Lesbian + Christian Ministry = Trouble

This might be the most messed-up stories I’ve ever heard. It starts in 1988, when Charlene Riling, a lesbian, goes to get an AIDS test at a county health department. I won’t say any more than that about the story, you’ll just have to listen to it. This story begins at minute [...]

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Karl Rove an atheist/agnostic?

I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
http://atheistrevolution.blogspot.com/2007/04/is-karl-rove-atheist.html
I have to begin [...]

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Heretics

This is an older story from This American Life. It’s about an up-and-coming pastor of a megachurch in [Oklahoma*] who started to think a little too much about his Christian beliefs. He started thinking some of the same thoughts that I did — if Christianity is true, then billions of people will not [...]

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Charismatic Christianity

I realize that many Christians don’t follow fundamentalist Christianity. This post is mainly about the fundamentalist Christianity that I grew up with, the type of Christianity that is probably the fastest-growing type of Christianity in the US. For people within the movement, it’s described as “being alive” (full of emotion, speaking in tongues, [...]

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Bill O’Reilly’s double-talk about theists

You have to laugh at this. Bill O’Reilly talks about people believing things that they *want* to believe without evidence, and how that is horribly destructive to them and people around them. But, he wants to illustrate his point by talking about theists (i.e. people who *want* to believe in God without evidence [...]

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Why I am not a Christian

Some time ago, I stumbled upon a website called “Letters From Leavers“. It’s essentially a website setup by Christians that asked the question, “Why did you leave the church?” Presumably, they want to remedy the situation. Hopefully, they want to understand it, and maybe it will lead Christians to stop using the [...]

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Vatican decides not to believe in limbo any longer

From the LA Times:
Vatican panel condemns limbo to eternal dustbin
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Catholic doctrine states that because all humans are tainted by original sin, thanks to Adam and Eve, baptism is essential for salvation. But the idea of limbo has fallen out of favor for many Catholics, who see it as harsh and not befitting a merciful God.
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In [...]

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Barber and the barb

My parents sent me an “email forward” the other week. It contained the kind of parable you might hear in church. I recognized that types of stories to be overly simplistic and full of unanswered questions, yet church-going folk never asked them (or even consider them). To me, it seemed like everyone was ignoring the [...]

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