Reading Time: 11 minutes Today, let’s check out an evangelical who wants his tribe to totally change to be something they’ve never been, to fix one of their worst shortcomings as a group.
Parables
Posted inReligion
Christians (Still) Suck at Making Parables
Reading Time: 9 minutes I wanted to take a quick detour to show you one of the two incidents that inspired me to begin blogging. This first incident involves a terrible Christian who trotted out a miserable little fantasy he called a parable. Today, I’ll show you a rundown of what parables are, why Christians’ parables in general suck, and how one of those Christians helped inspire me to begin blogging.
Posted inReligion
No Low is Too Low: #MeToo Edition
Reading Time: 12 minutes This time the guy digging frantically for an even lower spot in my estimation of Christians is Gus Eli Reinhardt, who wrote an absolutely shocking post trying to piggyback on the #MeToo movement by comparing a standard Reformed doctrine to a violent rape. Worse, he’s depicting this spiritual violation as a good thing. Here’s why Christians keep doing this, and why it backfired this time.
Posted inReligion
And Yet It Moves: Dismantling the Second Myth About Meaning and Purpose
Reading Time: 11 minutes This second myth drives people to extraordinary lengths–and leads them to make life-altering bad decisions, even after deconversion. I’ll show you why Christians perpetuate a culture based around this second myth, and in the doing hopefully show you how very earthly and non-supernatural their process and thinking really is.
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 inReligion
The Message is Not Perfect (In a Broken System).
Reading Time: 8 minutes Today we’re going to look at Christianity as a social system to see why people might be unable to get the results from following it that its adherents promise they should get.
Posted inReligion
Salt: The Permission Slip Christians Wanted.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Today we’ll be talking about the increasingly-popular Christianese phrase, “salt and light.” It’s one of those fundagelical concepts that has been creeping around in the background of Christian churches and apologetics for a while now–this idea that churches and Christians alike are supposed to be “salt and light” to the society around them. I didn’t hear the phrase much at all when I was a Christian; like a lot of their other weird ideas, this is a pretty modern one so it might have taken you by surprise too. We’re going to talk about how Christians conceptualize this idea, and then how it actually works out in reality, because this idea is yet another in a long, long line of excuses Christians use to be assholes to people. Knowing about this permission slip helps you see it when it’s deployed against you, and it’s one of those dog-whistle terms that is useful to know when you see Christians slip it into conversation.
Posted inReligion
The Christian’s Guide to Ex-Christians: Parables (Really Suck).
Reading Time: 6 minutes If I ever did a “Stuff Christians Like” entry, it would be about parables. Not the ones in the New Testament, though yeah, they say they like those too. No, a lot of Christians love making parables to “teach” and “reach” non-believers. They think parables show their own timeless wisdom and gentle hearts, and they […]