Reading Time: 5 minutes 2020 had me thinking about numbers. Nine. I was nine years old when my mother died. I remember the day they told us she had cancer. My sister and me. My parents sat us down in the living room and explained to us what colon cancer is. They told us that the doctors had discovered […]
Cancer
Posted inHealth
Hearing loss, failing eyesight, and the struggles we try to hide
Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s talk about discrimination. Not the racial type: I’m talking about the ability of human hearing to discriminate, to distinguish the all-important but often whisper-subtle edges of what most people experience as the familiar sounds of vowels and consonants. For some of us, consonants are especially hard to discriminate among spoken sounds. Their delicate wisps […]
Posted inReligion
Tim Keller and the Lies He Tells About Death
Reading Time: 10 minutes Christians promise up and down that their product can give people peace of mind about death. It does not. And Tim Keller found that out the hard way, though I doubt a single one of his followers will understand his recent confession.
Posted inReligion
How Positive Thinking Backfires
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been talking about the cult of positive thinking. That’s an ideology that insists that people must maintain a attitude of perfect positivity in order to affect reality itself with their very thoughts. And today, I’ll show you the harm this mindset produces. (Previous posts in this series: Rethinking the Power […]
Posted inReligion
The Prayer Journal at the Hospital Chapel
Reading Time: 9 minutes I was thinking today about Christians who accuse ex-Christians of treating their god like an automatic teller machine (ATM). They level this accusation at us whenever we remind them that prayer doesn’t do anything in the real world. A while ago, they decided that if we mention this shortcoming, then obviously we deconverted because we didn’t get a pony upon demand. Today, let me show you how I figured out why Christians keep accusing us of this imagined shortcoming.
Posted inReligion
Let There Be Light: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Culture Warriors
Reading Time: 21 minutes Hello and welcome to a Roll to Disbelieve movie review! Today’s botched cinema roll is Let There Be Light, a 2017 production featuring Kevin Sorbo as an atheist strawman.
Posted inGeneral
The Waiting Room: That Moment We Dangle Between Fates
Reading Time: 9 minutes When we find ourselves waiting for an outcome, we can start to get desperate. I can see why we might have evolved that burst of hormones and chemicals, but this exact process can be easily manipulated by those who wish to take advantage of us. Today we look at the waiting room, both physical and metaphorical, and where that anxiety can take us if we’re not careful.
Posted inReligion
The Day My Prayers Changed
Reading Time: 13 minutes One day I realized that my prayers had changed without my even noticing. But they had. When I noticed that change, that moment became a turning point in my own faith journey.
Posted inReligion
No Miracles for Monsterlet
Reading Time: 8 minutes Mr. Captain and I have–or rather had–a cat we nicknamed Monster for how downright evil she was (but she was “just a little one”). She passed away yesterday. Her death reminded me of how David Marshall, among many other Christians, believes that this world we live in is the best possible world out of all possible configurations and that his god is in charge of all of it–and how wrong that belief is in reality.
Posted inReligion
I Don’t Think Anti-Gay Christians Really Trust Their God Much
Reading Time: 8 minutes Taken to the nadir, religion can become a means that truly predatory, shameless people use to gain social control and dominance over others, nothing more, and it is used or deployed rather than practiced or believed; the folks doing this might act like zealots, but really what they are is frauds who’ve found an angle–a foolproof one. And that’s why this week I was struck anew by just how little these zealots appear to truly trust in their god.