When you present people with anything statistic-related, and you reward that statistic based on its level, then yes, people are going to do anything they can to figure out what the statistic is and manipulate it.
We’ve been talking about the secularization of America lately. Barna’s released a new study that confirms our suspicions and offers even more hope that things may be coming to a head soon; you just have to dig through it a little to find the good stuff.
When Christians say they love movies like “God’s Not Dead,” or stoutly defend dreck like it against all criticism, I wonder if they realize what they’re telling me about themselves?
Another church is closing–part of an overall trend in America. What does it mean?
Prosperity gospel preacher Creflo Dollar recently asked his followers to give him a USD$65 million dollar plane because that is what he thought he needed to spread the gospel (how did people manage before private planes?). In the wake of considerable pushback and criticism, he removed the grifting request, but he’s back and more belligerent than ever–and blaming Satan for all the backlash.
So basically it was just another day in Prosperity Gospel Land.
When I think about all the accusations and strawmen, all the gloating and smugness that seem such a great part of modern Christianity’s interaction with non-believers, I realize suddenly that beneath them all is fear–and most of that fear is stuff that every human being alive has to deal with on some level. The way these Christians are dealing with their very human fears is probably the worst possible way. They want the fear resolved, but they want it resolved as easily as possible and at the lowest possible cost of effort that can be managed.
Logical Christians care a lot more about being correct and soothing that cognitive dissonance than they do about anything their Savior is supposed to have actually told them to do. And now they’ve got metaphysics to do that with.
The few people who respond to Christians’ lies and are fooled thereby into conversion–or reconversion, or rededication–are enough of a success that the legions turned off from the religion are totally forgotten. So why is it that non-Christians forget all this stuff when it comes to their own untruths?
Evangelicals are long accustomed to dwelling in a bubble of kiddie league of media and art–dumbed-down, overly-obvious, telegraphed, hamfisted, unoriginal, willfully-ignorant, uninspired, blubberingly-sentimental, sexist (and often racist and bigoted as well), lowest-common-denominator-appealing, and yes, rinkydink. And that’s before we get into their numerous technical flaws, especially in the area of movies: the terrible plotting and pacing, the shoddy characterization, the dropped storylines and overly-simplistic conflicts, the unworldly way people react in them, the scenery-chewing and puppy-kicking villains devoid of any humanity, and the cardboard-cutout heroes.