It’s been a rather mind-blowing week over in Christian Bizarro-land. The anniversary of the landmark decision Roe v. Wade was coming up, and it happened to coincide with the start of a legislative session in Congress, so naturally there’s been quite a lot of grandstanding and showboating going on as Christianist politicians and religious leaders alike jockey to demonstrate who loves fetuses the most.
We’ve talked here about the “Christian bubble.” The Christian bubble is an insular world with its own customs, language, in-jokes, references, worldview, attitudes, and social customs–a world that only very minimally touches upon the real world that non-Christians inhabit. Today I want to devote more time to the idea.
You’ve probably heard of that genre of books called heavenly tourism. In these books, a Christian discusses a Near-Death Experience (NDE) they had where they think they visited an afterlife that looks remarkably like the Christian Heaven. They were allowed to return (or requested to do so) and now they feel that their life’s mission is to tell as many people as they can about their experience. Christians love these books. But now one of these heavenly tourists has recanted his story. Here’s how he did it, and why, and what it means for Christianity.
It must really suck to be a Creationist when everything about the human body–especially lower back pain–points back to evolutionary theory being totally real.
Do you know what gaslighting is? Here is how to identify this common religious-abuse tactic and–hopefully–escape from it.
“You Belong With Me” is a fairy tale about the Purity Myth–and about how conforming to it can win young women what they want. Unfortunately, fairy tales are rarely very in tune with reality.
I’ve compared the efforts of Christian apologists to watching a Roomba repeatedly hit a wall, and nowhere do we see that analogy in action better than with a circular argument. That was one of the early topics I tackled here here on this blog like a year and a half ago, but I want to discuss circular arguments because since then I’ve noticed even more that Christians like circular arguments–almost as much as this tuxedo cat likes riding its Roomba.
A long time ago when I was administering a roleplaying MUD* online, I began to notice that the staffers responsible for creating and running plots and storylines for players kept defaulting to very supernatural themes.
Even a guy who is one of the folks behind Skeptic Magazine and a regular speaker at big atheist conferences, author of books about skepticism, and a champion of science can experience That One Weird Thing That Happened Once (TOWTTHO).
The very best that apologetics arguments can ever do is make a lack of evidence sound slightly less damning.