Reading Time: 6 minutes On June 10, 2022, an arsonist attempted to burn down the headquarters of The Satanic Temple (TST) in Salem, Massachusetts. Forty-two-year-old Daniel Damien Lucey took a bus from Chelsea, then walked to the building, arriving around 10pm. He was recorded on a doorbell camera pouring lighter fluid on the front porch and igniting it before […]
sociology
Posted inPsychology
Vladimir Putin as the ultimate authoritarian leader
Reading Time: 7 minutes Recently, Elon Musk challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat–with the winner taking Ukraine. It was a dumb joke, for all that Musk claimed to be “absolutely serious” about it. But it caught my attention because the person he challenged happens to be one of the biggest authoritarians on the planet. That kind of challenge means something to an authoritarian that a non-authoritarian doesn’t quite understand.
Posted inAnalysis
Does religion really improve educational outcomes?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Horwitz makes the claim that religiosity is beneficial for working-class young men when it comes to their educational attainment. The claims in the article are clear illustrations of two logical fallacies – faulty generalization and cherry-picking.
Posted inRacial justice
It’s tough to be a white supremacist leader these days
Reading Time: 3 minutes The white supremacist group we’re discussing today, Patriot Front, utilized RocketChat to maintain their secrecy and privacy. It didn’t work.
Posted inCulture
The Cooperative Election Study Won’t Save Christianity
Reading Time: 7 minutes Solid information can only be good to have. If we can’t identify and describe something that’s happening, we’ll have very little chance of predicting outcomes from it or influencing it. That’s why I found Ryan Burge’s recent post on Religion News kinda frustrating.
Posted inGeneral
How a Wingnut Perceives the Loss of Dominance
Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, let’s meet the toxic Christians who consider their loss of dominance to be literally a fate worse than death.
Posted inReligion
How (and Why) Evangelicals Blow Their Witness With Single Moms
Reading Time: 7 minutes On Mother’s Day, I showed you a major evangelical news site that somehow missed an important story about the single moms in their churches who didn’t find motherhood through adoption. Instead, these women got their kids through unapproved sex or divorce, neither of which hardline evangelicals like much. Evangelical single moms really test evangelicals’ own marketing hype to the limits — and accidentally reveal exactly who evangelicals, as a group, truly are. Today, let me show you how evangelicals treat single moms — and why, and what their behavior says about them as a group.
Posted inGeneral, Religion
Evangelicals’ Birthrate Strategies Reveal Very Dark Covert Goals
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we checked out some evangelicals’ reactions to the pandemic-related declines in birthrates around the world. These evangelicals’ general approach to increasing birthrates in general interested me. Instead of helping to make life easier for the women having these babies, evangelical leaders instead sought to shame, gaslight, scare, and strong-arm women […]
Posted inParenting & Family
The childfree life: Parenthood is becoming less popular
Reading Time: 8 minutes Even as a child, I knew that parenthood wouldn’t ever be for me. At the time (the 1970s), this decision marked me as a completely transgressive weirdo. I got some serious flack for it from people who thought they were qualified to tell me what I wanted out of life. I even faced reproductive sabotage from my then-husband! But according to a recent Pew Research study, it seems like more and more young adults are choosing the childfree life these days.
Posted inReligion
Mark Wingfield Wants Evangelicals to Jesus Harder, Darn It
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.