We’re fast approaching the holiday season, and as fun as holidays are supposed to be, for a lot of us they bring the potential for great pain. One of the scariest aspects of the holidays, for someone whose family is very religious, is the possibility of a religious intervention.
Christians often pull out the stops when they discover that one of us has left the fold. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown at us to read, watch, or listen to. We get invited to “casual dinners” that turn into full-blown interventions. We can’t even visit a friend’s house without discovering a church friend there to try once more to “just talk to us” to “make sure we’ve really thought about this.” And then, once we think we’ve weathered all of it, along comes just one more Christian into the fray, often totally convinced that “God” told him or her to say some particular thing to us.
It’s amazing to me that Christians can take a book compiled over thousands of years with dozens of mostly-anonymous authors, a book of (revised) history and (imagined) science, of folk magic and supposedly-divine intervention, of petty racism and soaring nationalism, of beautiful poetry and stunning brutality, of–yes–transcendent language and startling insight at times, and reduce it down to sound bites they can select, warp, and then fling at their pleasure to score points against those they view as inferior opponents. To me it seems extremely disrespectful for a Christian to treat their holy book in such a simplistic and reductionist way, but I see it all the time regardless.
Back in my Pentecostal days, there was a phrase I heard non-stop: “the original Greek and Hebrew,” used to describe my denomination’s doctrines and creed. The idea was that our denomination, unlike those of all those other inferior Christians doing everything wrong, had gotten our ideas from “the original Greek and Hebrew” and therefore were closer to what our god wanted out of his followers than all those other Christians were. I notice that Christians still love that phrase, so I want to talk about it today.
Sometimes it’s easier to pop on a video or video series than it is to crack open a book–and lately I’ve heard a few folks asking for suggestions along these lines. If you fall into that category of folks, you’ll be happy to know that in the realm of ex-Christianity, there are plenty of videos to watch!
Robby Dawkins is telling some porkie pies about helping to resurrect someone who died! Is it true? (Seriously? Of course it’s not.) Let’s look at what happened, and what it shows about Christianity that he’s gotten any traction at all with his fish story.
We’re going to be heading back to God’s Not Dead next week, but before we do that, I wanted to finish up something we were talking about last time we covered the Handbook for the Recently Deconverted: one of Christians’ very favorite apologetics tactics, the Argument from X. A while ago, Read more
Today we’re talking about wishful apologetics: those arguments that ache and yearn for an idealized form of Christianity. Special Guest: C.S. Lewis.
Ever wonder how someone converts into fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity? Here’s how I ended up there.
We recently added another line to that cosmic address–did you notice? After “Virgo supercluster,” we now have Laniakea, a galactic supercluster that comprises Virgo and some other local superclusters. Scientists have figured out how to tell what galaxies and groups are part of our galactic supercluster, and in addition and almost as importantly, they finally have a model of it that fits predictions and equations both. And that discovery has spoken to me on a very fundamental level.