I woke up today after a day that sucked on every conceivable level. I mean, it wasn’t just my imagination. One of my major appliances went belly-up, I had a really bad back day, Bother’s decided she mistrusts cat boxes, and a swarm of angry religious nuts, white supremacists, and ignorant malcontents have somehow elected a complete buffoon to the top leadership position of my country. At least the car is running.
Christians claim that they have one holy book and one god, one truth and one “objective morality.” But somehow they have managed to turn those simple ingredients into tens of thousands of denominations, at least as many rancorous doctrinal differences, a cottage industry of pseudoscience producers, and countless cultural squabbles.
Nobody needs to ask stuff they already know. There’s a certain element of insularity and naivete to these questions that is almost charming.
Some readers tipped me off to the latest tempest-in-a-teapot going on in the fundagelical world lately. It didn’t take long for me to notice that as usual, Christians are arguing about the wrong thing. To them, of course, the argument is of the utmost importance–and like everything they do, there’s a reason behind this controversy. It’s not a great reason, but we can’t have everything.
Saturday, we did a liveblog review of Dark Dungeons, a short indie movie based on the Chick tract of the same name. It was awesome and I hope y’all had as great a time as I did! Some folks had requested I gather the comments I made during the movie and put them somewhere so they don’t have to crawl through Disqus to find them. I thought I’d put them here and start a new comment thread while I was at it.
In a few hours I’m firing up Dark Dungeons. Before I do that, I make a few notes about the movie to start us off–where I’m coming from as I watch it, and why I feel so strongly about the game it demonizes.
We idealize the stuff we liked, gloss over and forget the stuff we didn’t, and glamorize in our minds what is more of an emotional state than actual events. And if we happened to be in our teens and young-adulthoods during a particular era, that’s the era where our nostalgia will be the strongest and most emotionally resonant. Well, for people in their late 30s and early 40s, that era is going to be the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s. That’s why the people who seem the most persuaded of Chick tracts’ effectiveness are older fundagelicals. These tracts came along at a very pivotal moment in their culture–a moment long gone, and a moment many of them dearly wish they could have back.
The other day I ran across this fascinating piece about Donald Trump and it lit a lightbulb over my head like I was in a cartoon. It was about the difference between bullshit and lies, and it perfectly illustrates what’s so adrift about modern American evangelicalism.
Today, we’ll look at how a dead German philosopher came into a resurgence of popularity–only to play an unexpected role in the Christian Right’s ongoing love affair with its own ego.
If you hang out on Twitter, you might have seen a peculiar decal making the rounds: a stylized rainbow man embracing a stylized man printed with the Confederate flag. Beneath the figures is the slogan “FORGIVENESS 2016.” Variants of the figures (some quite inventive) and comments on them have been making the rounds extensively, mostly in a mocking way. This mockery is well-deserved, because it’s not time for forgiveness yet.