So let’s understand here that though the title of his piece is “Why I Don’t Believe in Atheism,” what he’s actually doing is offering up his (and his denomination’s) seven best arguments against what they believe is atheism.
Recently, I made an offhand comment about a blog post by a Christian minister named Joe McKeever. After dismissing his arrogant, unsupported claims in the main, I joked (a little) about the idea of going over his post in more detail later. The more I thought about it, the more I thought such a treatment might not be a bad idea. It’s kind of old, but I think it covers all the Bingo spots on the card, so to speak. Plus, I think it’s hilarious.
One of the big threats Christian leaders make to their flocks about deconversion is that if they leave the religion, they’ll become miserable. Oh, certainly they make other threats that are equally ludicrous: ex-Christians will instantly lose all meaning and purpose in life; they’ll become terrible and immoral people; they’ll destroy and/or lose their families; they’ll suddenly get a long run of absolutely horrible luck… I’m sure I missed some there, but that ought to get everyone started. Today we’re going to cover that first threat: how Christianity is supposed to make believers happy–and how it doesn’t.
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.
Today we’ll be discussing a uniquely Christian form of cold reading: their attempts to guess why people deconvert from their religion.
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.