Blogaround

1. Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ (posted March 2) "Won’t give straight answers. I asked him if something was going to be on the test, and he said, ‘You say that it will be,’ and stared at me with no expression. I mean, come on, bro."

2. Mad Genius Or First Video Fail? (posted February 28) I've been watching these videos of Simon, a British guy, solving incredibly hard sudokus and gushing about them and it's just delightful. This video is an hour long.

3. Snopes-ing 101: the Fact-Checkers’ Toolbox. Really useful advice for anyone who spends time on the internet.

4. Guidepost report: RZIM leaders were blinded by loyalty, spent donor money to sue a survivor (posted February 23) [content note: sexual abuse and coverup] "Overall, Guidepost found RZIM leaders failed to hold Zacharias accountable and believed his side of the story when allegations were raised — even if his explanations were suspect."

5. Died: Ray Bakke, Who Believed Christians Are Called to Cities (posted February 28) "'It was the biggest shock of my life,' he told CT in 2021. 'The whole Moody-Trinity-Wheaton establishment, all of them singing ‘red and yellow, Black and white,’ but when those kids showed up at their kids’ schools, they panicked and they fled.'"

6. No justice for the dead: Resisting martyr narratives in the struggle (posted March 2) This is a post from an atheist blogger, and I find it very interesting because I have been thinking about the same kinds of things lately. 

I still believe in resurrection. Or, I hope for resurrection. I hope it's true. But I'm wondering, should we live like resurrection is real, or not? What if our belief in resurrection reassures us that it's not really that bad that some people never really get an opportunity to have a happy and comfortable life like I have? That would be bad. Is it better to live like it's not true, like this is it, and we need to see justice done on earth because we can't bank on it being done in heaven?

7. Jury finds first US Capitol riot defendant to go on trial guilty on all counts (posted March 8) "Reffitt, a Texas Three Percenter and supporter of then-President Donald Trump when he went to the Capitol on January 6, was charged with five counts -- wanting to obstruct the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election, transporting guns into DC, carrying a Smith & Wesson handgun onto the restricted grounds of the Capitol, interfering with Capitol Police protecting the Upper West Terrace and obstructing justice by threatening his son and daughter when he returned to Texas."

8. Intuition and the Garden of Eden (posted March 7) "I am proposing that the Garden of Eden is not a story about how humans are hopelessly flawed and doomed by nature because of a historical mistake made by a single universal ancestor whose original sin forces us to seek salvation from eternal torture in our submission to an authoritarian religious institution that represents God. Instead, the Garden of Eden is an allegory about how authoritarian religious institutions trick humans into letting them speak for God."

9. The Continuous Gaslighting Of An Autistic Mind (posted January 25) "Even if 98% of humans don’t want to read about someone else’s childhood trauma in a public forum, that doesn’t mean it’s morally obvious that 'oversharing' content like that is wrong; it simply means that people like that, however many or few, have an emotional need that should be clarified in open conversation before I befriend them, which is of course a challenge in our day of social media 'friendship.'"

10. Evangelical Colorblindness (posted January 12) "When black evangelicals and other critics raised the alarm about the ethics of this investment in whiteness, church growth experts had their trump card in hand: what could be more important than people becoming Christians? Don’t we have to use the most effective methods possible?"

11. My Biggest Problem With The Bible Is… (posted March 9) "Constantine’s agenda was nothing less than the redefinition of Christianity from a way of living – which included practicing radical enemy-love and creative non-violence along with a prohibition from joining the Roman Army – into a set of belief statements that made it easier to define who was and who was not a Christian."

12. Why I wish I’d transitioned when I was 12 (posted March 9) "Struggling to come to terms with my transition, my Mum asked me in a therapy session why I hadn’t come out sooner. I felt so sad I could hardly speak. Lying in bed that night, I had the sense that if I could make it possible for one trans girl to go straight from puberty blockers to affirming hormone therapy, it would somehow make up for what I had to go through. "