Aside from being the name of a Mars rover, curiosity is a key value in forming and maintaining cross-cutting friendships. These relationships are important to maintain social peace in a diverse community and to build the character of both ourselves and others. But increasingly they seem more elusive than ever.
Drew McCoy over at Genetically Modified Skeptic took a free Evangelical course about atheism, which turned out just to be a series of short videos by Greg Koukl repeating some of the same disinformation that we used to disseminate when I was an Evangelical Christian. This is a video that I would so love to… Continue reading The Apologist’s True Mission
As Christians we always used to talk about unconditional love, divine love, so-called Agape love. God loved us SOoooo MUCH that he had himself incarnated and executed in a most ostentatious manner on our behalf so that he wouldn’t have to kill us, even while we were still his enemies.
Maybe this should be a new acronym: AWJ. The source of the faux-pology. I’m glad this guy sent an apology. Most people in his situation would not have. However… I’m fascinated by how he phrases his apology.
In the light of this year’s CPAC, I’m reminded of a post from 2020: The Republican Fundamentalist Cult. I had written this during Trump’s first impeachment trial, and I predicted that the Republican party would justify his misbehavior, even against clear evidence. I was right. I wish I had been wrong. The current Republican party… Continue reading The Republican Fundamentalist Cult, the Sequel
I hate rejoicing in someone else’s demise, but in this case, I really don’t have much good to say about him. His career started in the Reagan era, I believe. I remember him from when Bill Clinton was in office, and he furthered what I now know to be conspiracy theories. (Vince Foster, anyone?) Through… Continue reading Remembering Rush Limbaugh
Evangelicals say things like this all the time about gay people. Threatening someone with eternal damnation is a mind-control tactic. And saying (or even just accepting) that someone is going to hell because (you think) you’re morally superior to them, that’s just cruel. This produces a huge amount of cognitive dissonance. And so to ease… Continue reading “I Love You, But You’re Going to Hell.”
About a month ago, I wrote about A Crisis of Healthy Skepticism. I pointed out that we can often verify or disconfirm information with a 15-second Google search. But when I was a Christian fundamentalist, we never took advantage of that 15 seconds if it could challenge our pre-existing beliefs because we so needed to… Continue reading Disconfirming the Second Coming
From Canadian news, “Republicans face backlash for speaking out against Trump ahead of impeachment trial.” This report made me realize something about cults. Something I’ve been struggling with ever since I was shunned from my old religious community. You see, we didn’t have an explicit shunning policy. But I was shunned anyhow. I was shunned… Continue reading Shunning
I’ve described to friends how the Trump ecosystem reminds me of the religious fundamentalism that I grew up in, the religious dogma that took me almost 45 years of my life to escape. Farhad Manjoo’s commentary in the New York Times, “The Capitol Was Just the Start,” so vibrantly describes the reality-bending insanity of the… Continue reading The Fundamentalism of the Trump Ecosystem