In 2013, a Christian apologist named David Marshall debated historian Richard Carrier on the topic “Is the Christian Faith Reasonable?” The debate was hosted by both an atheist and a Christian student group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Today we’ll be talking about it–and about debates generally. Here Read more
Long ago, I began noticing something about the online roleplaying game I helped run–something that I’m noticing more and more often in various denominations of Christianity. Today I want to talk about this similarity and why I think it’s becoming so prevalent.
Recently I ran into this debate between David Marshall and Richard Carrier regarding whether or not belief in Christianity is “reasonable.” It got me thinking about apologetics generally, and about this new name specifically because I’d never even heard of him till now. Today I want to talk about how apologetics plays into right-wing Christians’ distrust of education and credentials, and what David Marshall’s brand of apologetics represents in the religion.
Rape culture is the term we use to describe a society in which sexual aggressors are excused and even justified, while victims are silenced and often blamed for their own victimization. It’s a culture in which the emphasis is on trying to “teach” women how not to be victimized rather than on teaching men not to victimize women. Today we’re talking about how a recent trial illustrates this idea and what it shows us about Christian culture.
Some churches like their lights to be super-bright; some prefer their churches to be dark and secluded-feeling. Some vote for the lights to start bright and then dim during the sermon; others prefer the dead opposite. The Worship Matters blog argues for both before settling on “brightly lit”, as does this rather inconsistent music minister. One blogger identifies the fight as somewhat generational before landing on “both are nice at different times.” But Thom Rainer himself insists in his comment section that this fight is indeed heating up and getting ugly.
Last time I talked about a recent conference held at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time I was concentrating more on a speech given there by Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Al Mohler regarding reparative therapy. Today I want to delve more deeply into the errors of the conference itself because I think it serves as a firm declaration by evangelicals that despite being consistently defeated in every single way imaginable, they still aren’t ready to give up on the idea of bigotry-for-Jesus.
A few days ago, Al Mohler said something very important regarding the SBC’s stance on gay people. The news came and went fairly quietly, so much so that I barely even noticed it until today. But it’s still important.
Tribalism is a term used to describe social groups that are very uniform in how they think and behave and that tend to value group loyalty and cohesion over individual members’ needs or any laws/rules/etiquette. Tribal group members value that one membership above that of other groups to which they may belong. And the members of a tribal group tend to act very decisively to protect the group’s cohesion against challenges and threats, even imagined ones.
Wow, do Christians tend to hate the idea of naturalism. One apologetics site even calls it, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, “a belief-system opposed to our god.” Notice their flowchart, by the way. It’s actually not too bad. “The natural world is all that exists, so if something falls outside the natural world, it is excluded from reality.” One almost wants to say in response “Yes, and…?”
Kim Davis is all but the Republican Jesus right now, but one of her recent claims left me confused–the one about how she was totally Democrat once but “the party left me” so now she’s re-registered as a Republican. Today we’ll talk about that claim, because the news of her attempted (and Read more