Slowly, I’m working through the posts in our archive library like the Lone Ranger: Riding into town one day, fixing all its problems, and riding back out to the sunset afterward. I’ve got about 2200 posts to fix, and I’ll get to them all in time!
In ‘God’s Club’, we learn that Jesusing fixes everything—including serious mental illness.
Once we think we’ve weathered all the manipulations Christians throw at apostates, along comes the Magic Christian: One who is totally convinced that ‘God’ told them how to resolve every issue we have with their religion.
One of the weirdest practices you’ll ever encounter among right-wing Christians has to be “speaking in tongues.” I strongly suspect that more people know about snake handling than know about speaking in tongues—and for a reason. So here’s a guide to this wild fundamentalist practice!
While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.
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.
There really are two types of Christian in this world, and one of them hates the other with every fiber of its hate- and rage-filled little body.
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.
Last time we talked about apologists, we talked about their first big mistake: that they start with a conclusion and find some kind of logic that will get them to that conclusion. That’s called arguing top-down. In bottom-up arguing, one starts with observations and measurements and builds the argument around Read more
The first fundamental mistake apologists make is that they don’t actually refer to any facts to make their various arguments, making their conclusions highly suspect. Indeed, apologists really can’t do that. It’s almost unfair even to make the request that they do so. After all: There is not one single demonstrable bit of objective evidence about the supernatural to which they actually could refer.
I’ve compared the efforts of Christian apologists to watching a Roomba repeatedly hit a wall, and nowhere do we see that analogy in action better than with a circular argument. That was one of the early topics I tackled here here on this blog like a year and a half ago, but I want to discuss circular arguments because since then I’ve noticed even more that Christians like circular arguments–almost as much as this tuxedo cat likes riding its Roomba.