Thoughts and struggles of a former Evangelical Christian learning to relate to life as a skeptic in the Deep South.
When Rhett McLaughlin of Good Mythical Morning left his faith, he felt like a man thrown overboard. Now he's put his journey to music. Here is my review of Human Overboard, released this September.
Evangelicals want to leave the world, not save it. Until then, all they want is to be recognized as the true protagonists of the universe.
Preachers like Pat Robertson can't stop making everything about Israel, even the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here's why.
If trees are known by their fruit, then the God of evangelical Christianity has some serious boundary problems.
A preacher recently suggested people are leaving the Christian faith--or at least they're mentally dismantling it--because it's the cool thing to do. He has no idea what he's talking about.
One partner remains a devout evangelical Christian while the other left the faith. What will they do about the children?
After a long but necessary hibernation, Godless in Dixie is back at the podcasting game, this time using a more traditional format. Soon the blog itself will relaunch alongside a number of others on a new platform called OnlySky.
Lori Arnold explains what it feels like to be unintentionally "othered" by those still in the community of faith. It's less of a door slammed in your face and more of a screen door between you all the time, reminding you that you are still on the outside.
A pastor once invited me to talk to his congregation about what atheists wish Christians understood about them, fielding questions from the church afterwards. Here are the eleven things that came to mind first.
Today the church is waiting around for someone to swoop in and fix everything that's broken through divine cataclysm, removing all responsibility from them. As it turns out, the events they've been waiting for already happened a long, long time ago.
Back in my day, Hell was a lake of fire. But times have changed, and modern folks want a kinder, gentler Hell. Hell 2.0 is basically like putting yourself in Time Out...forever.
Responsibility for every soul condemned to Hell would fall squarely into the lap of the God of the Bible, were any of these beliefs actually true. You cannot absolve an all-powerful deity from something like this, nor does the Christian faith in its original form attempt to do so.
Here are seven reasons absolutely everyone---even those trying to believe the Bible---should reject the notion of Hell. And shame on anyone who feeds this horrific nonsense to children.
The Bible begins with a story disparaging curiosity and exploration, a mood it maintains for the rest of the book. But when you view the mind strictly as a tool of worship, you invalidate learning for its own sake. Free inquiry utterly depends on, well...freedom.
Virtually everything we are told Jesus said or did came to us from churches founded by Paul. As it turns out, this single detail explains more than almost anything else. Ultimately it was Paul, not Jesus, who founded the religion which eventually became the Christian faith.
A lot of prayers have failed to materialize over the centuries, but none so fantastically as this one. And as it turns out, this one was extremely important.
Do you know how many people the Bible says were raised from the dead on Easter weekend? Here's a hint: It's a more than the number of biblical scholars, even conservatives ones, who believe this story actually happened in real life.
Jesus said a lot of things which directly contradict what humanists believe, but composite characters like him say self-contradictory things quite often. Here were five times Jesus said things which modern humanists could have said themselves.
The historicity of Jesus is still up for debate among historians. But the historicity of Christmas? Not so much.
Exactly how much evidence would you expect to find proving that a poor, itinerant rabbi lived and died in an area of the ancient Roman empire which the authorities scarcely cared about? And yet we have a decent amount of evidence pointing to the existence of *someone* even if he wasn't magic.
A brief look at what the Bible does (and doesn't) say about abortion, along with the story of how the Pro-Life movement took over evangelical Christianity.
The only good thing one can say about the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan is that it never actually happened. Morally speaking, the story is a mess, and modern attempts to justify it show everything that's wrong with the Divine Command Theory of morality.
The New Testament doesn't praise Abraham because he didn't kill his own child, it praises him because he was going to. Nothing is innately wrong if whatever God says is right.
A message delivered on Sunday, September 8th, 2019 to the Universalist Unitarian Church in Ellisville, Mississippi wherein I discuss three reasons why we make gods.
All I ever needed to know about the Bible I learned from the story of Lot and his wife. It is a microcosm of all that is wrong with this book.
It's not just about the miracles. Even the history in the Bible is made up. There never was an Egyptian captivity. There was no Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. No Moses, no Aaron, no Joshua, and no Canaanite conquest. Archaeology has spoken, but the church refuses to listen.
Here are six reasons why the Bible, even when taken on its own terms, cannot be a perfect book.
Smart people can still be made to believe nonsensical things...if you get to them young enough. Here are four reasons why religion works on even intelligent people, and why it's difficult to let go.
Here are 8 ways the Christian faith speaks to you, and about you, that sound remarkably like an abuser.
You can't raise people to believe things that don't make sense and then expect them to value rationality. Here are a handful of ways faith normalizes bad thinking.
In order to be saved, you have to believe it's something you need. So no matter how low your view of your self may be, Christianity will lower it for you even further.
These are the things we miss the most after leaving the evangelical Christian faith.
Here are 11 things I found got better for me after leaving my religion.
Here are six ways that leaving my faith tradition was completely unlike entering it.
We didn't leave our faith because we cared too little, we left because we cared too much. We did exactly what we were told to do, but evidently we did it a little TOO well.
I left my faith (or rather it left me) after 20 years of devoutly following Jesus. It was a death by a thousand cuts, but if I had to boil it down to two main reasons, these would be the ones.
All my young life I was told I needed a personal relationship with Jesus, so I threw myself into it, but in time we had to go our separate ways. Here is why I broke up with Jesus. For more articles like this one, visit GodlessInDixie.com (music by Bensound.com).