#exvangelical

See tagged statuses in the local BookWyrm community

Now *this* is good reporting.

Everything Samuel L. Perry is saying about the state of pop evangelicalism in the U.S. is spot on. I was smack dab in the middle of all of it ~10-15 years ago. I can still remember listening to *specific* Mark Driscoll podcasts in 2008. If you ever wonder to yourself…how can a man like Trump *still* be the darling of conservative Christians??! And why is a woman like Stormy Daniels so vilified?

This is your answer.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/07/stormy-daniels-donald-trump-evangelical-appeal-00156488

Researching the movement and what happened to me in my crazy cultic youth. Reading The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon and watching and ready to chew rails and spit nails. There are through lines in brainwashing. What sticks out most is Exploitation for Money đź’° đź’° đź’° of frightened people who want to get God correct and fix family and country, and the terrible suffering of children.

Reading _The God Argument_ by A.C. Grayling. I got past the there-is/are-no-god/gods part and into the positive humanism section. He talks about ethics and Stoicism. One of the elements of a good and meaningful life he says is good relationships. This makes me sad because since deconstructing I have no friends. There are a couple who also lost their faith but they moved to the other side of the country.

11 years ago someone named Michael Beverly posted the following on Google+:

I'm convinced that deep down inside Christians know "in their heart" that it's all bullshit.

Proof:  They don't live their lives anything close to what they claim their wonderful god asks of them.

They know that their real prayers, the deep heart felt longings, never come to pass (or very rarely and could be explained in other ways).
----
I thought this was brilliant so I clipped it to Evernote.

> The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-cancelling.

Christopher Hitchens, *Mortality*

Interesting episode on escaping Mormonism from the great "Was I In a Cult" https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mormonism-w-tal-bachman-hes-so-hiiiiigh-on-doctrine/id1582863762?i=1000649569717
The stories are good examples of how the more you learn about a religion, the harder it is to believe it.
Nice metaphor about being part of the "7 team" that believes 4+4=7. Then one day, you put 4 oranges and 4 oranges together, realize there are 8 oranges and can never again see it - but all your loved ones still believe 4+4=7. That's what becoming is all about.