For some reason Christian evangelist Jefferson Bethke gets under my skin. He appeals to young Christians who want to move the Christianity in a more progressive direction but then attempts to pull them back toward right wing fundamentalism. In his latest video series, he has been interviewing Christian leader, Tim Keller. This last video is just priceless on so many levels. Have a look:
Category Christianity
Liberal Christians are always telling me that God didn’t really mean this or that Jesus didn’t really mean that. Those parts of the Bible are metaphors and only atheists and the small minority of about 48% of Christians take that part literally. Real Christians of course understand the Truth and that is that the entire Bible is to be taken metaphorically except for the existence of God, some of Jesus’s magic tricks, his resurrection, and anything else liberal Christians want to believe really happened.
Christians often get upset with me and other atheist writers when we talk about the beliefs that a large number of Christians actually believe. They claim that we are merely making a strawman argument, that our criticisms don’t represent their beliefs, and that we don’t give True Christianity the proper thinking that it deserves.
The Constitution is supposed to protect us from religious theocracy, but it has failed. West Chester, Pennsylvania is once again using religion and religious values to run and attempt to run atheists out of town. Here I present to you two stories that should frighten and motivate you.
A year and a half after Jessica Ahlquist won her fight to secularize her school by having a Christian prayer banner removed she still faces hate and threats of violence from Christians. Obviously not all Christians are hateful assclowns, but the fact is that many of them are and it really shouldn’t be such a surprise.
Last week, liberal Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans wrote an interesting piece for CNN’s Belief Blog titled, “Hey atheists, let’s make a deal.” So here is her deal:
It is no secret that I think Christianity is a ridiculous religion however the belief in a deity in and of itself is not necessarily ridiculous. It is just improbably and there is no valid evidence to support such a belief. I have heard many arguments for God and most of which are pretty poor. There is one argument that I do find challenging and I think that atheists really need to address this argument in a compelling way.
Often times when I am talking about Christianity I try to speak generally. I focus on claims the Bible makes and some of the more popular beliefs that Christians hold. This gets me into trouble because obviously not all Christians are the same and there will always be a Christian who claims that the majority of Christians don’t believe in God literally or something.
There are a lot of great books written by atheist authors over the past few years. While I can’t say that reading any one particular book was the key to my own de-conversion from Judaism to atheism, I have heard from a lot of fellow atheists about how this book or that really got them thinking critically about religion and lead to their de-conversion. None of those books are going to be on my list.
The company that I was working for a number of years ago had a special workshop on inappropriate imagery in the workplace. The idea of the workshop is to make sure that all the employees treated each other respectfully and didn’t offend each other. One of the topics covered dealt with shirts and jewelry of an offensive nature. So I brought up the crucifix.