Blogaround

Chandler and Joey from "Friends." "I got her machine." "Her answering machine?" "No, interestingly enough, her leaf blower picked up." Image souce.

1. Mr. Rogers and Child Liberation Theology (October 15) "When you view children as sinful or evil, you are more likely to misinterpret developmentally appropriate behavior as sinful or evil—and thus more likely to punish them for just being children." R. L. Stollar has just written a book called "The Kingdom of Children," about child liberation theology. I really want to read this!

2. China's youngest-ever crew of astronauts heads to space station (October 26) Cool!

3. Journal Club: Whitewashed (October 25) "This chapter discusses how whiteness is the default for ace representation, and how that affects the intersection between race, gender, and asexuality. In particular, the chapter focuses on how aces of color can violate or confirm stereotypes, and how it can be difficult either way."

4. Can church groups and Louisville be sued on old child sex abuse claims? Court to decide (October 24, this is an archive link because the original is paywalled) Umm, so, a victim of sexual abuse is challenging the laws about the statute of limitations in Kentucky. And, for some reason, the Southern Baptist Convention- which is not part of this case at all- has submitted a brief arguing that the statute of limitations should NOT be changed. Arguing against the victim. What on earth. Like, they are not involved in this case at all, but they just want to pop in and let everyone know they're on the side of the abusers.

5. Vikings DB Enlists Help From Senators to Acquire Visa for Wife in Philippines (October 26) Oh man, this is so real. As a US citizen married to a non-US citizen, let me tell you, this is SO REAL. We're lucky- someone advised my husband to get a 10-year US tourist visa *before* we got married, and he did that, so he's always been able to travel to the US on vacation with me. But a lot of couples run into problems with this- the US often refuses to issue someone a tourist visa if they are married to a US citizen, because the US thinks it's likely they actually intend to overstay their visa and live in the US long-term. And applying for a spousal visa (this is part of the process of getting a US green card) can take a long time. 

And yeah, asking your senators for help speeding up the process- also VERY REAL. Hope this guy is able to bring his wife to the US soon. 

6. Julie Roys and LGBTQ+ People (August 1) Julie Roys runs a blog dedicated to reporting on and calling out abuse in the church and in other Christian environments. That's great work that she's doing. Unfortunately, it seems she does not support LGBTQ people. I didn't know that- sad to hear about this.

7. Flamy Grant - What Did You Drag Me Into? [Official Video] (2022) Music video from a Christian drag queen called Flamy Grant. This is the exact content I am interested in.

8. Matthew Perry, Star of ‘Friends,’ Is Dead at 54 (October 29) and ‘An ironic, self-deprecating metrosexual’: how Matthew Perry captured the spirit of the age (October 29)

"Friends" is hugely popular in China as a way to learn American English. My husband loved it, and introduced me to it, and I also became a fan. Sad to hear this news about Matthew Perry- he was great.

9. The Hardest Puzzle Of The Year (2022) 1-hour-50-minute sudoku solve video. Simon is a genius.

10. Pence ends White House campaign after struggling to gain traction. ‘This is not my time,’ he says (October 29) Good. As an ex-evangelical, I am more creeped out by Mike Pence than by any other politician.

11. Virgin-shaming hurts everyone, including asexual people like me (October 24, via) "What I am proud of is that I didn’t have sex to appease everyone’s demands."

Also from Tyger Songbird: Purity culture made me feel trapped. Finding asexuality set me free. (October 26) "It turned out that when the church was saying 'True Love Waits,' what they really were saying was 'True Love Waits… but you better get the Ring By Spring!'" This article is SPOT-ON.

On believing that "prayer works"

Giant screen at a football stadium which says "Love for Damar." Image source.

So I want to talk about this blog post, from Hemant Mehta: An ESPN analyst’s gratuitous on-air prayers won’t help Damar Hamlin. Background info: On January 2, at a Bills-Bengals football game in Cincinnati, Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the field. First responders gave him CPR on the field, and took him to a hospital, and everyone was worried about whether he would live. A week later, he was transferred to a hospital in Buffalo, and now has been discharged from the hospital because he is recovering well.

Anyway, this was a big deal in the football world. A player almost died right on the field in the middle of a game. A lot of people connected to football have been showing support and love for Hamlin, and a lot of people have been praying for him.

So now we come to Mehta's post, about ESPN football analyst Dan Orlovsky actually praying out loud on tv, during his sports commentary show. Mehta says, "But it’s disgusting how some people have used the tragedy to advance their personal religious agenda" and talks about the reasons why Orlovsky should have just prayed on his own time instead of on his sports tv show.

Okay, first of all, yes, I understand why atheists wouldn't want that on their sports tv shows. This is a valid complaint.

But, second, I think it misrepresents the situation to say that Orlovsky is simply using this situation as an opportunity to push his religious beliefs on other people. I think Mehta's blog post misses the actual reason why Orlovsky prayed on tv: Because he believed that it would increase the chances that God would save Hamlin's life.

Now, obvious disclaimer, I don't know if Orlovsky conceptualizes prayer in this way- but when I was evangelical, I definitely did, and yes, the general belief about prayer in the Christian culture I grew up in was, the more you pray, the more likely it is that the thing will happen. The more people who pray for something, the more likely it is that it will happen. The more intensely and passionately you pray for something, the more likely it is to happen. The more faith you have when you pray, the more likely it is to happen.

I mean, nobody at church talked about it in terms of probabilities, but they said things like "prayer works"- they very much believed that praying for something can be a significant factor in God causing that thing to happen. I'm a math person so I call it a probability.

So, according to this ideology, the difference between praying by yourself vs praying on tv in front of thousands of viewers could be the difference between life and death for Damar Hamlin. When you use your giant platform and pray in front of your viewers, then probably a huge number of those viewers will pray with you- and God ups the probability accordingly. When you take a risk and do something weird and unpopular, like praying out loud on a sports show, that shows you really really have faith- so God ups the probability because of that. This could be the thing that puts God over the edge, so God will save Hamlin's life.

People in this ideology- like me when I was evangelical- really believe that prayer does something. That God can really intervene if he wants (I say "he" because the god I believed in back then was a "he") and so we have to beg desperately, as much as we can, to try to get it to happen.

(I should mention that many Christians, when confronted with the fact that this view of prayer doesn't really make sense, will say that, actually, prayer doesn't change things, because God already decided beforehand what would happen. But prayer is still important because it's a way for us to feel we are involved with the things that God is doing in the world. So I guess if you're a really really good Christian [I hope my sarcasm is obvious here], you will be able to guess correctly which things God has planned to happen- this is called "discernment"- and you'll pray for those, and then you'll feel so cool when those things happen- even though it's not true that your prayer had any role in causing them to happen. Okay, so, yeah, when explicitly confronted with the logic of it, Christians will claim they actually believe that prayer doesn't influence the likelihood of things happening, and things only happen if they are "God's will" regardless of how much people pray. They claim this is what they actually believe, but THEY DON'T. At church, when people are sharing their "prayer requests" and asking the other church members to pray for them, nobody says, "okay let's carefully analyze these prayer requests to try to figure out which ones are 'God's will' because, obviously, we don't actually believe prayer changes things- so we should only pray for things that are God's will." Nope.)

So, yes, in that kind of Christian ideology, people believe that "prayer works"- meaning prayer increases the probability that God will do a thing. People didn't actually use the word "probability" but the way they talked about prayer meant basically that.

Now, you might be saying, doesn't this God seem kind of like... a terrible person? Like, God is sitting up in heaven going "well I could save this person's life, quite easily, but I won't do it because not enough people prayed about it."

I mean, yeah, full disclosure, that is why I don't pray. I'm a Christian but I don't pray. I do not believe in a God who decides whether to help people based on whether you prayed about it correctly. A god like that is despicable.

And yeah, when someone wants something so bad, and they pray about it so much, and then it doesn't happen and they ask "why?" there are all kinds of answers offered by Christians. Maybe you didn't pray enough. Maybe you had the wrong motivations when you prayed. Maybe you had some sin in your life that is causing God to ignore your prayers. Maybe the thing you wanted wasn't "in God's will." Surely there must be some little thing you did wrong, that explains why this is all your fault!

So yes, we very much are talking about a God who would, for example, let your family members die because you didn't have the correct feelings when you were praying. 

My point is, many people believe that the more we pray, the more God will help Damar Hamlin, and I think that's likely the motivation for Orlovsky praying on tv.

But here's another question: Today, because of social media, news is able to spread very fast. If someone is in a bad situation, it is very possible for hundreds, thousands, millions of people to hear about it right away and potentially pray for them. Compare this to thousands of years ago, when the fastest that news could travel was a guy on a horse.

So, because of social media, we can get huge groups of people to pray for specific things in a way that was completely unthinkable back when the bible was written. Does that mean that God intervenes more now than he did in the past? Because, supposedly, more prayers means more chance that God will do something. So, the invention of Facebook has led to God becoming more active in answering people's prayers. Can this be true? ... I mean, it's ridiculous.

Perhaps God takes "inflation" into account- maybe a prayer nowadays in the age of social media counts less than a prayer back then. Or, maybe God applies a scaling factor according to whether you actually know the person you're praying for or they're a total stranger you just saw on the internet.

And, people's biases affect what kinds of news goes viral, and what kind of people are seen as "real" victims who deserve our compassion/ deserve to be prayed for. For example: missing white woman syndrome. If a young, attractive, white woman is missing, there will be a ton of news coverage about it, but very little attention is given to missing people who don't fit that image. So, it's very possible that if a white woman is missing, lots of people will see the news coverage and pray for her, but a woman of color in the exact same situation will receive little news coverage and won't have a ton of strangers praying for her. Does that mean that God will help the white woman more? Doesn't something seem wrong about this? God's actions are constrained by human society's prejudices?

Maybe God has some kind of "affirmative action" policy. Maybe, to make things more fair, he credits people with additional prayers if they come from a demographic group which is less likely to be seen by the general public as deserving of help.

I think this entire line of thought is absurd- but if it really is true that "prayer works," these are the questions we need to be asking. Here's a paper that I've linked to before: Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials (2009). I love this paper SO MUCH because the "Discussion" section at the end asks a lot of EXTREMELY IMPORTANT questions which we should take very seriously if it's true that "prayer works." (And no, I don't believe "prayer works.")

And another thing- this specific situation with Damar Hamlin is very unique in how it has inspired such an outpouring of support for him. I think in this case, the reason that so many people care is because of how dramatically it happened, on live tv in front of thousands of football fans, and then there were several days when he was in the hospital in critical condition and people just had to wait and see what happened- and the emotions surrounding this specific string of events inspire people to pray more so than if it had played out differently. What if it had happened somewhere else other than a football stadium full of fans, and therefore fans didn't feel the emotions of it this way, and didn't care enough to pray for him? Would God help him less because of that?

It occurs to me that some bad situations happen faster than others. Some bad situations allow more time for news to spread and people to pray about it (for example, if someone is sick and in the hospital) and some bad situations happen so fast that by the time anyone hears about it, the damage is already done (for example, being killed in a car accident). So, the "slower" tragedies surely get more prayer during the window of time where an intervention from God could make a difference, right? Does that mean that God does more to help with those "slow" situations than the "faster" ones? Like, "I would help, but I'm waiting for more people to pray about it ... oops too late."

Perhaps we can compensate for this by pre-emptively praying against those kind of "fast" emergencies that we won't hear about in time to pray for in real time. Maybe every day we should pray, "God, help everyone today who gets into some emergency situation which doesn't allow any time for their friends to hear about it and pray for them." How many times should we pray this every day so that God helps with "fast" emergencies equally to how much he helps with "slow" emergencies? Let's do the math on it! If people really believe that "prayer works," then they need to do the math on this and figure it out. Ah, but isn't prayer more "effective" if you know more details about the situation / if you have a personal connection / if it's something you really really care about? So the vague, impersonal "help anyone who gets into a 'fast' emergency" prayer ends up being a really "weak" prayer then, right? Should we imagine specific bad situations happening to specific people, and get ourselves all worked up emotionally about how bad those things would be, and then pray against them- would that produce prayers as powerful as prayers that happen in real time in response to a real situation? (Please don't do this, it would be terrible for your mental health.)

OR, WAIT, maybe this is how God handles this issue: I have heard anecdotes from Christians like "I just randomly woke up in the middle of the night and felt a burden [this means a really strong feeling that you are supposed to do something] to pray for so-and-so, so I did, and then a few days later I talked to so-and-so on the phone and found out they were in a dangerous situation at the EXACT SAME TIME that I felt I needed to pray for them! Wow what an amazing miracle! This is wonderful!" These stories are, uh, bad, because if you suddenly, out of nowhere, get a weird sense that something terrible is happening to your friends/family, this is called ANXIETY and you need to go to THERAPY and learn how to have more realistic emotions about the actual dangers that exist in the world. A terrible way to handle it would be to say "oh, maybe the reason I feel worried about so-and-so is because there REALLY IS something bad happening to them, and I need to pray as hard as I possibly can right now, because they might DIE, and it would be MY FAULT for not praying enough."

Like, how does this even work, actually? This is a common trope in stories that Christians tell- suddenly out of nowhere you have a sense that you NEED to pray for someone, and then later you find out that that person was in danger at that exact same time, but they are safe now. How does this work? Person A is in danger, so God says "oh no, I must do something!" and tells Person B to pray for Person A, so Person B prays "God, help Person A", so then God helps Person A? Doesn't this seem overly complicated? Why does God need to get Person B involved at all? It seems like God thinks Person B feeling cool about having direct communication from God is more important than Person A's safety. Because, if Person B doesn't understand what God is trying to tell them, or perhaps they've been in therapy for anxiety before and they know that it's best for their mental health to ignore random terrifying thoughts that just pop up out of nowhere, and therefore Person B doesn't pray- then does God not help Person A? You may say, well, maybe God helps Person A anyway- it's not dependent on what Person B does. Oh, so the only reason God got Person B involved was so Person B could have this cool experience of supernaturally knowing that a bad thing was happening to Person A? If that was God's goal, why give Person B thoughts of worry- why not give them thoughts of "a bad thing was happening to Person A, but it's fine now, they're okay"?

Just seems like this God is really disorganized.

Okay, so, coming back to Mehta's blog post, where this whole thing started. I'm writing about this because I think his post misrepresents the motivation that Orlovsky had for saying a whole prayer on his sports show. It kind of portrays it like, praying is a habit that religious people have when bad things happen, which is fine for them but they should do it on their own time- as if that's all there is to it. Completely missing the idea that Christians believe that prayer actually does affect what happens in the real world. (Lol, well, *I* don't believe that, and I'm a Christian...) If you don't engage with that idea, you're not really going to be able to make an effective argument about this situation.

Ah, but I am not saying "Orlovsky really does believe that praying on tv could possibly save Hamlin's life, therefore it's totally fine for him to do that and no one should criticize him." (This is a pretty minor example in my opinion- but there are much more serious examples along the same lines.) Even though a lot of Christians really genuinely believe things like that, society cannot say that means it's totally fine for Christians to just go ahead and do whatever it is they believe will influence God to save lives or whatever.

Because, here's an example, there are Christians who believe that God causes disasters to happen because the US allows same-sex marriage. And therefore, by denying rights to queer people, we are preventing God from sending hurricanes, and so we are saving lives.

Yes, there are many examples along the lines of "we need to do something/ not do something, and then God will cause some totally unrelated good thing/ bad thing to happen"- the only connection between the "cause" and "effect" being God. Rather than a cause/effect relationship there's actually evidence for in the real world. And society can't just decide "well, you have to let these religious people do this, because they really genuinely believe it will save lives." No, we can't live that way, because anyone could make up literally anything and claim that we *must* do it or else God will kill people. We can't allow that- we live in a society.

I do think it's a difficult thing, though, because people genuinely believe that our actions affect what God does to us, so it's very difficult to argue against. Difficult to find some sort of outcome that people would agree on. 

In summary: I'm glad to hear that Damar Hamlin has been doing better. I am a football fan, and it was emotional for me to see so many football-adjacent people coming together like this to show support for him. A lot of people have been talking publicly about praying for Hamlin- and I understand why atheists may have a problem with this in certain circumstances. But Mehta's post misrepresents the motivation for praying on a sports tv show. It was likely motivated not by a desire to use a tragic situation to push religion on other people, but by a belief that maybe this could actually help Hamlin's medical condition. The idea that, maybe if we pray more, we can convince God to help him. 

If you want to argue against this, it's important to understand the reasons behind it. And yes, let's definitely argue against the idea that "prayer works." Why would God choose not to help people just because there weren't enough prayers about it? What kind of monstrous God is this? Yes, fight against that kind of God.

---

Related:

God of Bad Snaps

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

"The Authority of Scripture" is One Hell of a Drug

The Worst Bible Story

Blogaround

1. AI-generated Valentine's Cards (posted February 4) "You're the snail's poise!"

2. Reliable sources and blogger ethics panels (posted February 2) "I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, 'Why doesn’t LGM have more Fred Bonine content? Is one 2000-word post every 18 years really enough?'"

3. Washington selects Commanders as new NFL team name after two-season process (posted February 2) Awesome!

4. Former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sues NFL, three teams alleging racist hiring practices (posted February 1) "The lawsuit alleges that one team, the New York Giants, engaged in a 'sham interview' process with Flores for their vacancy. The suit alleges that Patriots head coach Bill Belichick 'mistakenly disclosed' to Flores in a text message exchange on Jan. 24 -- three days before Flores was set to interview with the Giants -- that the organization intended to hire Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, who is white."

5. Discovery of what ailed Dolly the dinosaur is a first, researchers say (posted February 10) "About 150 million years ago, a young long-necked dinosaur fell ill, likely coughing and suffering from a fever as it wandered what is now southwest Montana."

6. What happened to the nonbelief channel at Patheos? (posted January 4) "Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stopped writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focused on how to live a good life within their own worldview."

Blogaround

1. NFL pledges to halt ‘race-norming,’ review Black claims (posted June 2) "The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of “race-norming” — which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function — in the $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias." What the fuck.

2. Yes, But WHICH Hell Shall We Fear? (Journey Into Hell #1) (posted May 25) "There's no more reason to fear it than we have to fear the Chinvat Bridge or Mictlan."

3. Does God Have His Own Logic? (posted February 4) "Yes, of course there are things that are mysteries to us but not to God. That is not the issue here. The issue here is what a person is permitted to say if he or she expects to be taken seriously." Yes, THANK YOU, I am very excited to find an evangelical saying this.

4. Cruella (posted May 28) "Did you ever wonder how Cruella De Vil, the vampy fiend from Disney's '101 Dalmatians,' became evil enough to want to kill puppies and skin them for fur coats? You didn't? Ah, well—there's a movie about it, 'Cruella.'"

5. Still There for You: China’s Enduring Obsession With ‘Friends’ (posted June 7) Yep, it's like every Chinese person my age is a fan of "Friends" and used it as a key resource in learning English. My husband is a huge fan and so now I am a huge fan too.

Blogaround

1. Behind viral photo of Rep. Andy Kim cleaning up at midnight after riots (posted January 8) "When he finally did walk around the rotunda — his favorite and arguably the most storied room of the building — the disarray left him speechless. Water bottles, broken furniture, tattered Trump flags and pieces of body armor and clothing were strewn on the marble floor as if it were an abandoned parking lot."

2. 'If I would have known then what I know now, I would have never stepped foot in the NFL' (posted January 17) "The Raiders settled for $1.25 million in September 2014, paying cheerleaders from 2010 - 2014 what they were owed back in wages." 

3. Chinese New Year- the biggest holiday of the year here- is the week of February 12. This year, the government is recommending that people don't travel, due to the pandemic. China has been doing extremely well this whole year, close to 0 cases on a day-to-day basis (not counting the imported ones- but all international travelers are required to quarantine, so those cases get caught before they can spread), but with a few outbreaks here and there. (For example, I am in Shanghai- Shanghai had 7 locally-transmitted COVID cases in November, which was a BIG DEAL, and then none since then.) The authorities respond to any COVID case with very strict lockdowns and quarantines, and so we are doing well and life is mostly "back to normal" except that we have to wear masks, and can't travel.

Schools in Shanghai have requirements that students can't come to school if they or their family members have come from other cities within the past 14 days. HR at my job sent an email about what kind of quarantine and COVID-testing you need to do if you travel to a "medium risk" or "high risk" area within China during the new year holiday.

So yeah we are staying in Shanghai.

It's new year, it's the biggest holiday in China, so I think there will be people travelling, but definitely less than a normal year.

Blogaround

1. World’s first 100% complete T-rex skeleton found locked in battle with a Triceratops (posted November 20) Wow this is incredible.

2. Wow I feel this (though yeah, I'm extremely privileged compared to other immigrants):

one thing i have been continually struck by this year is how many people don’t realize that this situation of being unable to see your family for unfair reasons beyond your control is simply regular life for so many immigrants and people in diaspora

— bettina makalintal (@bettinamak) November 22, 2020

3. Watch penguins take over an NFL field (posted November 24) Adorable!

Blogaround

Shakira and J Lo perform at the Superbowl LIV halftime show. Image source.

1. New York City votes to ban cashless businesses in step against discrimination (posted January 24) "Supporters of the ban argue that electronic-only payments discriminate against low-income people, undocumented immigrants and people of color, who are less likely to have a bank account or access to credit."

2. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide (posted February 1) "In a surprising number of stories, the new house was often full of a weird number of beds, laid out in bizarre configurations."

3. the homeschool reading gap (posted November 5) "Every book I read included a protagonist I was intended to emulate; every book was aspirational and morally correct."

4. As a 28-Year-Old Latino, I’m Shocked My New Novel, Memoirs of a Middle-Aged White Lady, Has Been So Poorly Received (posted January 31) "The name Chab was not a typo. There are plenty of 8-year-old white American boys named Chab. I googled it."

5. Report: Outbreak of idiocy spreading 10,000 times faster than coronavirus (posted January 28) "Public health officials in Toronto have confirmed its first 50,000 cases of being a misinformed fuckwit as xenophobic conspiracy theories and tales of false cures continue to spread across social media."

6. Did Any Medieval Knight Ever Actually Rescue a Damsel in Distress? (posted January 29) [content note: rape] "Well to be completely honest, despite our best and extremely lengthy efforts of our quite experienced team researching this to try and find one single definitively-known instance of that supposed bastion of chivalry, the medieval knight, rescuing a woman in peril, we couldn't find one- with one possible exception we're going to get into in a bit."

OKAY this gives me FEELINGS about complementarianism. Complementarian Christians be like "oh remember the good old days when women knew their place and men valued them and treated them with the utmost respect, those idyllic days of traditional gender roles when women were safe and loved, oh if only we could get back to then, instead of now when women are exploited and sexualized because feminism says men no longer have to protect them." And the "knight rescuing a damsel in distress" is one of the most iconic symbols of that. (I seem to remember the purity-culture book "Captivating" made an EXTREMELY BIG DEAL of that.)

And now I happen upon this video that says, actually, we don't have any evidence that ever happened. And instead, that video contains one story after another after another of women being raped and forced into marriage, while men in power did NOTHING.

Complementarianism is a load of shit.

7. Shakira & J. Lo's FULL Pepsi Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show (posted February 3) Oh my god they are AMAZING.
It has come to my attention that some conservative Christians are criticizing them for being "sexualized" or something? Wow so glad I don't care about that any more.

8. The Super Bowl Is Over. The Discrimination Indigenous Peoples Face Is Not (posted February 3) "Like other teams that have mascots that they claim 'honor' Indigenous peoples, many Chiefs fans proudly sport their headdresses and tomahawk chops, perpetuating the stereotypes that we are primitive people who either no longer exist or only exist as savage warriors."

Blogaround

A little fluffy puppy. Image source.

1. Hundreds dead, no one charged: the uphill battle against Los Angeles police killings (posted August 24) [content note: police brutality, murder] "'It really greenlights this type of behavior,' said Melina Abdullah, a BLM organizer in LA. 'Police don’t have to care about anybody’s life, especially if they’re black or brown or poor.'"

2. For A Lady I Know. A poem.

3. I didn’t read Harry Potter when I was growing up. And I wasn’t alone. (posted September 1) Oooh, Alissa Wilkinson has ALL the receipts here.

4. 23: Sensory Series (2) “Picky Eater” (posted September 12) "Recently I’ve been examining why I struggle with certain foods and have come to the same conclusion as I have with much of my post-diagnosis self-exploration: I’m actually incredibly strong and my experiences are real and valid." YES.

5. Pat Robertson Thanks God For Aiming Hurricane At Other States: People Living There Should Pray Like I Did (posted September 12) Hahahaha well usually when Christians pray "God, please let bad things happen to other people instead of to me" they are way less obvious about it. This is one of the biggest reasons I don't pray anymore, actually. Because I realized the majority of my prayer requests could basically be rephrased as "God, please let bad things happen to other people instead of to me."

6. Baltimore Cops Carried Toy Guns to Plant on People They Shot, Trial Reveals (posted February 1) Whattttttt

7. The Gospel According to the Rumble Ponies (posted September 5) "Kaepernick, like Tebow, was an outspoken evangelical Christian who was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. And while the NFL forbade Tebow from writing Bible verses in his eye black, it couldn’t do anything to prevent Kaepernick from wearing Bible verses on the field because he had those verses tattooed on both arms."

God of Bad Snaps

Football players ready for the snap. Image source.

[content note: abusive Christian theology]

All right, I read this extremely bad, abusive article on Desiring God and, you know, God called me to blog about this crap: God Wounds Us Because He Loves Us.

(You can tell from the title it's going to be bad. It's actually worse than you think.)

Here's a bit from the beginning section:

Sometimes the Lord’s love for us feels like the opposite of love, but that’s only because we can’t see everything he sees. Behind the real pain he allows is an even more real love for those for whom he sent his Son (John 3:16).

The world would never call any kind of pain “love.” The world simply does not have categories for God doing whatever necessary to draw us to himself — his strength, his righteousness, his help, his peace. But his love for us explodes the world’s small categories and far surpasses its weak expectations.

First of all, "Sometimes the Lord’s love for us feels like the opposite of love, but that’s only because we can’t see everything he sees" is pretty much the dictionary definition of gaslighting. Telling someone that they're wrong about their own emotions, and they don't truly understand what they really need, so they need to just trust someone else to know what's best for them. Even though that someone else is hurting them. See, it's not really hurting them, they only think it's hurting because they don't really understand. Ugh. Gross.

And this kind of crap can be used to justify any type of immorality under the sun. Oh you think xyz is bad? Well, God says it's good, so clearly you are wrong. This ideology trains people to ignore their own conscience and simply follow an authority figure. Because they just don't know what's good for themselves. 

(Any time people start believing that the true nature of reality is something other than what we're perceiving with our own senses, you get into some very dangerous territory. That's how people justify killing in the name of God. Oh, it may look like they're doing something evil when they kill people, but actually they're doing a good thing because of these beliefs about the spiritual world which can't be proven or disproven. And the killer might truly, genuinely believe this.)

Also, I love how the writer of that Desiring God article says "The world would never call any kind of pain 'love'" as if his readers are going to be like "ah, the world, they're so foolish, they don't understand how pain can be loving", but, seriously? I read that and I was like "yep I will stick with 'the world' then. Pretty sure causing pain is NOT love."

It gets worse when the article starts giving us examples from the book of Amos:

We see this kind of unexpected and painful love in Amos. God has done everything reasonable to awaken his people to their sin and to rescue them from their rebellion against him, but they simply will not relent.

He withheld food to make them hungry: “I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:6). God was willing to watch them hunger if that’s what it took for them to hunger for him, again.

He stopped the rain to make them thirsty: “I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; I would send rain on one city, and send no rain on another city; one field would have rain, and the field on which it did not rain would wither; so two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water, and would not be satisfied; yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:7–8). God was willing to let them thirst if that’s what it took for them to thirst for righteousness.

He corrupted the fields to ruin their harvest: “I struck you with blight and mildew; your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:9). God was willing to compromise his people’s livelihood if that’s what it took for them to look to him for all they needed.

Most devastating of all, he even killed their loved ones: One last time from Amos: “I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, and carried away your horses, and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me. . . . I overthrew some of you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning; yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:10–11). God was willing even to see them die if that’s what it took for them to truly live.

Wow, I mean, God is REALLY BAD AT THIS, huh? Like, you want people to like you, so you cause terrible things to happen to them? What? Does God not understand human emotions at all?

This isn't love. This is using threats and violence to control people. If you can get them so desperate that they fear for their lives, they might choose to beg for help from their attacker. Make a deal with the devil, so to speak.

Also, wtf is going on with the "God was willing to watch them hunger if that’s what it took for them to hunger for him, again"? It's phrased as if God is the one suffering, like we should admire what a noble sacrifice God is choosing to make just because he wants so much to be close to his people. WTF? This is like in the movie "Shrek" where Lord Farquaad tells his soldiers, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make." Y'all realize that was a joke, right? You know that line was meant to show that Lord Farquaad is a heartless jerk, right?

The god described here does not actually love these people. He is not interested in giving them blessings and happiness; what matters the most is that they worship him. If they experience blessings and happiness but ignore him, well he's not okay with that.

There are lots of things in the world that only make the news when somebody screws them up. If they do their job properly, nobody ever hears about it. Like a bad snap at the Superbowl- normally, people don't think about who is snapping the ball, but then somebody screws it up and we all learn his name and blame him.

(For those who don't know football: The "snap" is the start of a play, where the football is originally laying on the ground and then the designated player "snaps" it up so the play can start. This happens maybe 100 times each game. Occasionally there's a "bad snap" which means the player who was supposed to snap made a mistake and the football went flying or rolling on the ground in some weird direction.)

The God of evangelical Christianity is like that football player, snapping the ball. Going along, doing his job well, and he's not happy about it because he doesn't have fans. He feels like nobody appreciates what he does. Even though his work is contributing good to the world, allowing the game to happen- that's not what he wants. He wants fans.

If he is making people happy and successful, but they don't realize it's because of him, he's not okay with that. Because his goal isn't actually to make people happy or successful.

So he starts messing up the snaps. He starts dropping the ball, every single time. The whole team is thrown into confusion, trying to figure out what on earth has suddenly gone wrong and why they can't even run one play.

And his team loses. Over and over and over, because you definitely can't score any points on offense if you never have a successful snap. The snapper isn't doing his job, and it causes a huge crisis. Snapping the ball is one small simple thing that usually goes well and his teammates don't have to worry about it. But if he doesn't do it, it ruins everything for his team.

So they come and ask what's wrong and why can't he snap the ball correctly. But he still refuses, because they're not worshiping him yet. Finally it's at the point where all the players and fans are begging and offering him ANYTHING just PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE we'll do ANYTHING, if you would just snap the ball correctly. And then he agrees, and goes back to doing his job the right way. But if they ever stop worshiping him, he'll ruin the game again.

Because he's not really concerned with how other people feel. He doesn't really want to do good for the world. If his team wins but he doesn't have many fans, he counts it as a loss. If his team loses but suddenly tons and tons of people are paying attention to him, begging him to snap the ball, he calls that a win.

This is a god who's not okay with helping people if he doesn't get the credit for it. He hates it when people are living their good happy lives but not worshiping him. He believes they must be punished for that sin. He can't stand anything that's not all about him, no matter how beneficial it is to people.

That's what we see in those examples from Amos. God thought the people didn't love him enough, so he destroyed a bunch of their things, and even killed some of them.

If you ever meet a god like that, don't worship them. Don't love them. Because they never loved you. They never wanted you to have a healthy and happy life. They just want fans.

---------------------

I was called by God to write blog posts in response to the abusive theology of John Piper/ Desiring God/ The Gospel Coalition. Here are some of my other posts:
I knew Desiring God ideology is spiritual abuse, but wow.
"The Authority of Scripture" is One Hell of a Drug

Blogaround

New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem. Image source.

1. How Harry Potter Parallels to the Deaf World (posted March 7) "It is because ever since I read the very first Potter book when I was a little boy, I've always felt like the author J. K. Rowling were inspired by the Deaf community for her Harry Potter and the whole wizardry idea."

2. It's Been 96 Years Since White Mobs Destroyed Tulsa's Black Wall Street (posted May 31) [content note: anti-black violence] Yeah, I remember this was in my history textbook in high school- we learned about it when we studied the civil rights movement, but I didn't really *get* it. I didn't get how much the white people involved HATED black people- as in, hated them so much that they literally didn't want them to live there as full members of society (and that there are still white people today who truly do hold those same explicitly racist, evil beliefs). The term "riot" makes it sound like a crowd kind of got out of control and it's not really anyone's fault, it "just happened" in "the heat of the moment"- but no, it wasn't like that. You don't "get out of control" and then go pilot a plane to drop burning balls of chemicals on the areas of the city where black people lived and worked. That takes concentration. That's something that's done by people who know exactly what they're doing. Must have been that those white people had wanted to destroy black homes and businesses for a long time, and they finally found an opportunity where society would let them get away with it.

And I didn't get how it must have felt for black people to live in fear of violence. (And actually, that's still true today.) How thousands of them fled their homes after the massacre in Tulsa, and had to go rebuild their lives, and there was no justice- nobody in charge did anything to meaningfully address the great injustice they had suffered. Like, society is just okay with it when people do these terrible things to you, and you just have to move on and deal with it without any help, without any justice.

3. White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (3.1) (posted September 19) "Back in 1975, “therapeutic” still meant mostly positive things."

Also: White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (4). An excerpt from an evangelical book published in 1975, arguing "But what about the right of the child to be born despite the evil way in which it was conceived [rape]? In this case the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo."

4. These are the NFL players protesting today amid Trump criticism (posted September 24)

5. The Washington Post and the Kaepernick Controversy: A Tale of Normalizing Toxic Christianity (posted September 25) "Further, the white supremacist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ Christianity embodied by the vast majority of white Evangelicals is incompatible with democracy and downright irredeemable, and we need to say so. Kaepernick’s Christianity does not need anything from Tebow’s."

And a good post from Libby Anne along the same lines: Progressive Piety and Conservative Politics: On Kaepernick, Tebow, and American Christianity.

BREAKING NEWS: Purity Culture Adherents Completely Miss the Point

Lady Gaga performs at the Superbowl LI halftime show. Immodestly. I love it. Image source.

[content note: rape culture in superbowl commercials]

This article was posted on Desiring God two weeks ago: How Do You Super Bowl? Ideas for Navigating Controversial Ads. It's full of advice about how good Christians should deal with the issue of superbowl ads. "But wait," you ask, "what exactly is the problem? Why are superbowl ads a tricky thing that people need advice about?" Well. I'm glad you asked. Let's see how the article explains it:

But in recent years, an increasing number of those pricey commercials also have proven sexually suggestive, or worse. Ads by Victoria’s Secret and GoDaddy are notorious examples, not to mention the latest efforts by the major beer companies, or this year’s inevitable racy movie trailer.

So the problem is that the ads are "sexually suggestive." No details are given beyond that. Seriously. There's nothing in this entire article that tells us why it's bad for ads to be "sexually suggestive." What exactly is harmful about that?

Fortunately (heh) I grew up in purity culture, so I can fill in here. This is a type of Christianity that is very much afraid of "lust." If a man looks at a woman who's not his wife and feels sexual attraction, oh my goodness DANGER DANGER. Yes, sometimes they will say that sexual attraction is normal (well, only if it's the heterosexual kind, of course) and not a sin, but it can lead to lust, which is a sin- but everything is talked about in such vague terms that many people end up with the impression that their very normal, benign feelings of attraction are a dirty dirty sin. (For example: I'm asexual, I don't experience sexual attraction, but I TOTALLY considered myself to be "struggling with lust" many times during my years in purity land.)

Notice that I said "if a man looks at a woman"- this is very gendered. In this ideology, men are animals which can hardly control themselves, and women don't really have any sexual desire at all. Instead, women want attention from men. So the "danger" from an advertisement containing a photo of a sexy woman is that it will make men lust and make women think "I should dress like that so men will want me."

At any rate, anything that invites people to think about the desirability of sex, sexuality, or sexiness is an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TEMPTATION. That's what that Desiring God article is about. That's the danger they are trying to help people avoid.

They totally missed the point.

The problem with superbowl commercials isn't that they acknowledge that sexiness exists. The problem is that they portray women and women's bodies as objects solely for men's enjoyment. Often in these commercials, women aren't fully human individuals who make their own choices; instead, they are the reward a man gets for being awesome. There was one particularly horrifying one I remember, which must have been 7 years ago but I remember it because it scared me that much: It was a commercial for potato chips or something, and every time the guy in the commercial took a bite of the chips, a lucky thing happened to him. One of the "lucky things" was a woman's clothes disappearing- she was walking down the street, and suddenly her clothes were gone and she was walking down the street in sexy underwear. And we the viewers are supposed to see this- a woman's clothes suddenly disappearing for no reason as she minds her own business- as a happy thing that happened to this guy who was eating the potato chips. We're supposed to see it as a good thing. We're not supposed to think about how the woman feels- she doesn't have her own feelings, she's only there to make the guy happy. OH MY GOD.

That scares me. That really scares me. It scares me that there are so many people who see no problem with that message- that commercial was approved to air during the superbowl, the biggest event for TV commercials. What if I was walking down the street and my clothes flew off? Would you think "WOW SO COOL!" or would you think "oh my god someone help her! Give her a coat!"

But the Desiring God article about the dangers of superbowl ads doesn't say anything about sexism at all. Not a word about how so many ads promote disgusting, dehumanizing messages about women. (Though in that ideology, if they said they were concerned about the messages it's sending about women, they would mean messages like "it's okay to wear sexy clothes." Again, they totally miss the point.)

They don't care what the commercial is actually about. They don't care whether it presents a healthy view of sexuality where everyone respects each other, or a view where women are public property and don't make their own choices about sex. In their way of thinking, all that matters is that the ad includes an image of a sexy woman. They don't look at how other people in the ad treat her; instead, it's the sexy woman herself who is intrinsically dangerous. Her body is dangerous, and good Christians must not look.

Must not look. That's right, all the "advice" in that Desiring God article is along the lines of "don't look." It's full of practical suggestions about changing the channel, muting during commercials, or skipping the superbowl altogether. Don't look. The sexy woman's body is so dangerous, you must not even look.

The most heartbreaking, horrifying part of the article is this:

We always have a jump channel set on the remote, so pushing one button changes to a ‘safe’ channel. We usually set it to some channel about food or houses or animals. The kids have seen enough commercials to know and will themselves say ‘jump.’ So they are aware and can discern, but we don’t leave it on to increase exposure

OH MY GOD, they trained their kids to say "jump."

I was under the impression that the concern about kids seeing sexual things on TV is that the kids are too young to understand. If they're too young to understand, then how can you teach them to recognize a commercial that they need to "jump" away from? I'll tell you how: you teach them to look for a woman wearing sexy clothes- that's the sign that a commercial is not safe. Do you see how messed-up this is? They're teaching their kids that the problem is the woman herself. The problem is her body, the existence of her cleavage. Not how the other characters in the commercial treat her.

I submit to you that a child cannot develop a healthy view of sexuality if they are trained in this way. Especially if that child is a girl (or assigned female at birth). What happens when she starts to grow up and she discovers that her own body has boobs and curves- those same dangerous things that she was taught to "jump" away from?

What happens when these kids meet an actual person who is "dressed immodestly", the kind of person they would "jump" away from if they saw them on TV? Are they going to be able to treat her like an actual human being, or just see her as a dangerous object they need to protect their pure hearts from?

Purity culture is so totally fixated on sex and sexiness that it's unable to even see the sexism and disrespect present in these ads. They're so focused on superficial things like showing skin that they can't comprehend the morals and messages in these ads, the difference between consent and sexual assault. Of course they miss the point. Of course they can't see it when their only advice is "don't look."

I can't watch the Superbowl this year (a post about what I gave up when I came to China)

There are international bars in Shanghai, hosting Superbowl parties that start at 7:30 am. But I have work. Image source.

Apparently the Falcons are playing the Patriots tomorrow. Except, if you're in the US reading this, then I should say "today." But in China I'm publishing this Sunday night and they're playing Monday morning.

And I can't watch it this year. For the past 3 Superbowls, I've been in China, and I've watched them all, live. 2 were during Chinese New Year, so I had off work that day anyway, and 1 was when I was working evenings and weekends as an English teacher, so I never worked on Monday morning.

But this year, I have to leave my apartment at 7:45 Monday morning and go to work. That's 6:45 Sunday night in the US (eastern time). I can't watch it live, and I don't plan to watch it Monday night. It's gonna be 4 or 5 hours long, I don't really have time for that on a Monday night. Plus will I be able to find a website to watch it without accidentally seeing the final score before I even start?

Plus I don't have other football fans here to watch it with.

So I guess I'll just watch the highlights when I get home on Monday night.

I gave up my whole American lifestyle when I came to China. But for some reason, losing the Superbowl is the saddest part.

5 years ago, I went to a Superbowl party, and I came home and thought, "Next year I'll be in China, and I won't be able to watch it. And even though going to China is my dream and it's what I really want, it's still a real loss to have to give up things like that. And it's okay to grieve over that." (As it turns out, I was not in China a year after that, because God is not the kind of God you can trust to not let your internal organs derail all of your life plans.)

I've been here 3 and a half years. That means I've missed 3 Thanksgivings. Yeah I make my own Thanksgiving, but it's not the same. And I forgot about the existence of Labor Day, until I saw people on Twitter talking about "it's Labor Day weekend." And I forgot about the existence of Columbus Day, until, again, Twitter. And I forgot about the existence of Groundhog Day, until I saw it trending on Twitter on the night of February 2- that's morning of February 2 in the US.

And after 3 and a half years, I'm starting to miss the US. I miss bagels. I miss good milk. You can get milk that's good enough in China, but it's not the same. And it's so hard to find decent sandwich bread here. I miss chocolate birthday cakes with buttercream frosting. Yeah, I buy myself a fancy piece of cake when it's my birthday in China, but I eat it alone- Hendrix doesn't want any because it's "too sweet." And if you're at a restaurant that has a special "treat" for free for your birthday, it turns out it's a bowl of noodles.

And you all in the US just lived through that election. I didn't; I only lived it when I was on Twitter, and I could avoid it if I wanted. I've had a very, very different experience than you all have had. (And yes, I voted.) Chinese people laugh at the orange antichrist- his Chinese name is 川普 [chuān pǔ] because we don't have the "tr" sound here- because he's a joke, obviously... but it's not the same as the way I laugh at him with Americans on Twitter. They're not scared like I am. It's not their country. The Saturday after the election, I saw one of my American friends, and we were sad together, and that was the first time I'd met another American since it happened.

And I wish I could see my family more than twice a year. I wish that when I heard about some fun event, or conference, or friend's wedding, or protest, I didn't have to say "well that's not during the week I'm planning to be on that continent, so there's just no way I can go."

I chose to come to China. And it's been good, but it's been hard. The last time I had to renew my residence permit, and I was stuck in a sea of bureacracy with no clearly-defined rules and I worried I was going to get kicked out of China, I told Hendrix, "I didn't know it was going to be this hard. If I had known, maybe I wouldn't have come." But I'm not interested in wondering whether I made "the right decision"- those kinds of conversations assume that living in the US is the default for me and I'm only allowed to get off that path ("God's plan") if I have a really really good reason. I like that China has become "normal" for me and it's coming back that would be a big change, a big serious decision- rather than staying.

Back then, I was very much influenced by the ideology of radical Christian missions, which said the most amazing godly people were the ones who gave up everything and moved to some mysterious place with a totally different language and culture. And even though I didn't end up coming to China as a missionary, and I didn't end up doing it for God- I did it because I wanted to- there was this idea that "giving up your life" was such a good and heroic thing, and such a simple thing. I knew I wouldn't have skim milk like at home, but did I really know it? People talked about how it was hard to give up stuff for God, but back then I didn't know what it was like to hunger for a regular donut after not seeing one for 6 months. Or to be like "I wanna go to Panera" when the nearest Panera is 7000 miles away.

They said "give til it hurts" and it sounded good in theory, like I'm on an adventure for God, but tomorrow I won't be watching the Superbowl, and that hurts.

I said to Hendrix, "I'm going to have to teach you how to watch football." He said, "You did," because I explained the rules to him during previous Superbowls. And I said, no no, I don't mean the rules, I mean about what you're supposed to say when you're watching the game. You have to say "GO GO GO" and "Oh come on, that was NOT a fumble" and "Challenge that! Where's the red flag? YES he threw the red flag" and "GET HIM! GET HIM! NO NO NO NONO GET HIM!" and "Are we in field goal range?" and "Come on we really need some defense here, how about a blitz."

Hendrix is like, "I like to be quiet when I'm watching TV." Okay then. Someday I'll teach him better.

After 3 and a half years, I'm starting to miss the US. For some reason I miss the Superbowl most of all.

Blogaround

A yellow lab who believes itself to be stuck under a laundry basket. Image source.

1. Law of Kindness: how Christianity affects my ethics (posted February 5) "There’s a mental separation I have to live with: as a public citizen, as a voter, as a member of interfaith communities and activism movements, I’m not a pacifist. I believe that mandating pacifism on oppressed peoples is another act of violence against them. I think that enforcing standards like “be kind” or “stay calm” or “tolerate ignorant shitheads” onto trauma survivors can re-victimize them all over again."

2. Why the “God Is a Father and Must Punish His Children” Defense of Hell Makes No Sense to Me (posted February 9) "A lot of justifications of hell revolve around seeing God as a parent who must punish his wayward children. But here’s the thing—I don’t punish my children."

3. Beyoncé's Formation reclaims black America's narrative from the margins (posted February 8) Also, watch Beyonce's Superbowl performance here.

4. A request from your fat friend: what I need when we talk about bodies. (posted February 7) "Every discussion about bodies — whether in the media or amongst friends — is about how to avoid the horrible fate of looking like me."

5. Cam Newton, the Super Bowl, and Racist Stereotypes Against a Black Quarterback (posted February 6) "A white reporter demanding that a black quarterback answer for white stereotypes against black quarterbacks points to the power structures of racism in American culture. Black people must answer for racism? Really?"

6. Beyoncé is Not Racist or ‘Anti-Cop’/ And Neither were the Black Panthers (posted February 10)

7. Here Is Why Only Women Showed Up to the Senate After Snowmageddon (posted January 27) "Because if you’re not a white dude, you basically have to prove everything. Forever."

8. Gravitational waves, Einstein’s ripples in spacetime, spotted for first time (posted February 11) "The observation tests Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, with unprecedented rigor and provides proof positive that black holes exist." Cool!

9. Peyton Manning’s squeaky-clean image was built on lies, as detailed in explosive court documents showing ugly smear campaign against his alleged sex assault victim (posted February 13) Oh my god. [trigger warning, sexual assault]

10. The Truth About Hymens And Sex (video) "Our bodies don't come with built-in virginity detectors, and sex isn't 'supposed to'' hurt the first time."

11. Christian Ed: Not Quite Dead? (posted February 13) "The problem with Christian colleges ... is the conviction that thinking the right things is what defines us as faithfully Christian. And so we create lists of things we have to think in order to play on one particular playing field. The problem with this is that the whole point of academic pursuit is the expansion of knowledge. And if knowledge is expanding, it will always come at the expense of what we thought we knew before."

12. How I Was Moved To Support Same-Sex Marriage In The Church (posted February 4) "For 13 years I was mostly on board with leaders who maintained that marriage was between a man and a woman, assuming they were onto something I was missing."

13. Doing Christianity “Jewishly”: Asking all the hard questions (posted January 25)

Blogaround

Image source.

1. Leprechaun Traps and the Terrible Lessons They Teach (posted March 17) "Today, thousands — if not millions — of elementary school children learned that it was okay to trap and capture another sentient creature as long as it’s in the pursuit of wealth and treasure."

2. Every Female Character in Every Disney/Pixar Animated Movie From the Past Decade Basically Has the Same Face (posted March 18)

3. Can You Change a Woman’s Mind in the Walk Up to an Abortion Clinic? (posted March 19) "There’s no evidence that activists are succeeding in changing women’s minds. What is succeeding is the one thing the Supreme Court intended: People who believe abortion is murder are able to share that message with those who least want to hear it."

4. Ravens Lineman John Urschel Loves Math More Than You Love Anything (posted March 20) "Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel recently had a math paper—titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians"—published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. You think you love math? You don't love math. John Urschel loves math."

5. one big reason why so many young people are giving up on the Bible–and their faith (posted March 18) "Deliberately creating a culture where the sometimes overwhelming difficulties of joining contemporary faith and ancient text are a welcome and expected conversation and where the outcomes of those conversations are not predetermined." Oh goodness, that would be revolutionary.

6. Why Evangelical Christianity Doesn’t Make You a Better Person (posted March 17) "I cut a long-awaited vacation short and drove 450 miles, getting in at nearly 2:00 in the morning so that I could then get up and be there for all of the events surrounding my daughter’s baptism. I sat through an hour-long ritual that made me sick to my stomach and I smiled and said all the appropriate things and pretended that none of what I was enduring was repulsive to me." That's love.

7. How I learned to stop clobber-texting and love George Bailey (posted March 16) "It would be unjust, they said, to apply a rule meant to prohibit the exploitation of the poor in such a way that it resulted in harming the very people the rule was originally meant to protect." A-frickin-men.

8. Modern Worship Music is Foreplay, Or Why I Hate Going to Church (posted March 6) "There’s a time and place for communal worship, but it seems that modern Protestant, charismatic worship gives us all the emotional (and often vaguely sexual) release with none of the support and follow up it requires."

Blogaround

Image source.

1. the post about masturbation (posted January 30) "Women shouldn’t masturbate because all men supposedly really suck at sex."

2. Equal rights for LGBT people are not last rites for Christians "The two of you go to apply for a marriage license. In line right ahead of you are two women also applying for a marriage license. The lesbian couple gets their license and leaves the office to start planning their wedding. You and your fiancée are granted a license and leave to plan your wedding. As it turns out, there are not a finite number of licenses to be granted." This post is all about the truth about homosexuality.

3. Patriots Super Bowl Win Provides Storybook Ending To NFL Credibility (posted February 1)

4. Five Reasons to Wait Until Marriage (posted February 2) "If your view of sex is such that it's something that should only come after commitments of love and it's a final way of expressing that love, then waiting is a great option for you."

5. Why Chinese people call Katy Perry 'Fruit Sister' (posted February 3)

6. Florida police used mugshots of black men for target practice. Clergy responded: #UseMeInstead. (posted January 25) "The images of pastors, monks and others wearing clothing that in part symbolizes peace and love are intended to be striking, to cause people pulling the trigger to think twice."

7. Dear Katy Perry: If You Have Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome, You Are Not Alone (posted February 4) "Whatever Jesus didn’t like the heart and fire and passion behind your performance at half-time, I don’t like that Jesus*."

8. One Shade of Grey: A Feminist Fantasy. lol.

9. Transgender and Christian: Reimagining Genesis 1 (posted January 28) Yes, it is possible to be transgender and love the bible.

Blogaround

Image source.

1. The Beauty of Bodies: Russell Wilson’s Inelegant Theology and the Joy of Incarnation (posted January 19) "I don’t have the energy to hammer someone for their feelings of gratitude anymore."

2. The Secret Weapon the Church Never Planned On – Passionate Parents of LGBT Children (posted January 20) "They look at their children and do not see 'abominations' and 'broken' people, they see the child they have known and loved."

3. Why you should still bring canned goods to food drives (posted January 20) "A visible, tangible reminder of the need of others."

4. Shanghai fires 4 top district officials blamed in the New Year's Eve stampede that killed 36 (posted January 20)

5. The boy who didn't come back from heaven: inside a bestseller's 'deception' (posted January 21) "'You’re right, this whole story is fabricated,' Johnson recalled Beth Malarkey telling him. '[But] because the book was a bestseller, no one in the evangelical publishing industry wanted to kill it.'"

6. snopes.com: Super Bowl Prostitution "No data actually support the notion that increased sex trafficking accompanies the Super Bowl."

7. The Subversion of the Creator God (posted January 21) "What I'm suggesting is that the worship of the Creator introduced into the religion of Israel a subversive element that began to slowly unwind the smug, insular, exclusive and violent imagination of Israel."