Alpha Course is a venerable evangelism-focused Bible study about Christianity. As such, its creators brought their A-game to making it as persuasive as humanly possible. But to call it underwhelming would be an understatement. In the series’ second video, “Who is Jesus,” we explore various bad apologetics arguments and emotional Read more…
Years ago, I wrote about Bill Schnoebelen as part of the Cult of Before Stories series. The Cult includes that vast collection of fake, bombastic Satanism-and-witchcraft-themed testimonies that hucksters peddle for attention and profit to evangelicals. These fake testimonies hit their peak around the late 1980s before petering out in Read more…
Prayer has always been the ultimate example of magical thinking. That means doing something that has no effect on a desired outcome, but the person doing it thinks it does anyway. And nobody knows that deep down quite like evangelicals do. As much as their Dear Leaders constantly push the Read more…
Testimonies, in Christianity, are short anecdotes about how Christians came to believe the various claims made by their flavor of the religion. They’ve been on my mind lately because not long ago, a Christian told me that he thought Christian testimonies constituted valid and very real evidence for Christians’ claims. Read more…
Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been talking about Beach Reach. That’s a short-term mission trip (STM) organized by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). For two weeks, college-age SBC-lings descend on a beach during American universities’ Spring Break. During their trip, these volunteers offer charity services to a truly deserving Read more…
Here, a high-ranking hun offers her totally-used-to-be-an-antiMLMer-y’all testimony. And she does it for the same exact reasons that trendy Christians claim to have been totally atheists before their conversions, and with the same exact goals as well. So today, let’s explore the similarities between these two toxic groups and the testimonies they deploy as sales pitches.
Today, I’ll show you the shared features of these two popular testimony styles, and which testimony I think wins the fight for Christians’ attention and money–for now.
A line’s determined by two points, so I reckon we’ve found a new trend. His end of Christianity might have come to the Satanic Panic too late for the dancing, but they arrived eventually. So today we welcome Benedict Atkins to the Cult of “Before” Stories!
As usual, Christians have totally gotten the whole matter wrong about these stories–and they’ve revealed a few very unpleasant aspects of their own tribe in the doing. So here, at last, is the real skinny: here’s what an ex-timony actually is, who tells them and why, and how they differ from Christians’ testimonies.
Halloween is that magical time of year when Christians can dial up to 11 their Happy Pretendy Fun Time Games. It is their everything.