Reading Time: 11 minutes Today, we look at yet another Christian who shows us exactly why his religion is struggling like it is. More than that, even, Ed Stetzer gives us a blueprint for his embattled tribe’s response strategy, and with it, perhaps a little hope for the future.
Guides
Posted inReligion
The Weird Alternate Reality That Is Christian Pseudoscience
Reading Time: 9 minutes Pseudoscience has been a serious part of Christianity ever since Christianity was, well, Christianity. And it wasn’t until recently that Christians’ rock pile of alternative facts got so unwieldy that it simply collapsed in on top of them. Today we’ll have an overview of pseudoscience–what it is and why it’s so important–because we’re about to head into that CPC manual again and it’s going to be relevant!
Posted inReligion
PostChristian: For Christians, the Solution Is Always to Jesus Harder
Reading Time: 10 minutes Once again, I discover that to a Christian, the solution to every problem is going to be to Jesus harder. It fits a very popular narrative that even one of Progressive Christianity’s biggest names can’t escape. Here’s why that approach is such a perennial favorite, and why it’s just going to keep failing.
Posted inReligion
The Rights of Consumers in the Post-Christian Marketplace
Reading Time: 12 minutes We’re going to look more closely at one important aspect of the spiritual marketplace: would-be Christian evangelists are salespeople, and the people they want to recruit into their various groups are, therefore, potential customers. Now, customers might not always be right, but we’ve got certain rights and privileges that these particular salespeople appear to have forgotten.
Posted inReligion
The big secret about the meaning of life (that Christians don’t want people to know)
Reading Time: 13 minutes Strap in and hang on–keep your hands and feet inside the SUV at all times and please don’t get excitable with the flashlights around the T-Rex–and let’s turn our attention (and that flashlight) to the topic of Meaning and Purpose in Life.
Posted inReligion
Stages of grief at the end of apologetics
Reading Time: 14 minutes I’ve been coming into contact with a lot of different ideas about apologetics itself as a field. One of the more intriguing of those ideas comes from Myron Penner, a Christian who wrote a book called The End of Apologetics. He did an interview with a blogger when the book came out, and the reactions to that interview were so fascinating that I wanted to show them to you.
Posted inReligion
Leaving the Ring
Reading Time: 8 minutes Christian leaders themselves can spin-doctor the latest bad news as much as they like (and oh, they have been!), but reality is unfolding in their ranks whether they like it or not. Their flocks don’t have the luxury of denial. They’ve had to come up with strategies for dealing with the new reality of Christianity’s demographic shift, most of it in direct defiance of their leaders’ demands.
Posted inReligion
The Happiness Hucksters
Reading Time: 10 minutes We’ve been talking about happiness lately: what it is and isn’t, and why Christians seem so unhappy as a group. Last time we touched on the Happy Christian Illusion, that veneer of happiness that Christians pretend to have for various reasons. Today we’ll talk about why that veneer is necessary, and why it covers such a huge core of unhappiness for so many people.
Posted inReligion
Upon My 20-Umpteenth Year of Apostasy: A Word About Authenticity
Reading Time: 9 minutes I just realized that I’ve now been out of Christianity for longer than I was in it. That may sound like an odd way to conceptualize things, but I’ve been doing it for a while about various unpleasant people and subjects. It makes me feel good to know there’s that much distance between me and whatever it was that bothered or hurt me, and my time in fundagelical Christianity definitely counts as something that hurt and bothered me! One of the best outcomes of that deconversion was finally being able to live more authentically–and today we’ll be talking about how that happy change came about.
Posted inReligion
Christian Myth #5,921,347: “The Gospel Does Not Need Trickery”
Reading Time: 11 minutes Christian mythology is filled with absolutely stunning examples of bizarre reasoning, and today we’re talking about one of the very worst examples of the breed: the idea that its claims are very easily proven true using credible, reasonable, rational arguments and observations, and therefore don’t need any kind of dishonest tactics to shore those claims up or support them, so Christians don’t need to lie or misrepresent anything about their religion in order to persuade others. This idea is not only a myth but an especially toxic and harmful one to both believers and those around them.