Reading Time: 6 minutes I don’t know what fundagelicals would even do with themselves if they weren’t panicking about the end of the world. A new date has been set–April 18th–but it’s not getting a whole lot of attention. Today Lord Snow presides over an increasingly backfired fundagelical tradition: Rapture predictions!
Con Artists
Posted inReligion
How Cat-Tipping Taught Me To Be Gentle To Myself.
Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s a gorgeous super-early-Monday morning; insomnia’s got me watching the dawn while the cowcat is having a Grooming Emergency beside me, and her frantic grooming session reminded me of something I realized not long ago. The birds are singing, the world’s waking up, and I was just thinking about the importance of being gentle to […]
Posted inReligion
To Catch a (Christian) Predator.
Reading Time: 10 minutes (TW: Rampant sexism. Abuse of children and women.) Hi, folks. I wanted to introduce y’all to Christian leader Bill Gothard. He’s got a folksy good-ole-boy crooked smile; he’s just the right age where an old white dude gets a lot of cachet in certain fundagelical circles, and he’s a rock star in the homeschooling/”purity culture” […]
Posted inReligion
The Cult of “Before” Stories: From Witchcraft to Christ.
Reading Time: 9 minutes Way back in the 1970s, a British Christian named Doreen Irvine wrote From Witchcraft to Christ. It was supposedly her “sensational true story of a woman rescued from Satan’s grasp by the power of God,” according to its tagline. And I’m sure you are already thinking about how accurate that tagline is. Read the reviews […]
Posted inReligion
When the Scam Ends.
Reading Time: 13 minutes “There’s one born every minute,” the consummate showman P.T. Barnum said once, and that saying goes double for religious scams. The implication is that for every one of those every-ones born every minute, there is a person who is happy and willing to help them out with that little problem they were having of possessing […]
Posted inReligion
Things The Bible Doesn’t Talk About (Like PTSD).
Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s been another of those weeks where this blog seems to have an embarrassment of riches in the “Christians Behaving Badly” department. This is another of those stories I think about when people try to head into “aww, what’s the harm?” territory. David Barton is not a neuroscientist or a trained clinical psychologist any more […]
Posted inReligion
Fruitarians and Fundamentalists: How Learning About a Fringe Diet Helped Me Break Free.
Reading Time: 9 minutes ZOMG two posts in one day? I’m spoiling y’all! But this was on my mind. There’s a Connie Willis short story called “Even the Queen” wherein a group of women in the not-so-distant-future discuss menstruation at a ladies’ lunch. I ran into it when I was just out of college and in the process of […]
Posted inReligion
The Christian’s Guide to Ex-Christians: Miracle Maxin’
Reading Time: 13 minutes Christians move through a world filled with all sorts of divine interventions by their god–to the point where they openly scoff that no amount of miracles would ever make a skeptic happy. I’ve even read a Christian minister claim that the real problem with skeptics is that we’ve been deluged with so many miracles we’re just plain bored with the silly things by now. To be honest, any amount of miracles would be fine with me. Any amount at all is better than what there is currently, which is “none.”