There was a recent article on Huffington Post about whether Christians should be watching Game of Thrones. This to me is just another example of Christians being afraid of fiction.
Category Christianity
Many times when I get into conversations with Christians online, I get some Christian who inevitably tells me that not all Christians believe X. That “X” could be Creationism, Hell, Original Sin, Sin itself, even God. Many of these Christians accuse me of painting all Christians with the same brush. The thing is that I haven’t.
Days after the Pope implied that good atheists are welcome in Heaven, the Vatican Secretariat of State allegedly Tweeted, “Intolerance against Christians, especially in the name of ‘tolerance’, should be condemned publicly.”
A Christian blog I read recently wrote about an old question asked to public intellectuals in 1908 by G.K. Chesterton. The question was, “What is wrong with the world?” Of course I have a very different take on the question than my Christian counterpart, but I think it is an interesting question to explore.
I made a comment on the Huffington Post Religion’s Facebook page the other day that I didn’t believe Jesus actually existed. Now one can debate whether my belief is valid or not, but that isn’t what one Christian chose to do. No, one particular Christian decided to lash out in hate toward me instead.
Last night, I was a guest lecturer at a community college sociology class. The subject was atheism and secular humanism. I started out talking about the beginnings of religion and at one point outlined how the Old Testament came together. One fundamentalist Christian in the class questioned my account and well she should have because it is pretty damning to her fundamentalist beliefs and because I think it is important to question everything.
Many Christians love to tell their stories of how they got saved. I think it is also valuable for atheists to tell our stories of how we became damned to eternal torture… I mean how we de-converted from religion to atheism. The thing is that I think atheists and Christians have very different processes for how we came to our present position on the existence of deities. I don’t really want to know how someone got saved, but I would like to know what convinced them of their beliefs. That is not necessarily the same thing.
On Sunday, Google put up a picture of Hugo Chavez on their main search engine page. Apparently, a lot of Christians were extremely offended by this. They weren’t offended because of the now dead Venezuelan leader’s policies or because they just didn’t like the guy. No, they were offended because it was Easter and Google didn’t give a shout-out to Jesus.
I used to tell some of my Christian friends that I don’t have faith in deities, but that I do have faith in people. This was and still is often my opening line in many conversations with religious believers.
Dave Silverman was on Fox News yesterday and he made an interesting argument. He said that “bigotry against gays is not a precept of Christianity.” He continued to claim that there are a lot of bigots who use Christianity as a shield against criticism for their bigotry. I disagree with Silverman on this one.