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.
Today we’re going to look at Christianity as a social system to see why people might be unable to get the results from following it that its adherents promise they should get.
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!
I saw a story recently about a Christian lady who thinks she prayed a tornado away from her home. I couldn’t possibly find a better example of the narcissistic right-wing Christian mentality of “screw all y’all, I’ma get mine” than this story, and today I’ll show you what I mean by that.
Last time I talked about a recent conference held at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time I was concentrating more on a speech given there by Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Al Mohler regarding reparative therapy. Today I want to delve more deeply into the errors of the conference itself because I think it serves as a firm declaration by evangelicals that despite being consistently defeated in every single way imaginable, they still aren’t ready to give up on the idea of bigotry-for-Jesus.
In the same way, it is simply bizarre to me that people who have built up this total conspiracy theory around all these “Bible codes” and arcane secret societies and government plots seem to be so incapable of coming up with what really should be one of the easiest parts of their predictions: what’s going to happen, exactly, and when. But that’s not even the worst part of these constant streams of Rapture scares.
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.
That brand of Christianity makes some distinct promises to its adherents. If you do this, then you will get that. But it doesn’t actually follow through on those promises. Indeed, it really can’t. Instead it gives people something totally different. Today I want to talk about promises and Fireproof, and how this viewpoint stands up to reality.
This movie echoes something I myself was taught as a young fundamentalist: that by doing loving things, one can create loving feelings in oneself and inspire loving feelings in a target. In other words, just like the old song by Air Supply put it, we were taught that we could make love out of nothing at all.
You can’t really talk about Fireproof without talking about the Love Dare, and vice versa. Today I found out why that is.