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

We’ve talked about Joyce Meyer before in this space. She’s an easy target, low-hanging fruit, even a piñata, so to speak. She’s a shrewd businesswoman who knows her target audience and panders to that audience shamefully and completely. I can’t even really blame her for finding her niche and tailoring her approach to it as well as she has; if it weren’t her, then it’d be someone else there in her place.

And who is that audience? Middle-aged Christian women who just want to feel a little assurance that they’re doing the right thing, women who believe that their faith will be rewarded if they comply and who need reassurance that that reward is still in the offing.

(Content note: Religious extremism and terrorism.) It was such an ugly, ugly story–and all the uglier for being so painfully familiar. A Muslim radical, newly arrived to Australia, took the most effective tool of communication he had–a gun–into a nice Read more

We’ve talked about the Purity Myth off and on here, and even knowing what I know about it I still get completely blindsided sometimes by the dramatic examples of lives that have been destroyed by it. Today we’re going to look at one of those lives–and talk about that person’s mistakes in perception.

When someone is convinced that the end of the world is coming, that person isn’t exactly going to care what his or her credit rating looks like, so to speak. I personally knew people who didn’t want to take care of their own bodies because they were so sure that they’d just be Raptured before they got old. I’ve met other ex-Christians who told me that their parents didn’t want to teach them to drive or take sex education because they were so sure that they and the end of the world would happen well before the kids became old enough to hit their teens. I’ve seen “Rapture ready” type websites that actually advised readers to take out as much credit card debt as they possibly could in advance of apocalyptic predictions. And we’ve heard countless Republicans in the Jesus Party claim that the reason they fight against legislation meant to reverse climate change is that Jesus is coming back anyway, so why bother with it all when he’s just going to destroy the planet in the last battle?

Not long ago, one of our lovely commenters, ratamacue0, asked me a very good question with regard to the homeschooling post: namely, why I took exception to the weird, twisted form of “Socratic questioning” used in a video made by Read more

You’ll never, ever see Christian love like you will when his most fervent adherents discover a dissenter in their ranks. They think they’ve been commanded by the author of the entire universe to love their neighbors. But ugh, who wants to do that when there’s all that abuse they’d rather be doing? Loving people is all hard and stuff.

Sometimes I find myself simply astonished by the lows to which some Christians will stoop. Every time I think I’ve found the new lowest-low, some Christian shows up with a shovel and a pick to prove me wrong yet again.

Thankfully, I am a skeptic at heart, which means that I am always willing to amend my position when presented with conflicting but clear evidence.