The God-forsakin' Blog

  Today at work, I was conducting a training, and saw someone in the class wearing a shirt that said “Jesus loves you”. I didn’t get a chance to pull him aside and talk to him about it today, but as the trainer I am obligated to talk to him about it, so I’ll catch him before class tomorrow. What I will actually say is constrained by the limits of our respective roles. The agency rule is simply that we don’t wear clothing that sends political, religious, or sexual messages. That’s a rule that pretty much every employer has, but it’s especially important in my field because we work with people who have intellectual disabilities and mental health challenges. So if they don’t like his shirt, they aren’t going to just roll their eyes inwardly like you or I would… they’re going to either shut down, or act out. That’s the message I’ll send, and it’s true. But there’s more I would say if we were having the conversation person to person rather than professional to professional. If I...

  My religious upbringing did a lot of harmful things to me. The constant fear of hell, of missing the rapture, of failing to please god and not even knowing it, of falling short no matter how much faith I had and how much I worked to love my god and my neighbors. The belief that I was worthless, that my crimes were so horrible that only the death of a god could even the score, that I was broken and evil in everything I did and was, that all my best efforts and intentions were indeed as filthy rags. (Side note: the verse literally translates to "all your righteousness is as used menstrual cloths". Not shitrags or corpses or other ritually unclean things, mark you; in addition to telling us we're all tainted and worthless to the point that we should be thrown away, the authors of the Bible also worked in the misogynistic idea that the most unclean thing possible is always going to be something that comes from a woman.) And I STILL got off easy, compared to my closeted ga...

 Humans generally, and conservative Christians particularly, have this problem: They don't believe a problem is real unless they or someone they know are directly, undeniably affected. Today I talked to an Evangelical pastor who didn't believe in masks or vaccines until he nearly died of COVID-19. NOW he tells whoever will listen to take it seriously.  Today I read an article pointing out that the most frequent Biblical command - helping the poor - is the most ignored. But I suspect that's only true of Christians who have never been poor or been close with anyone who was poor. When you've worked 60-hour weeks and budgeted and STILL been unable to pay your bills, or known people who didn't work because a physical/mental health problem rendered them unable to do so, you're less likely to assume that poverty is the result of laziness. Today I heard about the very real possibility that Roe vs. Wade will be overturned, which would fulfill the lifelong wishes of peopl...

 I decided to try an experiment just now. I wanted to figure out how far from the original meaning you get when you translate something first into Hebrew, then into Greek, then into Latin, and then back into English. But I don't know any of those languages, so I had Google Translate do it for me. Here is the result when you run the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin through that process: Q Mrs. for sure The only thing that shines is gold He bought a ladder to paradise When he comes there he knows If all stores are closed the verb has something to come Oh oh oh oh and he bought a ladder to paradise There is a sign on the wall But he wants to be safe Because you know that sometimes two words mean In the tree next to the creek It's a songbird Sometimes all our thoughts are confusing Oh that makes me wonder Oh that makes me wonder feeling is i feel When I look west And my spirit cries to leave I saw in my heart smoke flowing through the trees And the voices of...

Studies show that people who are being prayed for do not recover from illness or injury any faster than people who are not being prayed for. UNLESS they KNOW that people are praying for them. Sometimes that leads to better outcomes, and sometimes it actually leads to marginally WORSE outcomes. So prayer is indistinguishable from any other placebo. It may make people feel a little better because they believe it will make them feel better. And if they feel better, their immune system will respond differently, and their overall health will have a slightly better chance at improving. The thing that actually helps here, when it helps at all, is the belief that it will help, coupled with the knowledge that friends and family care about the person and want the person to get better. Those things have real effects on health. But when people didn’t know they were being prayed for, there was no statistically significant benefit or drawback to prayer. And you know what? Back in the Bronze ...