Reading Time: 8 minutes Ex-Christians have a lot of shorthand ways of talking about how it feels to be deconverted. Often that shorthand involves scenes from movies like The Matrix. But there’s one I’d say gives that classic example a run for the money, and it’s been on my mind lately. Today I want to introduce you to the very odd duck that is the 1974 animated Jack and the Beanstalk–and why it reminds me so much of my own time in Christianity.
Magical thinking
Posted inReligion
A Landscape Littered With Failed Shortcuts
Reading Time: 10 minutes For some stuff, there’s no substitute for doing something the long way for a result worth having. Here’s a look at shortcuts–why they’re so seductive, what they can’t accomplish, and why some people go overboard with seeking them.
Posted inReligion
Angelo Stagnaro: Another Creationist Who’s Gotten It Backwards.
Reading Time: 10 minutes We’re going to look at Angelo Stagnaro, who wrote a post for a big Catholic site about how his god totally created the universe. It’s called A Universe Made Just For Us, and I thought y’all would enjoy it today because oh, I know how much we love us some quantum-woo apologetics!
Posted inReligion
Bible verses I wish I’d known about while I was Christian
Reading Time: 10 minutes The CPC also left out an awful lot of Bible verses that reveal that the Bible’s god is a total fan of abortion–sorta. I’ll show you some of those verses today. But more than that, I’ll show you a bunch of stuff I didn’t see or understand until well after my deconversion.
Posted inReligion
How to Keep Kids Christian For Life, According to Christians.
Reading Time: 14 minutes I’ll show you the weirdest and worst of those teachings here–and more importantly I’ll show you exactly why they’re wrong.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Coercion and the Global Marketplace of Ideas
Reading Time: 12 minutes The religion’s leaders 100% believe that there’s some magical way to return Christianity to its former power and dominance through marketing and superior sales techniques. This notion is just another example of magical thinking in Christianity, and I’ll show you why right now.
Posted inReligion
The Power of Prayer in Christian Marketing
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last time we met up, we were talking about Christian marketing and why it sucks. Christians are required to put faith in stuff that simply isn’t true–and their magical thinking carries through to their strategies around revitalizing their brand, guaranteeing failure.
Posted inReligion
You Lost Me: No No, Y’all, David Kinnaman is All Wrong.
Reading Time: 10 minutes To say the least, we haven’t been, um, impressed by it a whole lot. And the funny thing is, a lot of his fellow fundagelicals aren’t either. It seems like for every fan of the guy’s ideas, he’s got a couple of detractors–all of whom have their own pet ideas about What the Big Problem Here Is and How to Fix It.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Oh Noes! The Baptism Drought Continues for the SBC!
Reading Time: 8 minutes The biggest Protestant denomination in the United States continues to suffer serious churn in its membership, and those of us who are rooting for its failure won’t be disappointed to hear how they’re dealing with it. I recently discovered a quiet little update to one of their most surprising task force meetings.
Posted inReligion
The National Day of Prayer: Crank-Calling the Red Bat-Phone to “God”
Reading Time: 10 minutes One of the biggest ways that overzealous Christians reveal that their religious grandstanding is, well, just a pretendy fun-time game is in how they publicly talk about and engage in prayer. One of the very last things they should be doing is letting that fact slip to the rest of us–but they show us, in so many ways, exactly how little they themselves believe the words they say. Here is one major way that we can tell that Christians don’t have much faith at all in prayer.