Godless in Dixie - Skepticism with a bit of a drawl.

Trying to Love Lauren Daigle

January 23, 2019 By Neil Carter

Lately I can’t seem to listen to my streaming music app without hearing Lauren Daigle’s “You Say” at least half a dozen times a day. What makes this significant (other than the fact that it’s a beautiful song) is that it’s a song by a Christian artist…except I’m not listening to a Christian station. Living in the Deep South affords me several local options for contemporary Christian music broadcasts, but I didn’t choose any of them, so this song keeps… Read more

Why the Book of Revelation is Suddenly Relevant

January 15, 2019 By Neil Carter

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What if I told you the book of Revelation really does have something to say to our current political situation? In post-Christian discussion groups online, people often ask what we are to make of this confusing book now that we’ve left our faith, and it turns out at the moment that it might be the most relevant book in the whole Bible. What’s Revelation About? So much has been said about this book over the centuries, and most of it… Read more

Why God Can Never Be Wrong

January 10, 2019 By Neil Carter

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I’ve labored for years now trying to articulate the main reasons why I left my faith—or as I prefer to say, why my faith left me—but the slipperiest explanation continues to elude me. Yesterday morning I read a post from a friend that may help me capture what I’ve been trying to say. I’ll get to that in a second. But first, the question she asked. She wondered aloud how God could allow a child to be tortured and killed… Read more

An Immodest Proposal

January 8, 2019 By Neil Carter

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Imagine for a moment that you’ve been approached by an exceptionally attractive billionaire. Well, not by him personally, but by one of his employees. And he tells you that his wealthy employer wants to ask for your hand in marriage! It’s a lot to take in, right? I know. But it’s totally legit. It’s a really big commitment…a binding, lifelong contract, in fact…and the prenup contains no small amount of fine print. He is a billionaire, after all. There are… Read more

A Christ-Haunted People

January 4, 2019 By Neil Carter

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“If our hope in Christ is for this life only, we should of all mankind be the most to be pitied!” (1 Cor. 15:19) This startling admission has been rolling around inside my head since I first read it nearly three decades ago, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it came straight from the horse’s mouth—from the apostle Paul himself. Of course, most Christians would insist that Jesus was the true founder of the Christian faith, but… Read more

The Best of Godless in Dixie in 2018

January 2, 2019 By Neil Carter

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Last year was a very. long. year. Remember Yanny vs. Laurel? That was in mid-May. I reminded my children of that and they were completely incredulous. I’m old enough to remember when newsworthy events only happened once a week, or even once a month. In 2018 it seems the news cycle completely respawned every 48 hours or so, making a week feel more like a month, and a month feel more like an entire year. It feels like we all aged… Read more

Santa’s Wager: What If You’re Wrong?

December 25, 2018 By Lori Arnold

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Over the past couple of months, my six-year-old son has become more and more interested in parsing out fact from fiction. With the Christmas holidays approaching, the subject of Santa’s existence starting cropping up a lot. He began asking me questions like, “How does Santa get into Daddy’s house if Daddy doesn’t have a chimney?” or “How do the elves make toys like video games?” Like a good skeptic, I kept turning it back to him to come up with… Read more

Why Christianity Keeps Producing Hypocrites

December 11, 2018 By Neil Carter

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Few things are more central to human nature than hypocrisy. In a way, our whole existence is a lifelong attempt to “fake it till you make it.” We learn by imitation, which means we are always pretending to be something which we have not yet become…right up until the moment that we’re no longer faking it. That’s why imposter syndrome is such a common struggle. But in time we become what we mimic; as historian Will Durant reminds us in paraphrasing… Read more

Deconstructing My Religion: A CBS Documentary (Video)

December 4, 2018 By Neil Carter

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Last night CBS Religion & Culture aired a short documentary (26:55) about the ongoing struggles of people who were raised in evangelical Christian churches but later left them for any one of dozens of possible reasons. Followers of this blog know that’s very much in my wheelhouse, and some may even remember CBS Sunday Morning including me in one of their previous treatments of this subject as a part of their coverage of the Openly Secular campaign. They interviewed half… Read more

What’s a Church For, Anyway?

December 3, 2018 By Neil Carter

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I recently wrote about a revelation of sorts that I feel I need to unpack a bit more. I attended a large Baptist church in an affluent community not too far from where I live and witnessed first-hand how sincerely some white evangelicals are struggling to understand why all their valiant efforts at winning the culture wars in America haven’t actually made anything better. In fact, things seems to be getting progressively worse every day. To be sure, they’ve won… Read more