actual hopelessness that their salespeople claim to be alleviating.
Posted inGeneral
Change: A Very Special Lord Snow Presides (LSP #221)
Reading Time: 5 minutes Of late, some of you have heard some rumblings about Roll to Disbelieve making a platform move in the near future. These rumblings are true.
Posted inCulture
Before Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Fused Together (LSP #218)
Reading Time: 7 minutes The evangelicals I knew back then thought fundamentalists were dangerous zealots and wingnuts who’d missed the entire point of Christianity in their mad dash to theological super-correctness. Meanwhile, fundamentalists thought evangelicals were lukewarm weaklings who couldn’t handle the real deal of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ — and thus would fold and accept the Mark of the Beast the moment the Endtimes began in earnest.
Posted inGeneral
We Found a Possible Exoplanet in Another Galaxy! (LSP #215)
Reading Time: 6 minutes If life existed on Earth, my ten-year-old self figured, then it had to exist elsewhere. If our Sun had oodles of planets and moons whizzing around it, then other stars had to have them as well. And on those planets, who knew what might exist? It seemed far more likely to me that at least some other planets hosted life — and more than that, intelligent life — than that none possibly ever could.
Posted inReligion
Beach Reach Training: How to Craft a Testimony (And Why)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been talking about Beach Reach. That’s a short-term mission trip (STM) organized by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). For two weeks, college-age SBC-lings descend on a beach during American universities’ Spring Break. During their trip, these volunteers offer charity services to a truly deserving group that is desperately in […]
Posted inGeneral, Religion
The Night My Fear of Hell Died
Reading Time: 11 minutes Today, I’ll tell you what happened the night I finally lost my fear of Hell.
Posted inReligion
Gaslighting: How Dare We Expect Evangelicals to Fulfill Their Promises!
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, I alluded to the mistreatment evangelicals heap upon people who express disappointment with their experiences in the religion. To be sure, it does happen. It happened to me, in fact! Yes, people join these evangelical groups on the basis of a whole bunch of marketing promises, and then they discover […]