Reading Time: 7 minutes Today we’ll be discussing a uniquely Christian form of cold reading: their attempts to guess why people deconvert from their religion.
Magical thinking
Posted inReligion
The Handbook: The Magic Christian (Doesn’t Exist).
Reading Time: 10 minutes Christians often pull out the stops when they discover that one of us has left the fold. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown at us to read, watch, or listen to. We get invited to “casual dinners” that turn into full-blown interventions. We can’t even visit a friend’s house without discovering a church friend there to try once more to “just talk to us” to “make sure we’ve really thought about this.” And then, once we think we’ve weathered all of it, along comes just one more Christian into the fray, often totally convinced that “God” told him or her to say some particular thing to us.
Posted inReligion
Naturalism: Not Gross. Not Crass. And Not Negotiable
Reading Time: 9 minutes Wow, do Christians tend to hate the idea of naturalism. One apologetics site even calls it, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, “a belief-system opposed to our god.” Notice their flowchart, by the way. It’s actually not too bad. “The natural world is all that exists, so if something falls outside the natural world, it is excluded from reality.” One almost wants to say in response “Yes, and…?”
Posted inReligion
Magical Thinking and Prayer
Reading Time: 13 minutes It’s funny to me that Christianity tends to jump with both feet on magic in general, considering how much magical thinking there is in the religion. Contrary to what they think, they are all for magic–they just want it to be Christian magic. Christian magic is A-OK.