In recent years, more Christians are facing doubt than ever before. But their communities and leaders still haven’t learned how to respond to it. They’re still largely using the same toolbox they had in decades past. Let’s explore that toolbox—and see where it fails to fit into real-world doubters’ experiences. Read more…
I thought that today–the most chocolate-y day of the year, so to speak–was a good day to bring everyone up to speed. I haven’t written about it in a long time and I’ve learned a lot since then. So today I want to show you what rolling to disbelieve is, and what it feels like to make your roll at last.
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.
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.
Today we’ll be discussing a uniquely Christian form of cold reading: their attempts to guess why people deconvert from their religion.
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.
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…