Captain Cassidy

Typically the response of Christian leaders to the fact that their congregations are abandoning them in droves is to blame the congregants themselves for leaving. They act like there simply never is a time when anyone’s allowed to leave, no matter how unserved they feel or how much they disagree with their pastors’ leadership. There was a time not long ago when someone might have cared about this outrage, but that time is fading quickly–and there’s nothing those pastors can do about it (that they’re willing to do, anyway).

The religion’s leaders 100% believe that there’s some magical way to return Christianity to its former power and dominance through marketing and superior sales techniques. This notion is just another example of magical thinking in Christianity, and I’ll show you why right now.

I’ll pick apart his speech today, and then show you–for good measure, since I’m helpful that way–why his tribe is actually having trouble recruiting and retaining members.

The criticism I have about religion really deals with the broken system that undergirds it: that marrow-deep dysfunction that pushes people to create a broken system, to join it, to celebrate it, to perpetuate it, and ultimately to protect it from all potential criticism or dismantling. Though Christianity is one of the best examples of a broken system that we could possibly encounter in our society, there are certainly others. Today I’ll show you what I mean by illuminating one of the biggest miseries to come out of broken systems: the false illusion of safety that they offer to both adherents and those who encounter their adherents.

Christianity is supposed to be the religious equivalent of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Its advertising and marketing materials proclaim constantly that its adherents are, ideally, the cream of the crop of the entire civilized universe. The people serving on the Enterprise and who belong to Christianity are both supposed to be the best their universe has to offer. But in reality, Christianity is a lot more like Red Dwarf–minus the sense of humor, self-awareness, and cleverness. And we can tell which it is by how its very own people react to their bad apples and their broccoli.

We’ve been having fun this week snarking a post in The Federalist to eensy-weensy little pieces. But who could blame us? The Christian who wrote it managed to outshine all his pals in finding the most WTF explanation possible for why his religion’s losing so many adherents and so much credibility and influence in the eyes of the world. That isn’t easy to do nowadays!

When you hear one of them chirp about men being “biologically wired to be drawn to feminine beauty,” perk your ears up for a lot of ad hoc reasoning and just-so stories to justify Christian sexism.

The results of that census from last year, posted just today, show that the number of Australians who are non-religious is increasing at a speed most of us wouldn’t even have thought possible 20 years ago.