Reading Time: 4 minutes [Previous: What rights do parents have over their children’s education?] The battle over public schools is a clash of values. There’s no such thing as neutral or value-free education. Every choice about what to present or what to omit from the classroom carries ideological weight. That’s why red-state politicians want to present one version of […]
homeschooling
Posted inReligion
The Poor Widdle Heathens in ‘Only God Can’
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hi and welcome back! We saw a movie recently, Only God Can, that covered quite a few tropes in fundagelical thinking. Today, we’ll be covering one of the most-beloved ones of those tropes: the idea that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are much happier and more functional than poor widdle heathens ever could be. Come to Fundagelical U […]
Posted inReligion
Seeking the Winning Team’s Banner
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be an authoritarian Christian is to live in constant, unending, ever-ratcheting-upward fear. They fear so many things! Today, I want to show you another important feature of these folks: their terror of loss. I don’t mean simply loss of objects or people they love, either. They’re also terrified of losing any confrontations in which they find themselves, as well. Here, I’ll show you the lengths to which this fear drives those suffering from it, and how they seek to soothe that fear.
Posted inReligion
ACE Really Is That Bad. (Also Announcing a New Series!)
Reading Time: 10 minutes Jonny Scaramanga has co-written a peer-reviewed paper that examines ACE and finds it wanting in many key respects. So it’s not our imaginations–ACE really is just as bad as we thought.
Posted inReligion
… And Now We Learn About Josh Duggar’s Secret Facebook Account.
Reading Time: 6 minutes I need to be really careful about what I say. Last time we talked, I was saying that I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop about Josh Duggar. I clearly used up my allotment of “I CAN’T EVEN” statements way too early on this whole thing.
Posted inReligion
What Josh Duggar Shows Us About How Not to Apologize.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Here is what a real apology looks like, and notice, please, that the response of Josh Duggar and his parents does not look anything like this list.
Posted inUncategorized
Taylor Swift’s Bubble.
Reading Time: 13 minutes “You Belong With Me” is a fairy tale about the Purity Myth–and about how conforming to it can win young women what they want. Unfortunately, fairy tales are rarely very in tune with reality.
Posted inReligion
Socratic Theatrics.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Not long ago, one of our lovely commenters, ratamacue0, asked me a very good question with regard to the homeschooling post: namely, why I took exception to the weird, twisted form of “Socratic questioning” used in a video made by one of these religious-zealot homeschooling outfits. This type of questioning, called the Socratic method, involves […]
Posted inReligion
The Dirty Secret of Religious Homeschooling.
Reading Time: 10 minutes There really do seem like two approaches to homeschooling now. In one, parents who are very concerned about the individual needs of their children–or about a lackluster local school district–pull their kids out of school to teach them at home. It’s not done to insulate their children but rather to help them in a way […]
Posted inReligion
Leaping from Floe to Floe.
Reading Time: 8 minutes Our dear friend Charles at Skeptic Journey has brought something up that I wanted to talk about today: the growing sense of flailing that I get from modern Christian organizations as they try to stem the tide of apostates and attract new members to their groups. A long time ago, I worked for a call […]