Reading Time: 11 minutes Back when I was Pentecostal, I found myself debating a pair of Southern Baptist guys. At the time, I believed in speaking in tongues, and I rejected the Trinity. They were deeply concerned that I’d go to hell over this huge deception, so they sought to persuade me I was wrong. I’m sure you’ll be […]
Truthiness
Posted inReligion, Science
Cognitive Dissonance: Why It Matters
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today, let me show you what cognitive dissonance is, why it’s such a big part of Christianity (for good and ill), and how to deal constructively with it when it shows up to the party.
Posted inGeneral
Election 2020: Fundagelicals’ Post-Truth Bizarro World
Reading Time: 11 minutes Hi and welcome back! This past week, I read some absolutely astonishing stories about fundagelicals, those wild and wackadoodle fusions of evangelicals with fundamentalists. For years now, they’ve occupied their own bubble of reality. Indeed, the Shitposter-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has been pandering his little heart out to them in the wake of his loss to […]
Posted inReligion
Sean McDowell’s First Big Resurrection Answer Is Hilariously Inept
Reading Time: 8 minutes For Easter, Sean McDowell created a video about the Resurrection. In it, he claimed that the Resurrection answered three very important questions. Today, let’s tackle the first of Sean McDowell’s questions and see how well he answered it!
Posted inGeneral
Evil Ecumenism in ‘This Present Darkness’ (LSP #105, Ch.7)
Reading Time: 7 minutes In this installment, we get our first real look at one of the other villains in the book–the pastor of the other church in town. Today, Lord Snow Presides over evangelicals’ disgust for one of their tribal enemies: excessive coziness with other denominations and religions.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Things Christians Love: The Meaningless Apology.
Reading Time: 11 minutes We’ve talked before about the not-pology, that kind of apology that isn’t actually a real apology. I’ve been reading PostChristian by Christian Piatt, who makes use of that common Christian distraction tactic early in the book. I’ll show you why he used the kind of apology he did, what he thinks it means, and what it really reveals about the people who use it–and why we’re on firm ground to view all similar apologies with deep suspicion.
Posted inReligion
A Tale of Two Arguments.
Reading Time: 8 minutes Christians claim that they have one holy book and one god, one truth and one “objective morality.” But somehow they have managed to turn those simple ingredients into tens of thousands of denominations, at least as many rancorous doctrinal differences, a cottage industry of pseudoscience producers, and countless cultural squabbles.
Posted inReligion
Evangelical Churn: A Coldly-Furnished Table.
Reading Time: 9 minutes The other day I ran across this fascinating piece about Donald Trump and it lit a lightbulb over my head like I was in a cartoon. It was about the difference between bullshit and lies, and it perfectly illustrates what’s so adrift about modern American evangelicalism.