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.
The administrators of BYU recently made a proclamation that really drives home exactly how out-of-touch Mormon leaders are with the next generation–and how desperate they are to win that generation back. Yes, everyone, they’re finally allowing students on campus to purchase and then consume caffeinated beverages from their cafeterias and vending machines.
This Endtimes scare has gotten quite a lot of pushback from actual astronomers–and from some big names in Christianity as well. We were mainly looking at the real-world pushback against the prediction last time, and today I want to look at one Christian leader’s pushback to it. Indeed, this scare illustrates a very serious problem in Christianity: the difficulty Christians have in reining in their own wingnuts.
Join me for a rabbit-hole trip to the land of the Dark Crystal–and a look at why this newest prophecy of doom is, well, doomed to failure, just like all the other ones Christians have ever made.
The 2017 PRRI study, America’s Changing Religious Identity, has brought the religion’s leaders yet more bad news. And their response has been predictable.
But there was this one incident that really brought home to me that no religion is immune to weirdos, and it didn’t take long to figure out why. This is how I converted to paganism–and then met someone who exemplified a mindset I thought I’d left way behind me, causing me to abandon religion altogether.