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 […]
Cult of Before Stories
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
The Cult of “Before” Stories Got a New Member Last Month.
Reading Time: 13 minutes One of my earliest blog entries, A Cult of “Before” Stories, remains one of the most-often-viewed pages on the entire blog (thanks, RationalWiki readers!). It was about how my preacher ex-husband Biff, as well as other Christians including the very well-known-at-the-time Mike Warnke, lied constantly while telling his “testimony” (for non-fundagelicals, a “testimony” is a […]
Posted inReligion
Mike Warnke: A Cult of “Before” Stories
Reading Time: 9 minutes Today, let me show you one of the most devastating things that happened to me when I was Christian. It was how I discovered that my god didn’t mind at all if his followers represented him through lying in flagrantly dishonest ways. It was also how I discovered that one of the most important beliefs my church taught wasn’t true: Jesus didn’t transform people at all.