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I just realized that I’ve now been out of Christianity for longer than I was in it. That may sound like an odd way to conceptualize things, but I’ve been doing it for a while about various unpleasant people and subjects. It makes me feel good to know there’s that much distance between me and whatever it was that bothered or hurt me, and my time in fundagelical Christianity definitely counts as something that hurt and bothered me! One of the best outcomes of that deconversion was finally being able to live more authentically–and today we’ll be talking about how that happy change came about.

Christian leaders have a terrible problem on their hands, and it’s only getting worse every day: what to do with the mounting numbers of increasingly-visible abusers and predators cropping up in their broken system. Today we’ll examine why this problem exists, how they’re trying to deal with it, and why those efforts are failing so dramatically.

Christian mythology is filled with absolutely stunning examples of bizarre reasoning, and today we’re talking about one of the very worst examples of the breed: the idea that its claims are very easily proven true using credible, reasonable, rational arguments and observations, and therefore don’t need any kind of dishonest tactics to shore those claims up or support them, so Christians don’t need to lie or misrepresent anything about their religion in order to persuade others. This idea is not only a myth but an especially toxic and harmful one to both believers and those around them.

Christian mythology is filled with absolutely stunning examples of bizarre reasoning, and today we’re talking about one of the very worst examples of the breed: the idea that its claims are very easily proven true using credible, reasonable, rational arguments and observations, and therefore don’t need any kind of dishonest tactics to shore those claims up or support them, so Christians don’t need to lie or misrepresent anything about their religion in order to persuade others. This idea is not only a myth but an especially toxic and harmful one to both believers and those around them.

From TheWrap.com comes this story of yet another incident involving Donald Trump and his supporters abusing someone. This story illustrates the rage of right-wing Christians about their rapidly-mounting losses in the public sphere, but also their certain collapse of power. And in the latest little drama-fest he’s provoked by skipping the debate, this seems like a good time to examine that rage and what it is doing to others–and what it demonstrates to us about a religion that is failing fast.

From TheWrap.com comes this story of yet another incident involving Donald Trump and his supporters abusing someone. This story illustrates the rage of right-wing Christians about their rapidly-mounting losses in the public sphere, but also their certain collapse of power. And in the latest little drama-fest he’s provoked by skipping the debate, this seems like a good time to examine that rage and what it is doing to others–and what it demonstrates to us about a religion that is failing fast.

I was recently reminded of just how self-serving and short right-wing Christians’ memories are, and it happened right when we’ve been talking about the nature of power in broken social systems.

Last time we talked about how power manifests in broken systems. Today we’ll talk about how to recognize one of the biggest signs of a broken social system: turnover, especially when combined with a particular way of speaking about those who have left.

A social system becomes broken when it starts causing harm to people both in and out of its group, and when it fails to deliver what its leaders and designers have promised it can do. But “broken” doesn’t imply a loss of power. To the contrary, a broken system’s leaders might have even more power than those in a healthy one because a broken system relies upon a shrewd understanding and brutal deployment of unwarranted power among its leaders. That’s the kind of power we’ll be talking about today.

Last time, we began talking about broken social systems–starting with the most dangerous question someone in one of these systems can possibly ask: Why is this system not working out in reality the way everyone says it’s supposed to be working out? Today we’ll be talking about the start of the answer to that question.