Posts

Today Lord Snow presides… over Mark Driscoll and his weird priorities. And demons. Can’t forget the demons.

Today I’ll show you why testimonies always follow one specific form, why they don’t work as advertised, and why Christians still can’t quit them.

One of the funniest Christian screeds I’ve ever seen was one that I ran across randomly earlier this week. It comes to us from an Australian Christian named Grantley Morris. I’ve never heard of him and you probably haven’t either. His vanity site is full of equally wacky stuff, but his Soul-winning Tips: Witnessing Made Easy easily takes the cake for ridiculosity.

Last week, Mark Driscoll arrived to the Evangelical channel. And he’s clearly hoping everyone has long forgotten about all the terrible things he’s done that should, and would in any decent group of people, utterly disqualify him forever from holding any kind of leadership position ever again.

Jonny Scaramanga has co-written a peer-reviewed paper that examines ACE and finds it wanting in many key respects. So it’s not our imaginations–ACE really is just as bad as we thought.

Christians use something called conditional acceptance to try to maintain control over a culture that is slipping out of their grasp more quickly with every passing day. I wanted to talk more about that paper today, because I’ve been noticing for a while that Christians sure do this a lot–and it’s very far from their stated goal of loving humanity.

The Mormon Church recently let us know recently how they will be handling their future as a religion. When I saw what they had to say, I thought about Max Planck’s words–and I’ll show you why today.

I’ll show you what this all-important task is, how effective it is, and why it’s that effective–and yet why the religion’s leaders can’t possibly change a thing about their emphasis on that task.

The reason I talk about the Satanic Panic is to remind people of what happens when a toxic group with real power has absolutely no tethers to reality.

Though many folks thought Ryan Bell’s Year Without God was a stunt, I had several friends who knew him–one or two quite well–and who vouched for his sincerity. He blogged about his experiences here at Patheos and often popped up in religious news and folks’ social media pages. His journey out of religion began with a question–a game-changing question that I’ll share with you today.