Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Why arguments aren’t evidence
The very best that apologetics arguments can ever do is make a lack of evidence sound slightly less damning.
Analyzing Christianity
A Response to the Response to Ryan Bell
We’re coming back to the Handbook for the Recently Deconverted shortly, but I saw this today and it just cried out for examination. Ryan Bell is a Seventh-Day Adventist minister who decided to go one year as a functional atheist. For one year, he’d abstain from prayer and all outward Read more
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: How to Know Who Owns the Burden of Proof
A rather impish part of me wants to write, “The person making the claim is the one who owns the burden of proof,” and have done with the post, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Today we’ll talk about how to tell who owns the burden, and Read more
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: How to Know Who Owns the Burden of Proof
A rather impish part of me wants to write, “The person making the claim is the one who owns the burden of proof,” and have done with the post, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Today we’ll talk about how to tell who owns the burden, and Read more
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: Identifying a truth claim
There is a book. The book details everything people need to know. Everything. But especially it tells us about The Place. It tells us where The Place is. Who gets to go there. Who the owner decides to invite. Where they will stay when they arrive. What they will do when they’ve gotten there.
Analyzing Christianity
The Handbook: It. Gets. Better.
It starts, for many of us, with a crystal-clear OHMYGOSH moment where we suddenly see something that simply will never be unseen. A light shines in a dark corner for the first time, and we see what lurks there and can never forget or even ignore it. Exactly what that light illuminates varies by the person, but that’s what it feels like. Suddenly something we thought for maybe our whole lives turns out to maybe be not quite what we thought it was.
From Patreon
The Real Reason For the “War on Christmas.”
Merry Christmas and welcome back! Hope you had a wonderful holiday. Today I want to talk briefly about this really interesting piece I saw about the annual “War on Christmas” that Fox News (Faux Noise?) trumpets and bleats about with more stridency every single year. In this piece, Chris Stedman Read more
Meta Housekeeping
It’s Everybody’s Holiday (Plus: Link Love!)
I’ve always loved Christmas. This time of year in general is an important one for me–almost everybody in my family has birthdays in the three months of winter, and most of the anniversaries happen around then as well–and most of the important deaths (“light a candle for me every year,” she asked, and I always do, always, always). So I want to talk about Christmas today, and at the end there’ll be some link love to some posts written elsewhere by me and other folks in case you need something to keep you busy.
From Patreon
Joyce Meyer and The Double Standards of Christian Derpitude.
We’ve talked about Joyce Meyer before in this space. She’s an easy target, low-hanging fruit, even a piñata, so to speak. She’s a shrewd businesswoman who knows her target audience and panders to that audience shamefully and completely. I can’t even really blame her for finding her niche and tailoring her approach to it as well as she has; if it weren’t her, then it’d be someone else there in her place.
And who is that audience? Middle-aged Christian women who just want to feel a little assurance that they’re doing the right thing, women who believe that their faith will be rewarded if they comply and who need reassurance that that reward is still in the offing.
Analyzing Christianity
William Lane Craig’s moral failings are far worse than mine
Way too many Christians talk a very big game about having a monopoly on morality. They even frequently claim that non-Christians either lack the capacity for morality or are aping Christianity’s monopoly on it. But they’re wrong. The worst moral failings aren’t found in the Bible. No, for that dubious honor we must look to the people who use the Bible to excuse their own moral failings.