Grab your 20-siders. We're going in.

A Pentecostal man who got into snake-handling has died in Kentucky after getting bitten by a snake at Mossie Simpson Pentecostal Church.

We’ve talked off and on in the past about various Christian “apology” movements, wherein earnest Christians apologize for some particular mistreatment or offense Christians as a whole may have given others. Today I want to talk a little about why these campaigns are so beloved by Christians, but so absolutely ineffectual in impact.

We’ve been talking recently about Christians’ hilarious guesses about why people are leaving their ranks in comments across this blog, and it reminded me of something.

I was reading this funny site that gathers “horror stories” from Christians about really awful church experiences they’ve had and realizing that quite a lot of Christian marketing isn’t very well thought-through. Not much says “churches are businesses like any other” Read more

But I saw an image not long ago that really put things into perspective for me. It asks one of those questions that, once I’d seen it asked, made it impossible for me to see this issue of disobedient county clerks in any other way other than them behaving as petulant bullies.

I’m just going to warn you now: stuff like we’re about to discuss today is exactly why a certain Christian apologist is now the subject of an erotic e-novel involving a crocoduck.

Recently I made an offhand comment about how I saw hypocrisy in religion as not a bug or a glitch in the ideology, but a feature of it. Today I want to expand on that idea a little more because I caught myself by surprise there and realized that it’s important. I began thinking about gaming, and how games are structured around features and bugs. So yes: today is a gaming post!

People have always left Christianity and to some degree have spoken out against it, but they didn’t pull out all the stops then–because they didn’t feel like they needed to. Now they feel like they do, but it’s too late.