As part of finding our own internal validation and becoming our own support network, one of the first things we have to do is take back the personal power we’ve given away. Especially if that Christian was tangled up with one of the really authoritarian groups in the religion, this step can be one of the hardest we’ll ever take on our way toward deconversion.
Its evangelists competed hard for followers and resources in a culture marked by a huge diversity of beliefs and gods. Because its leaders completely lacked the power to coerce people into joining and staying Christian, however, it wasn’t making that much progress. It would take a series of events in the fourth century to bring it not only to legitimacy, but dominance.
Bill Schnoebelen has had to reinvent himself a few times, but maybe he’s finding nowadays that once someone’s joined the Cult of Before Stories, it’s really hard to leave.
Preston Sprinkle, in his book People to Be Loved, expresses some truly atrocious ideas. Arguably the most offensive of the lot is his suggestion that gay people should marry straight people. Today I’ll show you why he thinks that’d be a great idea, and why he’s wrong.
One of the biggest ways that overzealous Christians reveal that their religious grandstanding is, well, just a pretendy fun-time game is in how they publicly talk about and engage in prayer. One of the very last things they should be doing is letting that fact slip to the rest of us–but they show us, in so many ways, exactly how little they themselves believe the words they say. Here is one major way that we can tell that Christians don’t have much faith at all in prayer.
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.
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.
Josh Duggar clearly didn’t differentiate between his sisters and any other vulnerable young girls in his power. This fifth girl–unrelated, but young and vulnerable enough to qualify as a victim for him–is the one who is bringing the lawsuit now. And that lawsuit is going to rip the Duggars’ carefully-crafted bubble wide open. Here’s why.
Recently we talked about the Jordan Root/TVC scandal, which involved a megachurch learning about a pedophile in their midst and mishandling that news in every way conceivable. Today we’re going to talk about how this scandal is another illustration of exactly why fundagelical Christianity is doomed and deserves to be so.