People love to say that atheism is a religion. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the smug assertion “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” I know what they’re trying to do, but I always want to ask them, “Does that mean faith is a bad thing now, or is something you can have too much of?” It seems to me they are using a definition of faith which means “drawing conclusions before collecting enough information to… Read more
June 29, 2019
Episode 4: Leaving My Religion Was Nothing Like Entering It
June 29, 2019 By Neil Carter
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June 25, 2019
Episode 3: We Did As We Were Told
June 25, 2019 By Neil Carter
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Those of us who broke up with Jesus (he wouldn’t return our calls) are accustomed to having our motives and our sincerity questioned by those still happy with their faith. We get it all the time. [ spreaker | youtube | googledoc | pdf | mp3 ] We hear that we weren’t authentic enough, or we weren’t fully surrendered to the will of God, or we had some unconfessed sin in our lives, or whatever. Maybe we just didn’t go to the right… Read more
June 22, 2019
Episode 2: The Two Main Reasons I Left My Faith
June 22, 2019 By Neil Carter
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In the last installment, I gave my reasons why I broke up with Jesus. I was being tongue-in-cheek, but if you grew up in evangelical Christianity you know exactly why I put it that way. For us, the Christian message was framed as an invitation to a personal relationship with the Creator of the universe. It wasn’t until after we accepted the invitation that they turned around and shamed us for wanting such a thing. [ spreaker | youtube |… Read more
June 20, 2019
Episode 1: Why I Broke Up with Jesus
June 20, 2019 By Neil Carter
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About nine years ago, I broke up with Jesus. People often ask me why. There were plenty of reasons but one of the main ones was that he wouldn’t return my calls. [ spreaker | youtube | google doc | pdf | mp3 ] Since I couldn’t get in touch with him, I asked some of his friends to explain to me why he wouldn’t get back to me, but their answers were never helpful. Each one had a different explanation and… Read more
June 17, 2019
How Evangelicals Handle Doubt
June 17, 2019 By Neil Carter
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I visited another local church yesterday, and as usual it left me with some…thoughts. Friends on social media seem a bit perturbed that I keep doing this to myself, but I have good reasons for it. My family is one of many torn apart by the culture wars that have been driving wedges between loved ones for decades now, so perhaps you could think of this as opposition research. Had we not been evangelical Christians, I suspect we could have… Read more
May 26, 2019
Why Faith Isn’t a Virtue
May 26, 2019 By Neil Carter
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As a left-leaning atheist living in the most religious state in America, I stay keenly aware that those around me judge me on a value scale very different from my own. People around me see faith as a virtue, and many of them put it above all other values. They believe in the power of belief itself, and they have been taught that all other virtues flow out of that one. To their minds, people without faith are devoid of any… Read more
May 5, 2019
Was Jesus a Real Person?
May 5, 2019 By Neil Carter
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Without googling it, would you know what a CVDP is? Would you immediately know what the CMIP and AMIP are? They are, respectively, a tool for analyzing climatological models and the frameworks climatologists use to correlate, organize, and analyze massive amounts of oceanographic and atmospheric data in order to make sense of patterns in global climates. I had to look them up to know what they are, and I’m probably doing a poor job of defining them since I am not… Read more
April 17, 2019
Dear Christian Friend
April 17, 2019 By Neil Carter
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Dear Christian Friend, I want to ask you a question, but first I have to clarify to whom I am speaking, since the word “Christian” has come to mean so many things it’s hardly even useful anymore. I’m not speaking to my friends and family who’ve gradually been nudged away from That Old Time Religion to something indistinguishable from FOX News. I’m not talking to people who still think Donald Trump is a brilliant businessman and an anointed Man of… Read more
April 17, 2019
Help Me Do What I Do
April 17, 2019 By Neil Carter
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During the school year, for my day job I teach high school Algebra. Then I write in my “spare time” when I probably should be doing something else to help pay the bills (have you ever seen what teachers in Mississippi make?). Aside from a full panel of Daddy duties, I try to use any free time I get to catch up on the writing I haven’t had the time to do during the rest of the week. I’ve finally… Read more
April 13, 2019
A Religion Obsessed with Blood
April 13, 2019 By Neil Carter
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It’s amazing how different your upbringing can look to you after you get some distance from it. I grew up holding certain things as sacred which I now realize are nothing of the sort. Or perhaps I should say I see now that “sacredness” is a subjective value assigned to a thing by an individual or group. What makes it “sacred” is that it’s sacred to them. [ audio | pdf | doc ] Outside that group, however, the magic disappears…. Read more
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