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You know, it seems like very often one of the accusations that get hurled at non-Christians is that we are obviously very miserable and sad because we don’t have the “joy” that Christians feel. This accusation is usually news to us, since most of us are pretty happy without Christianity; I can attest that my own life became much happier once I discarded the indoctrination I labored under as a Christian. So today we’ll be talking about joy and happiness.

It’s not hard to poke holes in Christianity’s supernatural claims. Anybody with a reasonable grasp of history or science can do it. Entire websites exist to debunk this or that supernatural claim, and I’ve written extensively about them. But there’s more to their worldview than just those supernatural claims! And today we’ll be examining some of those other ones.

One of the big mistakes non-believers make–especially those who’ve never been believers themselves–is to assume that all Christians are Biblical literalists. Most Christians are not literalists and would find the idea of the entire Bible being literally true to be purely nonsensical. We’re going to be talking about some of the claims Christians make that aren’t mythological, but first I wanted to briefly mention something that I think could otherwise get lost in the shuffle.

I couldn’t have been more wrong without thinking that actual dolphins would appear from nowhere and leap over the bed when it happened.

We’ve been talking lately about how abusers operate within a broken system and how that system protects them at the expense of their victims. Today we’ll talk about one example of a broken system that is finally coming apart at the seams, and what is said about that system when its leaders resist calls for justice and work overtime to trick others into thinking their system is more effective than it is. First, though, let’s meet Cardinal George Pell of the Catholic Church.

Last time we talked, I mentioned three examples of blatantly obvious lies told by Christians who clearly expected everyone to nod, smile, and let them get away with their dishonesty. These lies weren’t accidents or simple errors in judgment. They (and all the ones like them) happened because right-wing Christian culture has become a mixing-bowl full of noxious elements that have combined to produce a mindset that finds dishonesty acceptable and even laudable. Today we’ll go over what some of those elements are and how they fit into what we’re seeing in the news lately.

I’m noticing a trend lately with the Religious Right that might well baffle observers but which makes perfect sense within the strange subculture that its adherents inhabit: they act for all the world like they think we’re idiots. As usual, there’s a bit more to it than that, though. Today we’ll talk about three examples of what I mean.

Today, I want to talk about two things that my religious leaders were right about concerning love. But their other teachings rendered it impossible for believers to put these two good teachings into practice. Let me show you what they are, and why Christians can’t actually practice them.

It didn’t take me long at all to realize that I had been stone-cold wrong about almost everything I’d learned from my religious leaders about love. Today, let me show you five things my old religion got completely wrong about love.

Last time we talked, we were discussing Republicans’ bizarre and grotesque view of rape as just “another form of conception,” leading to their attempt to force women to gestate against their wills any pregnancies that result. Today I’ll show you just how far this regressive worldview gets. (You didn’t think it just extended to destroying women’s bodily liberties, did you? Oh, no. The rabbit hole beckons yonder, and it goes deeeeeeeeeep….)