Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Something Still Could: Courage for a Turbid Anniversary (June 9) "The Declaration’s words outran the intentions of the men who wrote them. “All men are created equal” meant, in 1776, free men of property, and everyone knew it. But the sentence did not say that. Lincoln saw what Jefferson had done, perhaps without fully meaning to: created a rebuke (even to himself) timed unintentionally to detonate in every coming day. The distance between what the sentence said and what its authors meant became a standing invitation to everyone it was never meant to include."

2. 134 Days, 68 Places, Zero Internet: One Man’s Journey Through Digital China (June 23) "One of the initial challenges was hotel reservations. At his first stop, a chain hotel in Linfen, another city in Shanxi, he couldn’t get a room in person because the hotel only accepted online bookings. The front desk staffer told Yang there was nothing he could do to help him check in, though kindly drew him a map to another location of the same chain that could accommodate walk-in guests."

Also from Sixth Tone: Through the Eyes of Shop Cats (June 23) "Shop cats originally existed to drive away rats and protect goods in old, simple stores. Now, many old shops are renovated or closed, and the new commercial spaces are cleaner and do not need cats to catch rats. Therefore, the number of shop cats is decreasing year by year, especially in Shanghai."

3. Where Did All the Dinosaurs Go? Answers in Genesis and the Problem of the Missing Evidence (June 12) "We have found, quite literally, billions of fossils in the layers that young-earth geology must assign to the post-Flood world. We have found the rhinos and the horses and the tapirs and the cave bears. Somehow every last one of two hundred kinds of the most charismatic animals that ever lived slipped through that net entirely, and left behind not a fragment."

4. On Christianity and aliens (part 2) (June 23) "But the fact of the matter is that the sin and/or salvation of other intelligent creatures on other planets or in other galaxies is their business and we have no idea. We do not have their Bible, only ours, and ours is about us, not about them."

Also from the Slacktivist: God’s wrath on the jerks (June 24) "God could send a tornado to destroy the house of such a preacher — and only their house, leaving the rest of the community unharmed. And God could have that tornado carve out the full text of Isaiah 1 in deep trench letters in the remnants of that house. But God knows that it wouldn’t help. That same preacher would be back on his cable TV station the next day, explaining that this extremely localized natural disaster was clearly evidence of God’s wrath over a Girl Scout troop welcoming a trans member three states away."

5. 'If you are alive, make any noise': Venezuela searches rubble on Day 4 (June 28) "On Saturday, the government said the death toll had reached 1,430, with nearly 3,500 injured."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump’s “Open-Border” Policy For Parasitic Worms (June 19) "So, what went wrong? Why is the average American now cursed to once again know what the [****] a screwworm is?"

2. The “Massive Human Consequences” of Ending Birthright Citizenship (March 31) "'The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?' He added: 'There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.'"

From a Chinese perspective, this whole thing about "wow it would be an unimaginable bureaucratic nightmare if birthright citizenship ended" seems kind of... odd. China doesn't have birthright citizenship, and yet it's not a constant nightmare of citizens being unable to prove their citizenship. Chinese citizens all* have an ID card, that they have to show whenever they deal with bureaucracy stuff that requires real-name verification. As an immigrant, I have to show my passport instead. (This can be really annoying, though, when the systems are set up to require a Chinese ID card and they don't have an option to use other forms of ID instead.) Finding out that the US just doesn't have a way to easily verify who's a citizen sounds just unbelievable, from a Chinese perspective.

*I have heard of Chinese people who weren't able to get an ID card because of the one-child policy- ie, they were the 2nd child in their family, and so their parents just didn't report their birth anywhere official. (Apparently there are fines for violating the one-child policy. It's not in effect anymore though- it ended in 2016.) This sounds like an impossible situation to be in- you can't do much of anything if you don't have a Chinese ID card. 

(But also, I'm sure China has problems I'm not hearing about. Just because the system works fine for the people I know doesn't mean it's actually fine. What is the situation for undocumented immigrants/ stateless people in China?)

As for establishing babies' citizenship in China- well, when you apply for the baby's ID card or hukou, you have to show the parents' ID card or hukou. (I didn't even get into what a "hukou" is, basically Chinese citizens are all supposed to have a hukou, it's a document that says very officially what city you are a resident of- this may have little connection to what city you actually live in, which is fine but you have less rights when signing your kids up for public school and things like that. Having a hukou proves Chinese citizenship.)

My husband is Chinese, so our kids have Chinese citizenship through him. (Also US citizenship because of me.) *Not* birthright citizenship. If both parents are immigrants, then the kid will not have Chinese citizenship, even if they are born in China. This sounds annoying to deal with- you have to get your baby a Chinese visa, within some number of days (60 days? I'm not sure) after they're born, but they don't even have a passport yet- some countries don't issue passports to their citizens fast enough to meet China's deadline, but from what I've heard it's not really a big deal, China is okay with babies missing this deadline.

The thing is, though, the big thing that makes the overall situation in China completely different from the US: In China, no matter how long I live here, I can never *be* Chinese. And children who are born here, if both their parents are foreign, they can't *be* Chinese. It's like, no matter what, you're always *different*. The concept of being Chinese is very strongly associated with ethnicity and family heritage- if you don't have that, you aren't Chinese, no matter what you do. 

This is completely different than the concept of being American. And ending birthright citizenship would change that.

3. In reversal, Senate votes to block war powers resolution, delivering Trump a win (June 25)

4. The Supreme Court says the U.S. can turn away asylum seekers at the border (June 25) "The Obama administration was the first to try stemming the flow of asylum seekers that way. But the lower courts blocked the policy on grounds that it violated federal law by denying asylum to people who otherwise would have qualified for it, had they been permitted to literally put one foot over the border."

Because of an imaginary line.

5. 4 surprising things to know about abortion in America since Dobbs (June 25) "The number of abortions nationally has increased each year since the national right to abortion was overturned."

6. US Supreme Court rules against Haitian refugees who were given Temporary Protected Status (June 25) and Trump can begin deportations of Syrian, Haitian TPS holders, Supreme Court says (June 25) This is just so shocking and sad, why would you want to send people back to a place that's not safe for them?

7. A federal judge in Boston blocks key parts of Trump's order to limit voting by mail (June 25) "The judge also found USPS has no legal authority to control mail-in voting."

8. Does Trump Know How Passports Work? (June 27) Seems not!

(I did see a blog post that said it literally does say "Welcome, but be good" in this edition of the passport- but this has NOT been confirmed so don't believe everything you read on a blog.)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. George Washington praying for the return of his slaves (May 28) "She boarded a ship to New Hampshire and never looked back. George Washington sent slavecatchers and government officials after her to recapture his “stolen property,” but her neighbors in the free state of New Hampshire helped her elude those kidnappers. Bounties and rewards were offered for her capture and re-enslavement for years afterwards."

Also from the Slacktivist: A first person, extremely possessive pronoun (June 1) "The subject of this song is, rather, a smallish neighborhood God. This is a puny God who is not the God of Haitian refugees, not the God of second-generation immigrants — not the God of LGBT people, not the God of women, not the God of widows and orphans and the poor, not the God of the sick and the immunocompromised, not the God of any of the billions of people living in any of the other 194 countries of this world, let alone the God of any of the billions of other stars in our universe."

And: Flattening and collapsing, egad! (June 2) "'Love your neighbor' is both necessary and sufficient." Preach!

2. What will it take to get a vaccine for the Ebola strain driving the current outbreak? (June 4) The good news is there's already a lot of scientific research and some vaccines that are likely to be effective. It's just a matter of actually having the money and resources to make it happen.

3. Interesting Pitch: ICR Says NO to Plain Reading of Noah's Ark (June 1, 16-minute video) Young-earth creationism says that the whole fossil record was formed during the year of Noah's flood, when all the animals and plants were buried, rather than being formed by millions of years of slow normal processes. And, therefore, all of the world's oil deposits come from the organic material buried during the flood. 

But, here's a problem: In Genesis 6:14, when God instructs Noah to build an ark, he says to coat it with pitch. !!!! Pitch! Oh no! Pitch comes from oil! There was oil before the flood? How can this be?

Please note that the bible does *not* say that all of the world's oil was formed by the flood. That's a young-earth creationist fan theory. And some young-earth creationists have realized that their fan theory contradicts the bible verse that says Noah used pitch to waterproof the ark, so now they have to come up with another fan theory about how it didn't really mean pitch, it meant pine sap or something.

Anyway, this is a video from Joel Duff which takes these young-earth creationist fan theories very seriously and explains why they don't make sense.

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Todd Blanche says DOJ ‘not moving forward’ with ‘anti-weaponization’ fund (June 3) Hooray! But also, I don't think this is the end of it- they're probably going to do a lot of other shockingly-corrupt things.

2. Musk Attacks Nyong’o For The Same Reason Hitler Attacked Jewish Art (May 26) "Musk is not just some asshole complaining about Hollywood casting choices. He is one of the most horrific mass murderers in history."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Fascists Lie (Even When They Seem To Be Confessing) (June 3) This quote from Vivian Wilson: "Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me. That’s insane."

3. Republicans' sweeping election overhaul fails in the Senate (June 4) "The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies' top priority, has officially failed in the Senate." This is good news for overseas voters like me.

4. House passes war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran (June 4) This is good, but it would still need to pass the Senate and also the antichrist would have to sign it, in order to become a real law, so that is unlikely.

5. You Can’t Raise Children to Obey and Expect Them to Defend Democracy (June 4, via) "It begins when a child learns that the person with power does not have to be truthful. Or when a child learns that obedience matters more than conscience. Or when a child learns that being hurt by someone who claims to love you is normal."

6. Screwworm In Texas Cattle Could Drive Up Beef Prices—After DOGE Axed Prevention Efforts (June 4)

7. The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought (June 3, via) "Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard."

8. When U.S. foreign aid changed, AIDS workers in Africa felt it (June 7) "The program is often cited as the most effective public health campaign ever, and is estimated by the State Department to have saved roughly 26 million lives since its inception."

9. Pete Hegseth shrinks military's recognized religions list, erasing atheists and Humanists (June 5) "The Department of Defense/War, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, has just pared down the list of recognized religious labels in the military to a mere 31, making it harder for service members to use the proper identification. A decade ago, as part of a larger mission to be more welcoming to people outside traditional faiths, the list of labels had expanded to well over 200."

10. After D.C.'s Reflecting Pool gets repainted, visitors ask: What changed? (June 5)

11. Deported Filipino sailors say they were falsely linked to child sexual abuse material (June 6) "Soriano Versoza's organization, which helps Filipino sailors with paperwork and other support, documented hundreds of deportations of Filipino seafarers and all follow the same playbook: CBP agents board the ships in the morning at the dock, they round up a handful of Filipino mariners, take them off the cruise ship, and interrogate them."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Pagoda Puzzle: What Can Save China’s Oldest Wooden Tower? (April 21) "First, the pagoda’s unique structure and scale make the risk of disassembling and replacing original components extremely high. It is a spatial high-rise framework, not a conventional single-beam structure. It would be extremely difficult to reset tens of thousands of rotted, cracked, and deformed components, restore the structural logic of the hidden layers, and avoid secondary damage during disassembly and reassembly."

2. Falling Leaves and Failing Arguments: Why Autumn Adaptation Doesn’t Prove Irreducible Complexity (April 21) "This is the kind of question that sounds simple but turns out to be remarkably difficult for young-earth creationists to answer consistently. Either the pre-Fall world had deadly winters and needed deciduous trees, or it didn’t and the whole system was purposeless until after the Fall."

3. Gene therapy for a rare type of deafness shows lasting results (April 22) "The results indicate that this could be a one-and-done treatment that lasts a lifetime, profoundly transforming patients' lives, Chen says."

4. Journal Club: Sexual pain in Christian Women (April 22) "In the lit review, the paper says that sexual pain may affect up to 46% of women, and that 6.2% of White Christian women report lifetime sexual pain with obstructed penetration."

5. Penn & Teller & the Supreme Court & BS (April 23) "Despite the fact that he had an alibi and bore no resemblance to the witness’s sketch, the police were sure Flores was the second man and they arrested him. So they brought Barganier back in and an officer “hypnotized” her in order to improve her recollection, telling her that hypnosis allows her to tap into the “tape recorder” in her brain."

6. The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars (April 20) "Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They're still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgment they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones' followers to harass and threaten the families for years."

7. We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI (March 6, via) "A student praised for years for being an exceptional writer now feels like a cheater because she had to learn how AI detection works in order to protect herself from being falsely accused. The surveillance apparatus has turned writing talent into a liability."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. The tariff refund process has begun for businesses. What about customers? (April 22) "That's because a product, like a TV, often has parts from multiple countries, and each was hit with different tariff rates. Those rates changed over time by presidential decree, which makes calculating a customer's actual cost even more difficult. Plus, the retailer likely absorbed some of that tariff expense. The tariff burden was also shared up and down the supply chain, between vendors, distributors and finally customers."

2. More immigrants are being held in detention for over a year. NPR followed one family's ordeal. (April 22) "This isn't legal. According to a decades-old federal settlement, children can't be detained for more than 20 days. But data from the non-profit newsroom The Marshall Project shows, since the start of Trump's second term, more than 1,600 children have been detained for longer than that."

And update on that: Alleged Colorado attacker's family released after nearly a year in detention (April 27) "Back home in Colorado on Saturday, two days after their release, El Gamal and her children reported to an ICE office for a required check-in. There, ICE detained them again, told them they were being deported to Egypt, and rushed them onto a plane, their lawyers said."

3. They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things (April 22) "They were taught 2 Timothy 3:16 as a promise and a contract. They were told what they could and should expect to gain from reading every word of every scripture and they were told what others would expect them to gain from it, and so what they learn — not just from this single passage, but from the entire experience of cover-to-cover reading — is to cultivate those expectations while ignoring the often-boring or confusing or unexpected aspects of the actual text itself."

This! This is exactly what it's like, being evangelical and really taking seriously the "read the entire bible" task that evangelicals are always saying we should do. You have an idea of what the bible is, and what the experience of reading it is supposed to be, and then when the actual bible itself doesn't match those expectations at all, you learn to subconsciously ignore what the actual bible is saying.

Also from the Slacktivist: Text and contexts: More Bible in the news (April 23) "That gets very antisemitic and very blasphemous very quickly, and it’s particularly dumb and dim as a reading of this passage, which involves God making a promise. See, the whole basis of supercessionism is that God’s promises are not worth diddly squat and can be revoked at any time because God is a capricious liar."

4. A chaotic White House Correspondents' Dinner, as told by NPR reporters in the room (April 26) "Just minutes into the dinner, guests heard muffled popping sounds as a gunman attempted to charge past a security checkpoint."

5. Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status (April 25) "DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around half a million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self- deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How a Buddha Got Its Sight Back (April 13) "The small circular cavities visible on their faces once held inlaid ceramic or glass pupils. These were fixed in place using a technique known as qianmu, in which the eyes were inserted into carved sockets. Over the centuries, as Yungang’s soft sandstone yielded to wind and rain, and later to war and theft, these fragile elements loosened, slipped free, and vanished."

2. Countdown Standard (April 13) From xkcd.

3. ‘Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon (April 12, via) "The tactic of mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of committing genocide, was described as domicide by academics, a strategy that is used to systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable."

4. “They Hopped” — Ken Ham’s Answer to Kangaroo Ark Migration Based on False Information (April 11) "The only placental mammals that appear to have reached Australia before human arrival are rats. And rats, as anyone who has studied dispersal biology knows, are perhaps the single most capable overwater dispersers among all mammals. The fact that only rats made it is actually powerful evidence for how difficult the crossing was, not evidence that a land bridge made it easy." (Similar to the video I wrote about here: Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories.)

5. 【可一儿歌】050 小燕子丨KeYi Children's Song丨【三淼儿童官方频道】 For those of you who are interested in what kind of Chinese songs my toddler is listening to.

6. Newcomb’s Paradox occurs in real life (April 17) "I’ve never heard anyone say, 'I’m a one-boxer if the second box contains $1M, but a two-boxer if the second box contains $1,001.'"

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘One of the good ones’ obscures a dangerous lie (April 9) "So this man who had fled a country where he had been beaten and imprisoned by military police for no reason encountered America’s militarized police who beat and imprisoned him for no reason."

2. And this take from the Onion (parody site, not actually true): Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile (April 10, via) 

3. The American Gulag (April 6, via) "Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, 'like Amazon Prime for human beings.'"

4. Trump's 'Praise Be to Allah' Easter Taunt Should Be Immediately Recognizable to U.S. Christians (April 7, via) "When the Roman state executed Jesus, according to John 19:19, it placed above his head a sign that read Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

5. Conversion therapy is soul-crushing — and it doesn't work (April 2, via) "I know this because I lived it for eight years. The guidance I was given ranged from the practical — “Don’t watch gay porn” — to the outlandish — “By developing platonic relationships with other men, my sexual desires for them would disappear.” But what it truly does is try to disintegrate a person’s body, mind and spirit."

6. Hegseth leads Pentagon prayer service with faux Bible verse made famous by ‘Pulp Fiction’ (April 16)

7. ICE detains 86-year-old in US to marry long-lost love, family says (April 15)

Update on that: 85-year-old French widow detained by ICE returns to France (April 17)

8. Amid quarrel with pope, Trump strips Miami charity of funding to house migrant kids (April 15) "'It’s incredibly psychologically harmful to be moved,' sometimes as stressful as serious illness or a death in the family, Latham said. 'For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be' from day to day."

9. Minnesota has charged an ICE officer with assault for alleged actions during immigration surge (April 16) "One victim told state law enforcement the encounter led them to believe there was a "crazy person driving down the road aiming guns at people," the complaint says."

10. She Helped the Authorities Deport Her Abuser. Then They Deported Her Back to Him. (April 6) "Carmen’s lawsuit, ICWC v. Noem, accuses the Trump administration of ignoring deferred action status and removing survivors from the country anyway; the administration is also deporting people like Carmen who don’t yet have the status but may be eligible once USCIS reviews her application. The case was filed against ICE and USCIS and seeks to represent a wide class of survivors who applied for U visas, T visas, and other protections under the Violence Against Women Act."

Really rich that these MAGAs are claiming they're "protecting women" by being mean to trans people. Here's something that would actually protect women: Don't deport immigrants who are survivors of domestic abuse.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Hand-Waving at the Fall: YEC Explanations of the Origins of Defense Structures (March 23) "If God “pre-programmed” organisms with hidden venom systems, parasitic capabilities, and predatory anatomies—knowing they would be activated by the Fall—then the distinction between a “very good” creation and a creation designed for predation and suffering becomes vanishingly thin. This is not a creation that was corrupted by sin; it is a creation that was engineered from the beginning to produce suffering upon activation of a divine trigger."

Also, I was struck by the part about "different use" (ie, young-earth creationists claiming that maybe predatory and/or defensive features of organisms' biology were adapted from some other purpose), because seriously, most creationist arguments are along the lines of "look at this complex system that this creature uses! So many different parts, and they all have to interact just right, and it if only worked partly, that would be totally useless and natural selection would not favor it- there's no natural explanation for this, it must have been God designing it! Wow!" but now that they've noticed the awkward theological implications of claiming that animals' abilities to kill other animals are specifically designed that way by God, it's "oh, well this was probably *not* originally designed that way by God, probably just adapted from a system that had some other purpose NOTHING TO SEE HERE!" 

So KIND OF THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

2. "I am Jesus Christ" and Other Games About Jews (February 21, via) I laughed so hard at "But as a popup tutorial informs us, you can turn water into wine by first pressing right click and then holding left click." Also, I hadn't heard of the "Bible Adventures" video game before, but I am 0% surprised that Christians made a not-very-good video game with extremely shallow representations of bible stories and then marketed it as a godly alternative to mainstream video games.

This video is about what it means for a video game to be Jewish, what it means to play a video game in a Jewish way, and the search for video games which reflect what it's like to be Jewish.

3. A series of posts from the Slacktivist:

Texts of terror? Terrific! (March 25) "This is such a non-liturgical white evangelical idea. The rest of American Christianity gets to watch them awkwardly attempt to rediscover and reinvent the lectionary without realizing that’s what they’re doing."

You have heard it said, but I say this instead (March 26) "But the real obstacle for Olson here is not any notion of inerrancy or infallibility. It’s the dogma of univocalism — the idea that all of the Bible is a single text that speaks with a single voice without internal debate or contradiction or contention."

Team Everybody sliding into our DMs (March 28) "This is what we find, too, when we turn to “the Bible.” It affords and accommodates different and opposite meanings, depending on how we choose to read it. We can choose to view it as a text assuring us that we are the special ones who will get to “possess” every last remnant of the lands and legacies of “Edom” and of all the excluded whose birthright we have taken for our own. Or we can choose to read it as a text that calls us to call in “the rest of humanity,” so that Everybody may seek the Lord."

And from Paul Davidson: Why Scholars Date the Book of Daniel to the Second Century BCE (March 5) "You know how in movies based on true events, multiple historical individuals are often combined into a single movie character for simplicity’s sake? That seems to be the case here, with the historical Nabonidus subsumed into the literary character of Nebuchadnezzar."

4. Satellite Pollution (March 27) 

Also from xkcd: Creation

5. Under New Olympic Sex Testing Policy, A Cis Woman Who Gives Birth Could Be Considered Male (March 31) "And it is not the first time the Olympics has subjected women to mass sex testing—the last time it did, from 1992 to 1999, the results were disastrous, with cisgender women discovering they had intersex conditions they never knew about, leading to public humiliation, career destruction, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished."

And more on that from Skepchick: Olympics Committee Punishes Trans & Cis Women (March 31) "Because as a reminder, girls as young as 11 compete in the Olympics, and now those children, too, will be put under the microscope to determine if they’re truly “woman” enough. It’s disgusting, and the Olympics staff should be ashamed."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Supreme Court Rules Against Conversion Therapy Bans On Transgender Day Of Visibility (April 1) This quote from Justice Jackson: "A state license used to mean something to the patients who entrust their care to licensed professionals—i.e., that the person is certified to be one who provides treatments that are consistent with the standard of care. That stops today."

6. The Final Word (Michael Card) - I've probably posted this before. I like this song about Jesus.

7. Liftoff! NASA astronauts have launched on a historic journey to the moon (April 1) "The crew members will first orbit Earth so that they can check out key systems on their spacecraft, including life support, communication, and navigation. Then they'll fire their vehicle's propulsion system to send themselves on a looping figure-eight path around the moon and back, ending with a splashdown into the Pacific Ocean."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Lebanon faces ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ under Israeli assault: UN (March 27, via) "The families are … living in constant fear, and the psychological toll, particularly on children, will last far beyond this current escalation."

2. Photos: 'No Kings' protests across the country (March 28)

Millions turn out for "No Kings" rallies held worldwide to protest against Trump (March 28)

No Kings Protests Failed To End Fascism on Saturday. Curious. (March 30) "They watched 200,000 people gather in Minneapolis, a city that was terrorized by the president's secret police for a solid month, and they were not impressed, not in the least."

3. Trump Must Resign (March 24) "It’s true that Trump is very unlikely to willingly step down. But calls for resignation can be powerful in themselves if repeated consistently and forcefully."

4. Franklin Graham told Trump he can still get into Heaven. That’s the problem. (March 30) "On a side note, it’s wild that Graham is explaining Christianity 101 to Trump more than a decade after conservative Christians tried to convince people Trump was already one of them. (James Dobson said of Trump in 2016, 'He did accept a relationship with Christ.')"

5. The Largest Physician Organization In The US Reaffirms Gender-Affirming Care Is Medically Necessary (March 27) "The American Medical Association (AMA) has reaffirmed that gender-affirming care for trans minors, including surgeries, is medically sound—and that access to this life-saving care should not be impeded."

6. Federal judge rules DHS illegally stripped immigration status from thousands who entered through CBP One App (April 1) "'Our clients followed the law: they waited, registered, were inspected, and were granted parole under the law,' Perryman said in a statement. 'The Trump-Vance administration's effort to tear this status away overnight was unlawful and cruel.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. If AI’s Native Language Is English, Where Does That Leave China? (March 12) "Many non-English languages are often what researchers call low-resource (e.g., Swahili) or medium-resource (e.g., Vietnamese) languages. This means there might not be enough diverse and high-quality digital texts — such as scientific papers, business case studies, or legal documents — available in those languages to train AI models on."

2. Conquest Narrative // Good Relation (March 16) A Jewish take on the biblical story of Joshua. "We could stop here, read the Conquest Narrative as both warning and foreshadowing, and move on. But there’s something that sits wrong with me about this solution."

3. Apples, Oranges, and Genomes: A Critique of Dr. Carter’s Claims about Human-Chimpanzee Genetic Similarity (March 12) "Christians deserve better than to be told that the latest Nature paper confirms their faith when in reality that paper’s authors see nothing in their data that challenges the standard evolutionary framework, and when the data actually strengthen the evidence for common ancestry by providing a more complete picture of genomic evolution across the ape lineage."

4. Why Complementarianism Isn’t Actually About Men Really Leading (March 18) "Male leadership in complementarianism is not about men leading, but instead about men being free from accountability and responsibility." Yeah this is what happens when you have an ideology that says the husband is the leader because he's a *man*, so he just *is*, regardless of whether he actually has any qualities that fit any normal definitions of "leadership."

5. The structure of ideological abuse (March 9) "You must never require someone to share their inner life with you without their free, full, informed consent."

6. Cesar Chavez abused and raped women and girls, NYT investigation says (March 18) [content note: rape] "In a statement posted to Medium on Wednesday, Huerta wrote: 'I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.'"

7. Chuck Norris, martial arts master and actor whose toughness became internet lore, dies at 86 (March 21)

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony (March 13, via) "In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day."

2. Hypothetical Legal Advice to SecDef Hegseth on “No Quarter” Statement (from Office of General Counsel) (March 14, via) Hegseth keeps talking about how enthusiastically he wants to commit war crimes. WTF? Can we impeach him or something?

3. FCC chair threatens TV networks amid Iran war coverage — but his warning rings hollow (March 16) 

4. Top US counterterrorism official resigns over Iran war, urging Trump to 'reverse course' (March 18, via) "'This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,' the letter continued. 'This was a lie.'"

5. One Year Later: The Effect of US ‘Chainsaw’ on Global Health (January 20, via) "To date, 757,314 people – the majority children – have died from the funding cuts, according to ImpactCounter, which tracks the effect of USAID cuts via sophisticated modelling tools."

6. Zionist Institutions Spread Antisemitic Propaganda (March 15) "Israel and Zionist orgs in the US have effectively been releasing huge amounts of antisemitic propaganda, linking Jews to the action of a violent nation state and its policies of sweeping censorship, apartheid, genocide, and war."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Dems’ No Tax Proposals Are Reactionary Garbage (March 17) "When people say that US society is not affordable, they are saying they’d like to pay less for groceries. But they are also very much saying that US society is constructed in a way that is inhuman, cruel, and un-navigable for everyone but the ultra-rich."

7. Judge ends asylum claims for Liam Conejo Ramos and his family, orders family's removal (March 18) "Attorney Danielle Molliver, with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices, told MPR News on Wednesday that the firm is appealing the decision handed down by U.S. Immigration Judge John Burns. Molliver said an appeal could take months or years."

8. Trump is dismantling democracy at 'unprecedented' speed, global report finds (March 20)

9. ICE officers are taking DNA samples from protesters they've arrested (March 19) "'What you worry about is an officer making a decision in the field that a person committed a crime when they might not have. Maybe they were doing something protected under the First Amendment,' Kerr says. 'The officer says, 'I think you crossed the line, I'm going to arrest you.' It turns out the officer was wrong, but the DNA test has been conducted, and the information has been entered into the database. What then?'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Can Complementarians Please Stop Using the “You’re Equal to Your Boss” Analogy? (March 2) "When complementarians say, 'Well, that’s what the Bible says' it is fair to answer them back, 'Well, either you are wrong in your interpretation or God is sexist.'"

2. on the other trafficked girls in Esther (February 26) "All of them are captured by agents of the State— "deputies" – to take these girls from their families and get them to travel sometimes exceedingly far distances so that the king can decide if they "please" him."

3. Created to Die? Exploding Termites and the “Very Good” Creation (February 8) "It’s a familiar strategy: describe complexity, express incredulity, declare design."

4. The market for marriage (February 19) "The usual pattern is that pastoralists are inegalitarian, inequality drives polygyny, and polygyny drives male control of women."

---

As a reminder, you don't have to read all the news links. But, *do* something. Check on your trans friends, protest, call your congress people, get connected to local groups, donate to groups that help immigrants.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. ACLU Files Lawsuit Against Kansas Trans Drivers License Revocations, Bathroom Bounty Hunter Law (February 27) "The lawsuit is being brought by two anonymous plaintiffs, both transgender men. Both hold driver's licenses with male gender markers. SB 244 retroactively invalidates those licenses, which will 'forcibly out Plaintiffs as transgender.'"

2. Trump administration drops suits against law firms after judges find president's orders unconstitutional (March 3) "'This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the ethical courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying and then won, and those that compromised their ethics and gained nothing,' Gupta said in a statement Monday. 'Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed.'"

Oh but wait, DOJ is [not?] dropping its appeals of losses in the law firm order cases. What is going on? (March 3) 

3. Who attacked a girls' school in Iran, and will there be accountability? (March 3) "As the death toll in the conflict passes 175, calls rise for an investigation into potential human rights violations and war crimes."

4. Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this (March 4) Yes, we should fact-check and not believe everything!

5. Why supporting a shelter for women is now 'kind of radioactive' (March 4) "A global survey by U.N. Women published in October 2025 found that more than 40% of organizations working to end violence against women and girls had to scale back life-saving services or shut down completely in the past year because of funding cuts."

These MAGAs talk about how they're the ones "protecting women" by discriminating against trans people, and at the same time they're massively cutting funding for women's shelters. It's another example of the ideology I talked about in my post about being right vs doing good.

Just reading an apologetics book and asking "why are we doing this?"

Book cover for "The Case for a Creator"

So I was at a used book sale and saw this: The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel, and snatched it up. Because I used to be an apologetics nerd, and I used to be a creationist, and I read Strobel's books "The Case for Christ" and "The Case for Faith" when I was in high school. But then, years later, I read atheist responses to them, and realized that those books came across like "we have such solid evidence for our faith, atheists don't even know what to say", but it's not true, atheists in fact have a lot of things to say. I got really turned off of apologetics after reading atheist responses. The atheists make some good points. Good for them.

Anyway I saw this book, "The Case for a Creator," (published in 2004) and I was like "ooh a creationist book, I wonder how it will come across to me now, since I'm in such a different place than when I read Strobel's other books."

So here's my review of the book, and also some opinions about apologetics in general.

God Made the Firmament

Image showing an ancient understanding of the earth- there is a firmament above the sky, holding back the waters above the sky. Image source: By Tom-L - Own work Based on File:Early Hebrew Conception of the Universe.png and several other depictions, including Understanding the Bible, Stephen L. Harris, 2003., CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99817773

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People," and so I want to talk about the firmament.

What is "the firmament," you ask? Well, in ancient times, people believed that there was a whole reservoir of water above the sky. The firmament is the big dome-shaped thing that holds back the water, so it doesn't all fall on us.

Okay...

Genesis 1 tells us what God made on each of the 6 days of creation. Verses 6-8 say that God separated the water above from the water below, and called the big space between them "sky." Different bible translations describe this using different words- vault, space, expanse, firmament. 

So yes, on Day 2, God made the firmament. You know how there's water above the sky, and there's a firmament holding it back so it doesn't fall on us? Ever wonder where that came from? Well, God made it on Day 2.

Okay...

"Genesis for Normal People" explains what the firmament is, and tells us to read the bible "with ancient eyes", ie, don't bring our modern understanding of science into it. As I said in my previous post about this book, it was so surprising to me that this book is ONLY about what the biblical writers meant, and it does NOT say anything about finding truth in the bible, or finding moral lessons to apply to our lives. It talks about what the bible meant to its ancient readers, and then leaves it at that.

I had heard about the "firmament" before, but reading this book, this was the first time I really understood this: The biblical writers believed that there was a firmament holding up the water. Really. They believed the earth was flat, and it had a dome on top, containing the sky, and then more water on top of that, and the firmament is the barrier between the sky and the water. Really. They believed that, and they mentioned it when writing the bible. That's what this part of the bible is talking about.

In the past, when I read the creation story from Genesis 1, I always had in mind what the earth really looks like. So I read that God made an expanse to separate the waters above from the waters below, and I assumed "waters above" maybe meant clouds, or something. I thought Day 2 was when God made the sky. I took the words in the bible and mapped them onto things that we know exist.

So Genesis 1 tells us that God made the firmament, but I wasn't able to understand that, because I believed the bible was true. Obviously there's no such thing as a firmament- so if I'm confused about what this bible verse is saying, I would never in a million years consider the interpretation "maybe it's talking about the firmament." When we read the bible with the assumption that it's true, we miss what the writer was actually saying.

Or, perhaps if you believe in inerrancy, you might explain it like this: "Firmament" is just an old-timey word for "sky." See, the point is that God made the sky- that's the part that's inerrant. Ancient people had an incorrect understanding of what the sky is, but that's not the inerrant part, so no problem. I feel like this explanation still misses the point- it fails to appreciate how foreign and alien the bible is. It just quickly glides past the concept of the firmament, claiming that this bible passage is actually about the sky. In this understanding of inerrancy, the bible passage is "actually about" something that would have been confusing and incomprehensible to the original writer. 

Is that how inerrancy works? God directs them to write something, and the part that's inerrant is the deeper meaning, which the writer themself doesn't even know? Yes, I have seen Christians talking about the bible with these kinds of assumptions- but normally I've seen inerrancy defined as "what it originally meant is inerrant."

I have heard young-earth creationists talking about the firmament, actually. I remember reading a young-earth creationist article which said that when God created the world, there was a layer of water above the sky, just kind of suspended up there I guess, and that's what Genesis 1 is talking about, when it mentions the firmament. Later, during Noah's flood, the water in the firmament rained down onto the earth- see, that's why the firmament doesn't exist any more. Also, before the flood, the air pressure in earth's atmosphere was much higher than it is now, because of the firmament on top of the atmosphere- and this high air pressure is good for people's health, and that's why you have people with 900-year lifespans before the flood. I'm honestly impressed with how much work the young-earth creationists have put into this fan theory.

But even this young-earth creationist fan theory is NOT what the bible is saying, when it talks about the firmament. The bible is NOT saying "there used to be a firmament, but all the water rained down during Noah's flood." It's saying "You know how you look up in the sky and it's blue because there's water up there?" It was written by people who believed the firmament still existed, because they saw it with their own eyes. (Or rather, they saw the sky was blue and assumed they were seeing the big sea of water that's up there. And yeah, that's a reasonable thing to think if you live in ancient times and don't have access to information about space.) The young-earth creationist approach of believing the creation story is literally true and then doing a lot of work to make it fit with what we know about the world thanks to modern science completely misses the point.

(And apparently there are some young-earth creationists who believe the earth is flat, and believe in the firmament and everything. I never encountered that when I was a young-earth creationist though.)

Believing that the bible is true interferes with our ability to understand what it was actually trying to say. It talks about the firmament because the writers really believed that was a real thing. We now know it's not a real thing- but if you bring that knowledge into your understanding of the bible, if you believe the bible is true and therefore can't possibly be talking about something that's not real- well, then you'll miss the point.

Anyway, let's all go outside and look up at the firmament today and thank God for making it on Day 2~

---

Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

I used to be a young-earth creationist 

If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean?

Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" (book review)

Book cover for "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," 1995 edition.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll, is a book that was published in 1995. (There's also a 2022 version which includes some updates about Trumpism.) I've seen this book mentioned by ex-evangelical blogs many times over the years, and I finally read it. Here is my review of it.

---

The overall thesis of the book

I had heard that this book was about anti-intellectual pressures in evangelical Christian culture. I had heard the quote, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." 

And, growing up evangelical, I had experienced some of this anti-intellectualism. There are questions you're not allowed to ask in church. There is an attitude that "we know better than scientists and scholars because we have the bible." I was guessing that was the sort of thing this book would talk about.

But it mostly didn't. It was not about what it's like "on the ground" in evangelical culture. Noll is a historian, and the book traces the history of evangelical attitudes toward intellectual thought, over the past several hundred years, showing the movements that came and went, and how that led to where we are today. (Or rather, in 1995.) That's really useful to know about, but it wasn't what I was expecting, so at first I couldn't really understand what Noll's point was.

Here's his point: Evangelicals have not done the work of applying evangelical beliefs to high-level academic study. Catholics have universities which were founded out of the Catholic tradition and do good quality research in many many different fields, but evangelicals don't really have anything like that. Yes, there are evangelical seminaries and bible colleges, of course, but these aren't really known for their high-level research. We should be applying evangelical ideas to all fields of academic research- philosophy, art, politics, and so on, but evangelicals aren't doing that.

And, because of that, evangelicals are not obeying the command to "love God with your mind." They are not interested in learning about the world that God created. And because evangelical thinking is so shallow, they are not prepared to face new ideas or societal developments and respond to them in a way that's reasonable and consistent with evangelical Christian beliefs.

The first thing that came to mind for me was, well, what about creationism, that's an example of evangelicals applying their ideology to science and going really deep with it and inventing a whole field of """science""" that's completely different from "secular" science. But, then Noll mentioned creationism as an example of evangelical anti-intellectualism. So, no, that's not what he thinks evangelicals should be doing.

---

I have to admit I don't really get it

I'm having a really hard time grasping what it would mean for evangelicals to deeply apply evangelical thinking to big academic questions or societal problems.

The book talks about how Catholics have historically valued tradition and study, and major universities were started because of a Catholic drive to learn about the world and do excellent academic work. It's very hard for me to imagine evangelicals doing something similar, because, to be honest, when I was evangelical, that was one of the reasons we viewed Catholics as "fake." Yes, we were highly suspicious that Catholics were "fake Christians" because being Christian is about having a "personal relationship with God" (this is how evangelicals define "Christian"), and Catholics were not so big on that. Catholics were more into tradition and church hierarchy. Evangelicalism is about reading the bible yourself, experiencing God yourself, having spiritual experiences that mean a lot to you personally but are hard to explain to other people. We felt that Catholics had kind of missed the point- they followed their traditions and their church leaders and the pope, rather than going directly to the bible or directly to God. They were all caught up in listening to what other people said about God, rather than having a "personal relationship" with God. So, they were highly likely to be "fake Christians."

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" talks a lot about this aspect of evangelicalism. Experiencing God and the bible in an "intuitive" and personal way, which is accessible to everyone- and how that causes evangelicals to not value advanced academic study.

Academia is all about building on the work that other people have done. Spending years learning about some very very niche problem and then advancing humanity's knowledge on it- and only people who have spent years studying in your same field can even understand what you're working on. To me, it feels very incompatible with the evangelical focus on how God is always right there with us and God knows everything, and we already have all the answers we need because we have the bible.

Yes, there are evangelicals in academia. Of course there are. I went to grad school, for engineering, and I was evangelical back then. What I'm saying is, I don't understand what it would even look like to meaningfully bring one's evangelical beliefs into one's academic work, unless you were studying theology or something very obviously religious like that. The evangelicals who study engineering, for example, keep their engineering work separate from their religious beliefs. Yes, sometimes there's an element of "I'm really stuck on this problem, I'm going to pray for God to help me figure it out" or "I can't take credit for figuring this out on my own- God gave me the ability to do it." But beyond that, I don't see how they can mix.

Okay, maybe because I'm thinking about my experience in STEM, that's why it doesn't make sense to bring religious beliefs into it. Maybe for fields about philosophy and morality, and art and meaning, and how we should live and how we should structure society, maybe in those areas it makes sense that evangelicals should bring their evangelical beliefs into their academic work. And Noll says there are evangelicals who do a good job of this, but mostly they work for secular or Catholic universities. There aren't evangelical institutions where people do this kind of work.

But I'm still having trouble understanding what Noll wants evangelicals to do, exactly. The examples in the book, of evangelicals doing this well, come across as not evangelical, to me.

I'm not sure how to explain how exactly this feels "not evangelical." It's something about... for evangelicals, being a Christian is about having an active, dynamic, emotional "personal relationship with God." It's a little wild, a little risky, full of big dramatic gestures about "laying down your life", and God suddenly "calling" you to go do some ridiculous thing. This is the polar opposite of good academic work, which is about spending years studying the minute details about what other researchers have done in your field, very careful, getting the citations right, making sure every claim you make is backed up by something that your readers could look up. Just years of normal and boring human work- no "you have to believe me because God randomly told me this."

And it feels really "not evangelical" to me, when considering the question "what does our Christian faith have to say about this or that issue?", to answer by citing sources built on years of human effort doing the necessary academic work. No, that's exactly what we're NOT supposed to do, right? We should address the question "what does our Christian faith have to say about this or that issue?" by praying about it and considering whether any thoughts which subsequently pop into your head may or may not be from God. And reading the bible and simplistically applying 1 bible verse to whatever the issue is.

The bible says "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding." And "leaning on your own understanding" sounds a lot like valuing a legacy of work done by academics over many years, right? "Trusting in the Lord with all your heart" would be believing whatever random thing "God told you" just now, right?

So, I mean, I understand that evangelicals can be in academia and do good work there, but the work itself does not read as "evangelical" to me. It's a separate thing from their religion. So I couldn't really understand what Noll would want this to look like, in an ideal world. 

Keep in mind, this book was written in 1995, so things may be much different between then and when I was "on fire for God" sometime around 2010-ish. Also, my experience is as an average church member, who also read a lot of bible-study books because I'm a nerd. Whereas, Noll is a historian who studies evangelical culture in the US. He is an evangelical with much more of an academic background than I have. I've heard (mostly from the Slacktivist) that there is a disconnect between what pastors learn in seminary and what the average churchgoer believes. For example, scholars who have actually studied the story of the Exodus know that it didn't really happen. But even if the pastor knows this, no way they can say it out loud in church- to the average evangelical, it's very much NOT acceptable to believe the Exodus didn't really happen- that's an attack on the bible! So there's a disconnect between the anti-intellectualism of the average churchgoer, and the higher-level leaders who have more awareness that these commonly-required evangelical beliefs just aren't true.

So my point is, it's very likely there's a difference between my opinion and Noll's on what "feels evangelical."

---

Creationism and pre-millennial dispensationalism

The two main examples of anti-intellectualism that this book gives are young-earth creationism and pre-millennial dispensationalism [PMD]. Here, let me define them: Young-earth creationism is the belief that God created the whole universe in 6 days, like Genesis 1 says, and therefore the earth is only about 6000 years old. Pre-millennial dispensationalism is the belief that the world is going to end "soon", and Jesus will come and "rapture" all the Christians away, and then the anti-christ will come, etc, and therefore we should obsess over news stories about things happening in the Middle East, to look for clues that match up with the prophecies in the bible.

I used to believe in young-earth creationism. And as for pre-millennial dispensationalism, and the other popular Christian ideas about how the world will end "soon", I never got into that at all. I guess I believed it was true that the bible gave prophecies about when the world would end, and that Christians who paid attention would be able to pick up on the "signs" when it happened, as the PMDs claimed. But I felt there was a very low probability that any of it would happen in my lifetime, so I didn't see any point to doing that kind of obsessed analysis and "being ready" for when Jesus comes. I thought, we've had 2000 years of Christians believing Jesus would come back "soon", and all of them were wrong. Probably it won't happen in my lifetime either! So I very much refused to be part of any of the "Jesus is coming back SOON, we have to be READY" hype.

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" points out that creationism is about refusing to learn about this amazing world that God made, if that knowledge might contradict your view of what "the bible says." And PMD ideology responds to news events in the Middle East (and/or the question of whether bar codes are "the mark of the beast") in an extremely shallow way- simply trying to match them up with bible verses, making claims about "here's what the bible says about this." Rather than actually learning about the history of the real-life groups involved, what they actually want, the reasons for conflict, etc.

---

Inerrancy

The book talks about the evangelical belief in biblical inerrancy. Noll describes this modern approach as taking a "scientific" view of the bible; in other words, viewing the bible as a list of ironclad true statements, and building on top of that. Developing ideas about biology/geology, as in young-earth creationism, or piecing bible verses together like a challenging puzzle, to find connections to modern news events, as in pre-millennial dispensationalism. Simply taking each verse as a true statement which can be 100% believed, and making logical deductions accordingly. 

This is a very new view of the bible. (Noll says that Christians who argue for this reading of the bible aren't "defending the bible"; they're defending an interpretation that's less than 100 years old.) In contrast, one could read the bible with an awareness of ancient literary genres and the reasons that writers would have spun the stories in certain ways. The things they wrote to make sense of the world, not because they actually happened.

This is also a bit confusing to me- is Noll saying biblical inerrancy is an example of evangelical anti-intellectual sentiment, and therefore evangelicals should abandon it? This makes no sense to me. How can you BE evangelical and not believe in biblical inerrancy? Like, yes, I agree that evangelicals should abandon their belief in inerrancy, but by doing so, they would cease to be evangelical- yes, I believe they should abandon evangelicalism, actually. But obviously that's not what Noll is trying to say.

I don't recall if the book says inerrancy is a problem, or if it says this approach of "reading the bible scientifically" is a problem. From my point of view, those are the same thing. As I define it, inerrancy is this insistence that every single thing in the bible is true, actually true. Does Noll define inerrancy differently? Does Noll think you can believe "the bible is inerrant" and also believe that the creation story in Genesis 1 didn't actually happen at all, under any interpretation of the word "happen", but was just something they wrote back then to illustrate how they viewed the relationship between God, people, and the earth? That's not inerrancy- or at least, I would not call it inerrancy.

Again, this book was published in 1995. Surely things have changed since then. And Noll is coming from an academic background, whereas I just went to church A LOT. So... that's why I'm not quite understanding some of his points.

---

Some examples of my experiences of anti-intellectualism in church

In my experience in church, yes there were comments about how we already know the answers because we have the bible, and scientists don't know what they're talking about. I remember hearing a story that went something like this:

My 6-year old son was at school, and his teacher was telling the students that the Exodus didn't really happen the way the bible said. Moses didn't really part the Red Sea. The Israelites just walked across on a sand bridge where the water wasn't as deep. Just a few inches of water. Then my son raised his hand and said, "Wow, it's so amazing that the whole Egyptian army drowned in just a few inches of water!"

The point of this story is: Oh those public schools, trying to tell our kids that the bible isn't true! It's horrible, it's an attack on Christianity! This teacher talking about the Israelites walking through a shallow section of the Red Sea- lololololol! So ridiculous! Taking the big dramatic story about Moses parting the Red Sea, and turning it into this silly thing about simply wading through the water- that's so funny! Lolololol! And it doesn't even make any sense, because then how would the Egyptian army drown in that water? Even a child can see right through it! LOLOLOLOL! [whole congregation laughs]

(And don't even get me started on the uninformed jokes people at church make about evolution!)

I remember one of my history teachers in high school, saying something like "Religious people believe [some bible story]. And historians believe [some modified version of the bible story which doesn't have miracles]." I really didn't like the way she said it, like saying "people who are more realistic know that the things in the bible didn't really happen." I wondered if there were any historical scholars who were "on our side", ie, who believed a very simplistic, naive, "the bible is inerrant" ideology.

Another thing: I sometimes read articles talking about "People say Christians don't value science, but that's not true! There are scientists who are Christians! For example, Francis Collins." I don't know why, but it seemed that Francis Collins was always the one they pointed to. I heard about him many times, but I don't actually know what his scientific contributions were. I think something about medical research? [Oh okay I just googled him- he worked on the Human Genome Project.] Wow, that's very interesting, isn't it- evangelicals mention Francis Collins just to score points in a debate against an atheist who says "Christians are anti-intellectual", but do we know or care about what scientific things Collins actually worked on? Lol, no. We mentioned him not because we actually cared about science, but because we wanted our debate opponents to stop saying we didn't care about science.

And another thing I remember from when I was evangelical was this: Sometimes I would read about scientists who were Christians, and it was presented like "hooray, our beliefs aren't illogical, see, here are some smart people who believe in this." But sometimes I would dig deeper, and find more information about these role models, and I would find out that they didn't actually believe all the things that "real Christians" should believe. Their faith was much more nuanced than that. For example, they weren't creationists. They didn't believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Etc. So... they didn't meet the evangelical criteria to be "real Christians" actually. And so they couldn't really be used as evidence for "see, smart people believe these things." I remember being kinda concerned about that, back then.

---

Other writing which used "scandal" in the title

Because this is an important book related to the history of American evangelicalism, the title has inspired some other similar titles:

The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart, a 2013 post by Rachel Held Evans. It's about how she grew up always knowing all the apologetics answers- but the reason she began to question what she had been taught was because of her heart. This is very similar to my own reasons for leaving evangelicalism. 

The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, a 2005 book by Ron Sider. I have not read this, but I know that Ron Sider was an evangelical who advocated for evangelicals to seriously follow the bible's teachings regarding helping poor people and other social-justice causes.

---

Conclusion

If you're always talking about evangelicalism, like I am, then you should read this book. Yes, definitely required reading if you are this specific type of person.

But, as I said, I feel like I didn't really *get* it. I don't even know what it would look like for evangelicals to seriously apply their beliefs in an academic sense. That would mean valuing tradition and history and the work that other people have done, long before us, and that comes across to me as not evangelical. Evangelicals are more about "I read this bible verse and here's how I felt about it" or "I was praying and a random thought popped into my head, maybe it's from God"- and treating these personal, emotional experiences as more real and truthful than whatever those stuffy arrogant scholars have to say. From that perspective, building on the academic work that people have been doing for hundreds of years is NOT a good thing- it means there have been hundreds of years during which that line of study could have gotten off-track, as sinful humans continue to develop it. Better to go directly to the source- directly to God, who is the Truth- ie, whatever random thoughts passed through your head while praying and/or reading the bible.

I honestly don't see any way you can be evangelical and believe that the way we advance our evangelical thinking is through work done by researchers rather than claims about "God told me this."

Well, I mean, I'm oversimplifying it a bit... In my experience, yes, evangelicals are interested in learning the meanings of ancient Greek and Hebrew words, to understand the bible better. Yes, evangelicals do believe that whatever the original Greek or Hebrew said is a better interpretation than whatever naive thought popped into your head when you read an English translation. Yes, we did believe we could get more insight into what the bible was saying if we learned about the culture it came from. And no, we didn't just believe that any thought that flittered across your mind while praying must be a message from God.

But... it wasn't like we were going to learn anything new from that kind of study. It was like, we already knew the answers, generally, and we looked up the meanings of ancient Greek words to kinda fill in some details.

And yes, we very much did believe that it was common for God to tell you something by just giving you some random thought out of the blue. A big source of evangelical anxiety is trying to figure out which random thoughts are from God and which aren't. (And some random thoughts might actually be from the devil! Watch out!)

I never realized how the "personal relationship with God" is so bound up with anti-intellectualism, so I'm glad I read this book. 

(When I think of anti-intellectualism in Christian spaces, I think of someone saying "I'm having doubts about the existence of God" and then people shaming them for even saying that out loud. People telling them the point is to "have faith" with no evidence. And yeah that kind of thinking definitely exists in evangelical spaces, but there are also a lot of evangelicals pushing back against it, saying, "God really is real, therefore our beliefs are strong enough to handle any questions you have. Ask any questions you want. It's normal to doubt." I was one of the evangelicals advocating for the right to question and doubt back then. But still, there was always a limit to it- you could ask any question you wanted, but at the end of the day you had to come back to what we already know are the "correct" beliefs.)

In the book, Noll doesn't really come right out and say "the concept of a 'personal relationship with God' is inherently anti-intellectual." He talks about historical movements which have placed emphasis on each person being able to easily understand the bible and having an "intuitive" experience of God, and how that came along with de-prioritizing advanced academic work based on evangelical beliefs. I'm having a hard time understanding what he would want evangelicals to do instead, because to me this is sounding like "the concept of a 'personal relationship with God' is inherently anti-intellectual" but I don't think it's possible to be evangelical and not believe that the most critical aspect of Christian faith is having a personal relationship with God.

So, in summary: This is an important book if you're interested in the history of American evangelicalism. Evangelicals have emphasized having an individual, "intuitive" experience of God, and have not applied their beliefs in more advanced, academic ways. The result is a shallow ideology which isn't able to meaningfully address new societal issues. But, I don't understand what the book wants evangelicals to do instead. Respect for history, tradition, and the work that scholars have done feels not evangelical to me.

---

Related:

I used to be a young-earth creationist 

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

Blogaround

1. Mark Zuckerberg Preps for More Ethnic Cleansing (January 15) "You may be left wondering what the big deal is. After all, YOU are so smart and savvy and cool that you haven’t used a Meta product since Facebook opened its doors to people who didn’t even have an official university email address. Allow me to take you back to 2017, when security forces in Myanmar conducted a genocide, butchering the Rohingya ethnic minority, resulting in thousands raped, tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes to become refugees."

2. Trump to make historic move toward revoking birthright citizenship (January 20) "Trump wants to reinterpret the phrasing 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' to mean that the federal government would not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents without legal status, incoming White House officials told reporters on a call on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss upcoming actions."

I've read some other articles which clarify this isn't *only* about children whose parents don't have legal status- it also applies if their parents are legal immigrants on a temporary visa. 

Anyway, NOT COOL to target children like this. WTF? 

I support all immigrants. As I've said before, I was shocked to my core when I found out that some people- many people- most people- just aren't allowed to travel to certain countries, just because of where they were born. The US simply will not give visas to people from certain countries, because those countries are judged to be so poor and desperate that there's a significant chance those people might overstay their visas rather than going back. That's what radicalized me. I always took for granted that I can choose to live in any country I want to- turns out I have that opportunity because I'm an English-speaking American. Everyone should be able to live in whatever country they want to.

(Note, though, that many countries don't have birthright citizenship. China doesn't have birthright citizenship. But the situation in China is completely different than the US. The US is "a nation of immigrants," and birthright citizenship is one of the things that makes America great.)

And another NPR article on immigration: Migrants left in despair at the border as asylum system shuts down (January 20) "A few dozen migrants had already scored appointments. Some of them had waited almost a year in Mexico, applying every day for the chance to cross the border legally. And then, within minutes, their dream of making a new life in the U.S. was undone."

I'm so mad about this. What does the orange antichrist know about trying so hard, traveling so far, going to a completely foreign place, hoping to make a better life for your family? He doesn't know anything.

But anyway, instead of being mad, let's donate to RAICES or the ACLU. Fight the legal battles to protect immigrants.

3. Kent Hovind’s latest ‘wife’ says bye-bye (January 16)

4. A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza (January 15, via)

5. Former head of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards has died (January 20) 

6. Photos: Families reunite as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire takes effect (January 19)

7. A Line By Line Analysis Of Trump's Big Anti-Trans Executive Order (January 22) I'm really worried about this too.