Reading Time: 4 minutes When I first recorded episodes for Global Humanist Shoptalk last year, I had no idea what 2022 was going to hold. I did suspect that far-right legislation would continue to pose problems, and that pandemic wouldn’t be over so easily after all. But I certainly wouldn’t have put money on a full-on war in Ukraine […]
Recovery
Posted inReligion
Episode 10: Why Smart People Believe Nonsense
Reading Time: 6 minutes Over dinner one night, I found myself explaining to someone raised outside of a devoutly religious environment that religious people are not stupid simply because they believe nonsensical things. [ iTunes | spreaker | youtube | pdf ] I’ve had this same conversation several times now, each time with a different person whose professional life has […]
Posted inParenting & Family, Psychology, Religion
Episode 9: How Faith Breaks Your Feeler
Reading Time: 11 minutes In my last post, I enumerated about a dozen ways faith normalizes bad thinking, teaching us to view what the rest of the world deems logical fallacies as simply “the way you’re supposed to think.” My contention is that growing up in church diminishes your capacity to detect and question factual inconsistencies, effectively breaking your […]
Posted inSecularism
Episode 8: How faith breaks your thinker
Reading Time: 16 minutes Someone wrote me recently to ask: What drives you to be so adamant in sharing your atheistic beliefs? What is the driving force behind you? To influence others to be nonbelievers?? I have so much to say about this it will take more than one post to get it all out, and this one won’t […]
Posted inReligion
Episode 7: How Christianity Teaches You to Hate Yourself
Reading Time: 9 minutes One of the great joys of living in the Bible Belt is that you can hear Christian music played overhead almost anywhere you go. One day not to long ago I had to make stops at a coffee shop, a gym, a doughnut place (I know, the irony), a fried chicken place, a clinic office, and […]
Posted inReligion, Secularism
Episode 6: What I Lost When I Lost My Faith
Reading Time: 11 minutes I’ve written before about how I can identify with Buzz Lightyear in the movie Toy Story. He came out of the box fully programmed to believe he was an elite intergalactic space ranger when in reality he was only a child’s plaything that ran on batteries. When the reality of his existential situation finally crashed […]
Posted inHealth, Psychology, Religion
Listening to the Still, Small Voice
Reading Time: 9 minutes In my youth group days, we had a skit we would perform in which someone portraying Jesus would follow the protagonist around wherever he went, silently accompanying him throughout his daily routine. Jesus would sit invisibly beside him in class, walk with him through the halls, and even go out with him on dates (creepy), […]
Posted inUncategorized
A Christ-Haunted People
Reading Time: 7 minutes “If our hope in Christ is for this life only, we should of all mankind be the most to be pitied!” (1 Cor. 15:19) This startling admission has been rolling around inside my head since I first read it nearly three decades ago, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it came straight […]
Posted inCulture, Religion
Deconstructing My Religion: A CBS Documentary (Video)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Last night CBS Religion & Culture aired a short documentary (26:55) about the ongoing struggles of people who were raised in evangelical Christian churches but later left them for any one of dozens of possible reasons. Followers of this blog know that’s very much in my wheelhouse, and some may even remember CBS Sunday Morning […]
Posted inReligion, Secularism
New Private Support Group for Doubters and Deconverts
Reading Time: 3 minutes Would you like to be a part of a closed, private Facebook group of skeptics and skeptic-supportive people? People regularly suggest that there should be a Godless in Dixie support group, and I’ve always responded that the settings on my personal Facebook wall are configured to provide that kind of environment by default. But the […]