Reading Time: 9 minutes Every so often, I’m convinced, Tim Keller starts feeling like the conversation has begun to meander away from his favorite topic (himself), so he blurts out something ridiculously fatuous to get everyone looking his way again. This time, his attention-seeking took the form of lies about Original Christianity.
Jesus Harder
Posted inGeneral
The Jesus obsession in ‘The Great Divorce’
Reading Time: 11 minutes By the time I joined evangelicalism (in the mid-1980s), I learned to feel downright guilty for not injecting enough Jesus-ification into my life. I couldn’t just read a fantasy novel for the sake of it, go to a movie, or enjoy music that didn’t mention Jesus even once.
Posted inGeneral, Religion
Bethlehem Church: Interpreting Churches’ Success Claims
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Recently, the news site of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had a major victory to report: a megachurch in a small town in Georgia reported 114 baptisms on one Sunday. That’s a pretty big boast, considering the SBC’s in a major decline and has been for generations now. This claim intrigued […]
Posted inReligion
How to Totally Solve Spiritual Drought
Reading Time: 5 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we checked out a Christian essay describing spiritual drought. That’s the feeling Christians get when they just don’t feel connected or filled-up by their god. At any given time, huge numbers of Christians feel this way. And obviously, that’s a problem. After all, their marketing says their god is standing by, […]
Posted inReligion
Why Jesus-ing Harder Won’t Bring Churchless Believers Back
Reading Time: 10 minutes When we were talking about churchless believers last week, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen a lot of Christians offering concrete strategies for bringing these believers back into church sheepfolds. The ones who do offer strategies tend to offer ones based around Jesus-ing harder. But that won’t work here any more than it’s ever worked anywhere in Christianity. Today, let me show you why Jesus-ing harder doesn’t ever fix anything — and why it can’t.
Posted inReligion
Correct Beliefs ≠ Lifelong Faith (The Myth of Safety Through Correct Jesus-ing)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Quite a few Christians think that if someone holds correct beliefs, then they won’t ever deconvert. That is simply not true. It doesn’t matter what flavor of Christianity one follows. People leave Christianity regardless. Today, I’ll show you this myth — and we’ll talk about why Christians love it so much.
Posted inReligion
The Caste System of Calvinism: Treating People Like Things
Reading Time: 7 minutes Recently, a young and fervent Calvinist, Robert Aaron Long, decided that the best way to deal with his personal difficulties was to murder a whole bunch of innocent people. His church, Crabapple First Baptist, immediately distanced itself and is doing its level best to pretend their teachings had nothing whatsoever to do with Long’s decision or his difficulties. But I’d venture to guess that the opposite is true. Calvinism teaches adherents to treat people like things, and it does so through its central tenet.
Posted inReligion
‘Failings:’ Brian Houston Just Told Us What We Already Knew About Hillsong
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hillsong is a deeply and irrevocably broken system that does exactly and precisely what pastor Brian Houston designed it to do. Recently, he even went on record to tell us so.
Posted inReligion
“Million Souls” and Lying for Jesus
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! Recently, we talked about a threat that Ravi Zacharias made to one of his victims: that if she revealed his hypocrisy, she’d be responsible for “millions of souls” going to Hell. It was a threat I encountered myself when I was Christian. And since leaving the religion, I’ve run into it […]
Posted inUncategorized
These Students Are Definitely Learning ‘Christian Love’ (LSP #177)
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today, Lord Snow Presides over how well these Christian children have learned the lessons about ‘Christian love’ that’ll definitely keep them (toxic) Christian for life.