Preston Sprinkle, in his book People to Be Loved, expresses some truly atrocious ideas. Arguably the most offensive of the lot is his suggestion that gay people should marry straight people. Today I’ll show you why he thinks that’d be a great idea, and why he’s wrong.
Normally you’d think that inaccuracies in Christians’ perception of others is just their problem. But their cultural flaws have a tendency of creating headaches for other people, too, not just for themselves. While they’re making strawmen about non-Christians and wrestling with their fictional creations, they’re getting an entirely wrong idea of what we’re really like and why we reject their claims and sales attempts. Today I want to talk about why Christians misrepresent us so often.
We’ve been talking lately about how, when Christians write about non-Christians, they often end up with a picture that doesn’t look terribly familiar to us–but which looks remarkably like the image of us that Christian culture paints. Today I want to dissect that picture.
There’s a huge, huge difference between listening to someone and really hearing them. Today I’ll show you what I mean, how to tell when someone has no ears to hear what you have to say, and how Christians like Preston Sprinkle are being dishonest with the people they are pretending to love.
I’ve been thinking lately about something I’ve noticed about many Christians trying to evangelize non-believers: they try to paint our various worldviews as very similar to their own, only inferior. Sometimes the lengths to which they’ll go to establish this commonality seem downright nonsensical. If you’ve ever wondered why that is, then strap into your seat because today we’ll be talking about the Law of Conservation of Worship.
Even the most optimistic, chirpy Christians have started noticing that something is definitely wrong.
Do you folks remember Anthony Waller? He’s a youth pastor I discussed about a year ago who got caught with a lot of child pornography on his computer. At the time, I considered his story to be yet another entry in the ever-growing list of ways that Christianity is failing its own young people. There are some noteworthy updates to the tale that I want to briefly touch on today.
Today we’ll be discussing a uniquely Christian form of cold reading: their attempts to guess why people deconvert from their religion.
It seems like there is a never-ending litany of miserable stories about abusers, predators, and scam artists lurking around Christian churches. If I wanted to write one of those blogs that concerned itself chiefly with exposing and discussing these people, I’d have to seriously step up my schedule–because there are that many stories, and each is more nauseating and horrifying than the last. But for some strange reason, Christian churches rarely engage with the problem they’ve created for themselves and perpetuate through their cultural practices and beliefs, and today I’ll touch on why that might be.
Once we think we’ve weathered all the manipulations Christians throw at apostates, along comes the Magic Christian: One who is totally convinced that ‘God’ told them how to resolve every issue we have with their religion.