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!
Our last writer throws a Hail Mary with his chapter, which asks doubters to direct their gazes to Jesus himself. As if anyone could!
‘Before You Lose Your Faith’ keeps pushing a vision of community that categorically does not exist and can’t ever exist in their flavor of Christianity.
The fact that so many Christian groups require metaphorical mask-wearing and inauthentic presentation has nothing to do with evil ickie individualistic Western life. Rather, it has everything to do with the exact kind of tribalism that his flavor of Christianity most often embodies.
Many years ago, more than half a lifetime by now, I took my first steps into gamer girl territory. Except I didn’t really see it as being a gamer girl. To me, I was simply a gamer, full stop. Now that we’re nearly at the 40-year anniversary of the classic Read more
In Chapter 8 of Before You Lose Your Faith, contributor Jay Kim continues the book’s fine tradition of trying to set the rules of engagement for evangelical doubters. This time around, deconstructors are not allowed to use ‘hammers’ to dismantle their beliefs. Now, they’re supposed to use only ‘precise tools.’ And what are those tools? Oh, just the same ol’ emotional manipulation, dishonest reframing, and apologetics bullshit that probably got those people doubting in the first place.
Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
In a lot of ways, this chapter really exemplifies evangelicals’ inability to engage meaningfully with the dealbreaking flaws in their flavor of Christianity—like the Bible’s amazing ability to twist and contort to fully support any opinion that any Christian could ever possibly have.
Something in Rachel Gilson’s childhood led her straight to the worst, cruelest, most evil and inhuman flavor of Christianity in the entire shit-tastic Christian rainbow. Through sheer necessity, she’s figured out a way to reframe her tribe’s infamous bigotry-for-Jesus. But it doesn’t have to fool anybody else, and I don’t think it even fools her at times.
It’s not your imagination: games really have gotten easier over the years. The reason has everything to do with my generation’s fear of failure, and our need to get payoffs we can’t get in real life.
Last week, we talked about the Christians who do their best to avoid their rightful burden of proof. In a way, though, that strategy might be better than the one we’re talking about today. When Christians actually try to pony up support for their claims, we can see just how Read more