Today, let me show you one of the most pernicious myths evangelicals believe about atheists: that all they need is a huge catastrophe in their lives to strong-arm them into believing in nonsense for no good reason.
In this blog’s first year, I spent a few months outlining all the different elements that went into my deconversion. I haven’t formally talked much about it since. Now, here, I want to put my deconversion ex-timony into one post. Here’s how–and more importantly why–I deconverted from Christianity, and why I won’t ever go back to it or any other religion.
I thought that today–the most chocolate-y day of the year, so to speak–was a good day to bring everyone up to speed. I haven’t written about it in a long time and I’ve learned a lot since then. So today I want to show you what rolling to disbelieve is, and what it feels like to make your roll at last.
Have you ever had a really embarrassing deed haunt you for years? This is one of mine. Set the Wayback Machine for the late 1980s: I was 17 years old and had been dating Biff a few months. I’d been Pentecostal a year or so previously, but had drifted out Read more
The backlash continues against that stupid movie God’s Not Dead (which is at this point rounding 20% on Rotten Tomatoes’ review site and a 16% on Metacritic). Christians defend it to the skies–check out the responses to the reviews posted on that first link; people never comment on reviews, except Read more
No, really, that’s how I ended up re-joining the Pentecostal church. About six months after leaving fundamentalism the first time, my boyfriend at the time, Biff, went to a church service with the specific intention of trolling the Christians there and ended up getting “exorcised” of a “demon.” (Scare quotes Read more
I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I ever saw a tornado. I was in my late 20s by now. I lived in the smack middle of Kansas in a tiny town notable mostly for being a convenient stop on the highway Read more
Everybody says their Catholics are the most hardcore, but I’m here to tell you that my German-Polish family is probably a front-runner for the gold medal winners of Catholic fervor. I grew up thinking everybody had an aunt named Sister Seraphia and uncles with fancy collars. We even had a Read more
Sometimes you just get lucky and make the roll that defines all lucky rolls for all time. Sometimes you’re the low-level noob in the party facing off against some impossibly strong and dangerous illusion and you’re the only one who makes the saving roll to disbelieve. How do you save Read more