Blogaround

1. Study that found husbands prone to leave sick wives was flawed, researchers say (2015) and Authors’ Explanation of the Retraction (2015) There was a study, which I'd heard about many times on twitter and various places, that found that it's MUCH more likely that married couples divorce if the wife has major health problems, than if the husband has major health problems. Popular wisdom on the internet took this to mean that men abandon their wife if the wife gets sick, society doesn't expect men to keep their marriage vows, patriarchy is the worst, etc.

Well I'm just finding out now (even though it happened in 2015) that the study had an error in analyzing their data, and actually those results weren't correct. I'm not sure if there have been other studies since then with better data, or what the current academic consensus on this is. But it's important to not keep repeating this claim, now that we know the study was flawed.

2. Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon (March 13, via) "The test of Samsung’s phones conducted by Reddit user u/ibreakphotos was ingenious in its simplicity. They created an intentionally blurry photo of the Moon, displayed it on a computer screen, and then photographed this image using a Samsung S23 Ultra. As you can see below, the first image on the screen showed no detail at all, but the resulting picture showed a crisp and clear 'photograph' of the Moon. The S23 Ultra added details that simply weren’t present before. There was no upscaling of blurry pixels and no retrieval of seemingly lost data. There was just a new Moon — a fake one."

3. Infinite Fractal Mazes (October 21) "Fractal mazes contain infinite paths, but the only solutions permitted are finite. Some people find that disappointing. What’s the point of all that extra maze if we don’t get to traverse it?" Oh this is so cool.

4. The Infamous 1981 Lee Atwater Interview School for Government at Liberty University (October 20) "By choosing to name their school for government after Helms, Liberty University is endorsing all of that — admitting, and even flat-out bragging, that everything they’re packaging as 'today’s conservative movement' and 'traditional values' is just a euphemism for saying 'N—-r, n—-r, n—-r.' They may as well have simply named it The Infamous 1981 Lee Atwater Interview School for Government and carved that entire quote in granite on the side of a campus building."

Also from the Slacktivist: Get sick, get fired (October 24) "And she reminded my wife, repeatedly, that the salon was 'a privately owned business,' which she said exempted her from the kind of labor laws governing large, publicly traded companies. And which also, apparently, exempted her from common decency and basic humanity."

5. A Missionary Died at 26 on a Doomed Quest. A New Documentary Confronts What Led Him There (October 5) There's a new documentary called "The Mission," which is about John Chau, the missionary who was killed in 2018 when he tried to bring the "gospel" to the Sentinelese, one of the few uncontacted people groups on earth. 

I'm interested in watching this... I've written about Chau a bunch of times here on the blog, because of how his story so completely matches the "ideal" actions that American evangelicals believe missionaries (and, really, all Christians) should take. And also I relate to him a lot... believing in something so much that it becomes so big and overtakes your whole life- well, that's kind of why I moved to China.

My posts about Chau:
This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To (2018)
Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts (2018)
Because of an Idea (2019)

6. Did Legalizing Abortion Reduce Crime 20 Years Later? (October 24) "So there are a lot of issues with the abortion-crime hypothesis, but one I rarely see brought up is the fact that there’s a very good chance that Levitt based this entire idea on an initial premise that is simply not true: that legalizing abortion drastically alters the number of abortions women get. Levitt calls this 'true virtually by definition.' It is not."

7. Feel free to not click on this one- I'm sharing it specifically because it's bad: Andy Stanley’s ‘Unconditional’ Contradiction (October 4) It's an article from Christianity Today, about the "Unconditional" conference, hosted by pastor Andy Stanley. The good Christians at Christianity Today are unhappy that Andy Stanley's conference wasn't as anti-gay as it could have been. Stanley's position seems to be, [and I'm paraphrasing this, it's not a quote from anywhere] "marriage must be 1 man and 1 woman, but still there are things we can learn from gay Christians- even gay Christians in same-sex relationships- so we should listen to them." Well, Christianity Today is here to tell you that's not good enough. I'm posting this link here so y'all can see what Christianity Today is all about. 

But hey, here's one cool tidbit from CT's article: "The most controversial conference speakers were Justin Lee and Brian Nietzel, whom Stanley described as 'two married gay men' who are also 'Christ-followers today.'" Wow, I hadn't heard Justin Lee got married- good for him! I read his book, "Torn," way back in 2012, and it definitely had a major influence on my journey along the "hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner" to "ally" to "queer" pipeline. Anyway, very cool to hear he's married now, very happy for him. (I don't know who Brian Nietzel is, but I suppose I'm happy for him too.)

Are our friends at Christianity Today happy for Justin Lee? LOL. Of course not! They know no details about his marriage, besides gender, and that's enough for them to conclude it's BAD and WRONG and nobody should invite him to speak at any conferences. This is what Christianity Today is about. Like, why can't you just be happy for people? Why do you have to make sure you're judging them enough? 

Why do you follow a god who requires you to judge people in order to maintain your Christian cred?

And this is why, in my opinion, it's pointless to even try to "pass" as a good evangelical in order to work for change from the inside. Any little deviation from "God's design for gender"/ "God created everyone to occupy the exact same place on the Kinsey scale" [uh this is also my paraphrase] and the good evangelicals are ready to cancel you. Andy Stanley isn't even saying it's okay to be in a same-sex relationship- he's just saying that his church welcomes people who are, and believes they have things to say which are worth listening to. If he wants to keep his status as a real Christian in evangelicals' eyes, he needs to backtrack on that and throw queer people under the bus. It wouldn't be the first time that a straight cis Christian made a statement about accepting queer people, and then got such nasty pushback that they immediately reversed their position, like "oh no, no of course I didn't mean that, of course I believe what the bible says, marriage is 1 man and 1 woman."

The cool thing about not being evangelical is you can stop playing those games. You can just simply accept your queer friends, just be a normal person with them, rather than constantly trying to judge them in a "loving" way, constantly walking that fine line between "hate the sin" and "love the sinner." You don't have to do any of that. Come into the big queer world. Love people like Jesus did. Be free.