The God-forsakin' Blog

Madison Cawthorn is an abomination unto the Lord, and a living blasphemy against all that is good.  He is a deviant and most likely a sexual predator.  His very existence sickens me, and as a man I'm ashamed that something like that is also allowed to call itself a man.  He is the opposite of everything that a man should be.  He is a symbol of everything that's wrong with America, and a country that tolerates his kind is in danger of collapse. ... In unrelated news, he apparently was also wearing a bra in a picture?

 An Evangelical just posted, apparently without irony, "I wish people would stop telling others how they are permitted to think." A person who literally wakes up early every Sunday to go and be told what to think, and is incapable of seeing why that's hilarious.

Religion starts by claiming to have the answer, and then works backwards from the assumed conclusion to try and make the evidence fit. That's a good way to be certain, but a bad way to be right. Science starts by looking at the evidence and then working forwards to try and find an answer that fits. That means a lot less certainty during the part of the process when you don't yet know the answer... but it means once you have the answer, it's right.

 The people most likely to reject the fact of biological Darwinism, despite overwhelming evidence that it works, are also the most likely to embrace the philosophy of social Darwinism despite overwhelming evidence that it doesn't.

As long as I have any evangelical FB friends, this blog will never lack for content. Today one of them posted a meme from something called "@TruthAgape" saying "Perhaps the most disturbing cultural trend I have seen in the last 5 years is the destruction of childhood innocence in an attempt to validate adults". When I was seven, I had adults telling me that there was an invisible man watching everything I did and hearing everything I thought, and that I had already by the age of seven done things that made him so angry that he would have had no choice but to let an invisible monster drag me to a dimension of fire and torture me forever... EXCEPT that this invisible man had his son horribly tortured by driving nails through his metacarpals and slowly suffocating to death to pay for my otherwise unforgivable crimes. The first time I heard about Jesus' crucifixion to save me from my sins, I felt so guilty that I went to the altar call sobbing and saying that I wish...

I just read an article that cites a few scientific studies showing that conservatives tend to have a more pronounced startle response and gag response than liberals. The implication drawn from the study was that conservatives are more driven by fear and disgust than liberals are, and therefore more prone to feel those things when encountering something unfamiliar - whether it's food they're not familiar with (they preferred meat and potatoes over vindaloo), ideas they're not familiar with, cultures they're not familiar with, sexual identities they're not familiar with, religious identities they're not familiar with... all of those things are more likely to trigger responses of fear and disgust in conservatives than in liberals. And that makes a lot of intuitive sense. It explains why the average conservative genuinely feels that "a taco truck on every corner" would be a dystopia - rather than the most awesome thing imaginable, which is how the average ...

A week from today will be Maundy Thursday. This is the day when Christians commemorate Jesus washing his disciples' feet, telling them as he did so that he was giving them a new commandment, to wash each others' feet as he was washing theirs. In other words, to seek to serve others rather than to rule others. It's been pointed out that out of all the gods, only one ever behaved this way. Only the Christian god behaves like a servant rather than a master. Only the Christian god tells people that service is the holiest thing that people can do. In this moment, Jesus tells us what he wants humanity to be, what humanity could be if we tried. Can you imagine the kind of world that might exist if Christianity as a whole had really taken that to heart?  Quick, when was the last time the most vocal self-proclaimed Christians in government advocated for tax money to be spent on helping the poor? When was the last time an Evangelical Republican who ran on a platform of "Christia...