Narratives are story-like structures we create in our minds to organize events. They help us remember the events–and to make sense of them. And it turns out that many of the things most folks believe about love comes from narratives. And one of the best narratives in the world comes to us from The Princess Bride. Here is what this story showed me about love.
“I’ll just leave this here, shall I,” said the Captain, her lazy Texan drawl absolutely dripping with contempt and disdain. Oh, we’ll get to work on the topic planned, no worries, but I saw this and it irritated me enough that I wanted to say something here before I forget. Read more
Today I want to talk about something I call “dancing bears”–that strange phenomenon you see when somebody who doesn’t really fit in with a group, or who might even be someone that group is actively working to undermine or disenfranchise, is deliberately sought and trotted out to advance that group’s Read more
I used to have such a love-hate relationship with cooking, but especially with baking–the bane of my existence for many years. This is how I learned to love cooking and baking after my deconversion.
Today we’re going to be talking about Christians who claim to know stuff they really don’t know. It happens a lot, so clearly there’s been some miscommunication on the subject of late. It always blows my mind when Christians act like experts about stuff they are simply not experts about. Read more
Today we’re going to talk about cognitive dissonance, that feeling of discomfort humans get when we hold two very conflicting ideas in our heads at once. People do all kinds of stuff to soothe that discomfort, even make up lies out of whole cloth, and we’re seeing it happen more Read more
It occurred to me that there are starting to get to be a rather unwieldy number of posts on here, and I should probably keep track of all this stuff somewhere, so I put together a resource page with all the series lists on it and some starting posts for Read more
Summer, 1995: It took me a minute as I woke up on the bus to realize that I was being spoken to by a stranger. I blinked back sleep, terror, bad dreams, cold, loneliness, and everything else and looked up the man who was trying to get my attention. I’d Read more
Christians’ laser focus on marriage unfortunately highlights the sheer inadequacy of their rules about relationships themselves. Let me show you what I mean today.
Oprah Winfrey, who apparently didn’t get the memo about labels, came out with this gem the other day when confronted with a person who called herself an atheist but insisted that she felt awe at the beauty of the universe and humanity itself: “‘Well I don’t call you an atheist Read more