It’s been a rather mind-blowing week over in Christian Bizarro-land. The anniversary of the landmark decision Roe v. Wade was coming up, and it happened to coincide with the start of a legislative session in Congress, so naturally there’s been quite a lot of grandstanding and showboating going on as Christianist politicians and religious leaders alike jockey to demonstrate who loves fetuses the most.
You’ve probably heard of that genre of books called heavenly tourism. In these books, a Christian discusses a Near-Death Experience (NDE) they had where they think they visited an afterlife that looks remarkably like the Christian Heaven. They were allowed to return (or requested to do so) and now they feel that their life’s mission is to tell as many people as they can about their experience. Christians love these books. But now one of these heavenly tourists has recanted his story. Here’s how he did it, and why, and what it means for Christianity.
A long time ago when I was administering a roleplaying MUD* online, I began to notice that the staffers responsible for creating and running plots and storylines for players kept defaulting to very supernatural themes.
Merry Christmas and welcome back! Hope you had a wonderful holiday. Today I want to talk briefly about this really interesting piece I saw about the annual “War on Christmas” that Fox News (Faux Noise?) trumpets and bleats about with more stridency every single year. In this piece, Chris Stedman Read more
We’ve talked about Joyce Meyer before in this space. She’s an easy target, low-hanging fruit, even a piñata, so to speak. She’s a shrewd businesswoman who knows her target audience and panders to that audience shamefully and completely. I can’t even really blame her for finding her niche and tailoring her approach to it as well as she has; if it weren’t her, then it’d be someone else there in her place.
And who is that audience? Middle-aged Christian women who just want to feel a little assurance that they’re doing the right thing, women who believe that their faith will be rewarded if they comply and who need reassurance that that reward is still in the offing.
(Content note: Religious extremism and terrorism.) It was such an ugly, ugly story–and all the uglier for being so painfully familiar. A Muslim radical, newly arrived to Australia, took the most effective tool of communication he had–a gun–into a nice little coffee shop in Sydney and took hostages. He did Read more
We’ve talked about the Purity Myth off and on here, and even knowing what I know about it I still get completely blindsided sometimes by the dramatic examples of lives that have been destroyed by it. Today we’re going to look at one of those lives–and talk about that person’s mistakes in perception.
When someone is convinced that the end of the world is coming, that person isn’t exactly going to care what his or her credit rating looks like, so to speak. I personally knew people who didn’t want to take care of their own bodies because they were so sure that they’d just be Raptured before they got old. I’ve met other ex-Christians who told me that their parents didn’t want to teach them to drive or take sex education because they were so sure that they and the end of the world would happen well before the kids became old enough to hit their teens. I’ve seen “Rapture ready” type websites that actually advised readers to take out as much credit card debt as they possibly could in advance of apocalyptic predictions. And we’ve heard countless Republicans in the Jesus Party claim that the reason they fight against legislation meant to reverse climate change is that Jesus is coming back anyway, so why bother with it all when he’s just going to destroy the planet in the last battle?
Not long ago, one of our lovely commenters, ratamacue0, asked me a very good question with regard to the homeschooling post: namely, why I took exception to the weird, twisted form of “Socratic questioning” used in a video made by one of these religious-zealot homeschooling outfits. This type of questioning, Read more
Not long ago, one of our lovely commenters, ratamacue0, asked me a very good question with regard to the homeschooling post: namely, why I took exception to the weird, twisted form of “Socratic questioning” used in a video made by one of these religious-zealot homeschooling outfits. This type of questioning, Read more