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Showing posts with the label religion

Security Guards in Church and Other Thoughts

Shoutout to KXOL Mega 96.3 Los Angeles, the perpetual soundtrack of my car!  I grew up on radio, a very different type of radio than this station: primarily conservative talkshows and Evangelical sermons, although I do remember a time when I was younger and K-Earth 101 occupied a larger amount of my parents' listening time. I've never really gotten into TV or podcasts, but good old zero-effort, zero-decision-making radio stations are my thing. Mega 96.3 has a wonderful group of people hosting and deejaying their station who are full of positive and inspiring things to say, and there have been several times on my way to work in the morning when I've found myself thinking how refreshing it is to hear people who don't agree on everything still having a good time together. Disagreements on religious perspectives come up for instance, and nobody sounds angry! This morning, the hosts started talking about why fewer people are going to church these days and then patched in the...

Mullinghouse Press: Bound

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When I first decided to write the book that became Our Fatal Sincerity  I envisioned it ending with an appendix of journal entries that showed my changing thoughts about Christianity over the years. I started to transcribe my old journals into a word processor soon after and continued to work on that project simultaneously to writing the rest of the book. It quickly became clear that there was far too much material to publish together with the main text of the book, so once the transcriptions were finished, I let them sit while I finished and published the other material, and then for several more months after that.  In the end, I decided to publish them on their own and only as an ebook, which you can now find here . While I had originally imagined that the journals would be a primary point of attraction to Our Fatal Sincerity , when I proofread the transcriptions, I was so bored I had to give up that illusion. There are just a few interesting points throughout, but I didn't ...

Is atheism dead? Yeah, kinda.

There are a couple people in my life who constantly remind me that the internet exists, and thanks to one of those people I watched a video interview of a guy who wrote a book called Is Atheism Dead? The interview was hosted by Sean McDowell, a friendly dad-like spirit who one of my internet mediums frequently feels the need to channel for me. I think Sean McDowell is a nice guy, and I really appreciate the effort he makes to bridge divides between people of differing beliefs. Simply because I’m familiar with his content, I think I will have to come back at some point to write some constructive criticism of things he could do better, but I do support his endeavors to make the world a more communication-friendly place. When it comes to certain of his views, and to some of the people he interviews though, my opinion may be noticeably less positive. Returning to the title of this particular guest’s book, the point I want to make about it is that it fits in perfectly to a pattern of choic...

Fun Science Tidbits from My Elementary School

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I took these photos (really badly) a few years ago when my sister was getting rid of some of their old textbooks and found this book we both used for our science class in... I think it was 4th grade. This blog could be a lot more interesting I bet if I gave it a more specific theme like, "Surviving (name of my school)" and then all the posts would be about the weird quirks of having all your education up until age 18 take place within the same conservative Christian bubble. I could get a lot of posts just out of the textbooks we had. And then there would be all the material on the weird incorporation of politics into our classes and the swapping of stories about having seen demons and the awkward uncertainty about whether most holidays were really okay given their pagan elements and the banning of Harry Potter  and Pokemon  and the mixed messages about how you should try to go to a really good college but at the same time maybe you should just go to the college of worship our...

Thank God for Creationism (In My Case)

If I hadn't been raised creationist, I would probably still be Christian. I'm glad now that I was exposed to this extreme set of ideas framed in a way that could demonstrably be proven false. If that hadn't happened, I might never have realized what it looked like to be surrounded by a network of ideas that wasn't being subjected to proper tests to see if it correlated with the rest of reality. If I had never realized that, I never would have started to test my other views to see if they were being insulated from proper criticism in the same way, so I probably never would have left the beliefs that were originally most important to me. Judging from the way creationism was taught to me though, I can only assume that many people who find it to be an important belief would misunderstand the role it played in my leaving Christianity. This is because creationist rhetoric teaches the expectation that questioning the literal historicity of Genesis 1 will lead people to reject ...

Mullinghouse Press: Our Fatal Sincerity

My book is out! It’s called Our Fatal Sincerity , and you can find it HERE .  I can’t believe I actually finished a book! I finished something! I’ve never been more proud of anything else I’ve done in my life! What is this book actually about? Our Fatal Sincerity is the result of my wrestling to come to terms with my own loss of belief in Christianity. Up until the end of 2018, my faith in Jesus had been the most important part of my life; as the book gets into, that year a lot of long-standing problems and new realizations suddenly came together and went critical—I was left unable to convince myself that the person I had been trying to talk to all my life was really there.  The book primarily grew out of the journals I was keeping during this time. Although my loss of beliefs was devastating at first, it also marked the point at which life began to make sense for the first time, and I couldn’t stop writing about all the problematic ideas I had been trying to force into my co...

All the Things I’d Like to Tell My Parents

Dear Mom and Dad, I want to tell you more about what I think and why I’ve changed my mind on so many things—I want to tell you because of course, just like anyone, I like to feel understood, and I’d like there to be more of an understanding between us so we can be closer as a family as well. I don’t like that nowadays I avoid talking with you about a lot of the things that are most important to me and do little more than nod and smile when you bring up the things that are most important to you. The reason I haven’t talked to you about any of this more extensively than by sending you that one brief text message, just detailed enough to say that I had changed my mind about religious things and didn’t want you to worry about me, is that I’m afraid that having to think about any of this makes you sad, and it’s been easier to let everyone act like nothing has really changed than to make you think about the specifics of things that make you sad. Most importantly, I don’t want you to think I’...

Trump Supporters

I suppose it's mostly accurate to say that a good number of the conservative Christians I know are Trump supporters. I say it's only mostly accurate though because in the particular community of people I know, supporting Donald Trump for president wasn't a popular position originally. The people I grew up around are thoroughly socially and economically conservative—socially because they believe that many of the moral codes recorded in the Bible ought to be followed fairly literally, and economically because they mistrust liberal economics as being emotionally driven and unsustainable in the long run (although the sources of this mistrust themselves seem complicated enough to merit a speculative post of their own). To people who are this conservative, Trump was clearly not a desirable candidate when he first joined the 2016 race since his past didn't prove him to be a true conservative. For some of my family members, Dr. Ben Carson was the obvious best choice: He had a h...