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Showing posts from October, 2014

Stonestreet, Prager, & Huckabee: Liars for Christ

John Stonestreet is a Christian apologist who seems to believe that anyone who’s not a Christian is destined to go on a shooting spree or join a terrorist group. This is ironic, of course, since most "terrorist groups" are filled with religious fanatics like Stonestreet himself. Stonestreet "believe" this is true , however, because, as far as he’s concerned, secularism is a kind of societ al insanity that inevitably turns people into homicidal maniacs. Like believing a vow of clerical celibacy magically turns priests into pedophiles or pederasts, the sheer ridiculousness of such a claim makes it hard to take seriously. But that hasn’t stopped Stonestreet and other Christian fanatics from repeatedly making such claims nevertheless.   For them, the problem with the world today is that "secular society is a curse," as Dennis Prager put it, because “life is meaningless if there's no God." Ironically, the only people who agree with Stonestreet

How Pop-Christianity Reaps What ISIS Sows

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims,” but that “violence and intimidation” can be used in more ways than one.   While those who commit acts of violence on innocent victims use terrorism directly, those who exploit the climate of fear that such “violence and intimidation” produce use terrorism indirectly.   Radical groups like ISIS, for example, use terrorism to scare people into believing in the God of Islam, but others use the fear of terrorism to scare people into believing in the God of Christianity. Both constitute forms of manipulation used by religious extremists who seek to turn our fear into a dependence on a deity, regardless of what name we call it.  By using other people’s violence to peddle their own religious beliefs, Christians like Mike Huckabee and John Stonestreet become surrogates for the very terrorists they condemn by willingly advancing the message that such terrorists seek to convey through their