{"id":148,"date":"2012-11-20T16:02:05","date_gmt":"2012-11-20T21:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/?p=148"},"modified":"2012-11-20T16:02:05","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T21:02:05","slug":"the-unsaved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/2012\/11\/20\/the-unsaved\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unsaved"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You heard right that I attended a Christianity-themed marriage conference<\/a> last weekend. My wife suggested we go, but what actually happened was that she led her invitation email with “free lunch,” and I said OK.<\/p>\n

I’ll tell you more about the conference itself later. For now, I want to get your thoughts on a particular description I heard. At the conference, a woman sat at our table. The rest of us made introductions, and she said that she was married but attending alone. Her husband, she remarked, was “unsaved.”<\/p>\n

Unsaved<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hard to say whether unsaved means a non-churchgoer, a non-christian, or an atheist. The term sucks, at any rate. It characterizes the person it refers to as deficient, incomplete, or pejoratively atypical.<\/p>\n

I’m not unsaved<\/em>. There is no saved to be un- about. Call me a non-believer or an atheist, but I am not someone who “just needs to be saved.”<\/p>\n

Many non-believers have taken religion seriously and investigated it deeply. They are not non-believers because Jesus has not yet entered their hearts; they are non-believers because they have explored Christianity (or Judaism or Jainism or Hinduism, and so on) and found it untrue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You heard right that I attended a Christianity-themed marriage conference last weekend. My wife suggested we go, but what actually…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[10,12],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/atheistintermarried\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}