I’m really painfully new at this blogging thing, so I’m trying really hard to catch up and learn what I need to learn to make this place amenable to visitors. If you notice some shortcoming I should address or some Read more
It was a bright fall day. I walked into a history classroom on the very first day of my junior year of college. The class was about the end of the Roman Empire and beginning of the Dark Ages. I’d Read more
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. This famous speech of Dr. Read more
Communities get these ideas sometimes to live together and re-enact their ideals. It’s part of being human. But things can go hideously wrong in authoritarian groups, and I’ll show you how today.
I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I ever saw a tornado. I was in my late 20s by now. I lived in the smack middle of Kansas in a tiny town Read more
I wanted to mention here that I’m going to be talking about evidence in a little while, so I thought it’d be useful to take a minute to consider just what evidence is–and isn’t. Evidence doesn’t care what frame of Read more
All this time, despite my misgivings about the very un-Christlike people in my church’s leadership and in my own little family, I spent a lot of time at the church, as one might expect. My mother’d been downright alarmed when Read more
Today, let me show you one of the most devastating things that happened to me when I was Christian. It was how I discovered that my god didn’t mind at all if his followers represented him through lying in flagrantly dishonest ways. It was also how I discovered that one of the most important beliefs my church taught wasn’t true: Jesus didn’t transform people at all.
Now that I wasn’t involved in weird evangelical churches anymore, I blossomed at last in the late 80s. I discovered the Drama Club at school, slowly made normal friends, and tried to fit in. I got involved with a historical Read more
I had been unchurched for a few months when a friend of mine from school, Angela, invited me to her church. She was quite straightforward, unlike Jennifer who’d called her church’s proselytization effort a “pizza blast” and pretended it was Read more