Reading Time: 9 minutes We’ve noted in the past (extensively, really) that Christian media sucks. And their preferences for visual art are no exception. Waverly Giles tried to make something that was off the beaten track, something that might challenge the viewer a little more than the usual Olan Mills-style portrait sitting or awkward family photo, and she got smacked hard for her impertinence.
Mormonism
Posted inGeneral
Weekend Coffee: September 3
Reading Time: < 1 minute • Michele Bachmann says Christian conservatives will never win another election if Hillary Clinton wins this one. From her mouth to God’s ears! • On Radiolab this week, “The Girl Who Doesn’t Exist“: Alecia Faith Pennington escaped a conservative-Christian/sovereign-citizen homeschool cult, but her parents deliberately never got her a birth certificate, a Social Security number, […]
Posted inSex & Gender
Mormons Are Mass Resigning over LGBT Beliefs
Reading Time: 2 minutes Homosexuality is frowned upon in Mormonism. Increasingly so. In 2015, the LDS church produced some pretty staggering anti-gay policy: It added same-sex marriage to acts considered to be a renunciation of the Mormon faith and thus subject to church discipline, including excommunication…. The new church policy follows a landmark US supreme court ruling in June […]
Posted inGeneral
And on the first day, I was an atheist
Reading Time: 3 minutes This is the story of my not so spiritual journey. Let us begin with my upbringing. I was raised in what can be described as an agnostic theist environment. For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s when you believe in a god (or gods), but don’t feel you can know for sure whether it, or […]
Posted inGeneral
The FLDS Cult Is Unraveling, Part II
Reading Time: 3 minutes There’s more good news in the saga of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an especially nasty totalitarian religious cult that splintered off from Mormonism. The sect’s former ruler, Warren Jeffs, is serving a life sentence for facilitating rape, and his absence seems to be destabilizing them. As I wrote last year, […]
Posted inGeneral
The Inglorious End of the Oregon Occupation
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people, free for everyone to use and enjoy. The month-long occupation by white Christian terrorists ended in utterly mundane fashion, with most of the militants taken into custody at a traffic stop as they attempted to travel […]
Posted inReligion
Religion…or Insanity?
Reading Time: 6 minutes I just finished reading a book called “Under The Banner of Heaven” by Jon Krakauer. The subtitle is “A Story of Violent Faith.” It’s about the Mormon religion…from its inception in the mid-1800’s, by Joseph Smith, up to the present day. The book deals with Mormon Fundamentalism, which I didn’t know much about. I did […]
Posted inGeneral
The Invisible Threat of White Christian Terrorism
Reading Time: 4 minutes Just after New Year’s, a gang of self-proclaimed militia members led by two sons of Cliven Bundy (yes, that Cliven Bundy) announced that they’d seized a building in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Ostensibly, this was a protest on behalf of two ranchers who’d been sentenced to prison for setting fires on federal […]
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Idaho Lawmakers’ Bigotry Has Cost Their State $715,000. (Now What?)
Reading Time: 8 minutes My even broke earlier today. I can’t even. Be sure you brace yours before you read this, because this is just bizarre. The Religious Right has made yet another misstep in its self-created, self-maintained war on gay people–but in a weird kind of way, though, this story makes the perfect Sunday Happy Thought.
Posted inGeneral
Weekend Coffee: December 13
Reading Time: 2 minutes • An editorial on Charisma News accuses atheists of “the height of intolerance” for, basically, existing during the Christmas season. • Mormon Feminists on the Brink: The LDS church has a long record of fierce and diehard opposition to feminism. Their resistance to LGBT rights is well in line with the church’s reactionary history. • […]