Today Patheos.com—the website on which you’re reading this blog—is celebrating its fifth anniversary. By way of marking that milestone the good folks at Patheos requested their bloggers do a little video about site. My offering’s below. (Please rest assured that in real life my skin isn’t the color one typically associates with white guys about to croak from high blood pressure. For now anyway my lovely beet hue is only due to a snafu on the Tube of You.)
Patheos also requested their bloggers highlight their top 5 blog posts. I have no idea which posts of mine might qualify for that designation. Certainly the post Taking God at His Word: The Bible and Homosexuality means a great deal to me. Atheist and Christian argue about hell (in a Starbucks). Atheist wins. made some Big Points that I wanted to make. Ditto with The Fundamentally Toxic Christianity. And Introducing The Not All Like That (NALT) Christians Project isn’t a post I’m likely to ever forget.
The posts that mean the most to me, though, are the ones wherein I answer letters written to me by people seeking advice and comfort. I don’t have a favorite one of those. (Most of them are available at via the Dear John category here.)
Here on Patheos I also host and edit the Unfundamentalist Christians group blog. I don’t really have five “top” posts on that blog, either; if I didn’t think any given post was as good as any of the others, I honestly wouldn’t publish it. That said, here are five UC winners, each followed by a quote from it:
To Pro-Lifers Who Believe Adoption is Always the Answer
If a pregnant woman chooses to give birth and relinquish her child for adoption, I honor her noble decision. But it is absolutely wrong to suggest that it is the duty of a pregnant woman who doesn’t want to carry her child to term to have her baby anyway so that she can relinquish it for adoption. There are already enough of God’s children on this earth who need a family. If you want to adopt one or more such children, by all means do. But don’t enjoin a pregnant woman to grow her zygote or embryo into a newborn for you.
How does one “get over” discovering that everything they’d been taught about God and religion since childhood was a lie? How does one get over needless deaths or prolonged illnesses brought on by church teachings? How does one get over being inculcated into a “religion” that fostered rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, forced divorce, abandonment of every sort—that created and insisted upon poverty?
Thanks, Christians, for making me live a lie.
Every time this society forces me to “check” my actions to ensure that my sexuality will bring no harm to my husband or myself, I am forced to live a lie. I cannot be honest about who I am, what I think, how I live, or how I wish to behave. I am prohibited from publicly showing the same light-hearted romantic affection that no straight person thinks twice before showing his or her love.
The Earliest Picture of Jesus on the Cross*
We can glimpse a bit of the historical importance of the crucifixion through early Christian depictions of that event. The absolute earliest visual depictions of Jesus’ crucifixion exist in the form of a symbol called the staurogram.
Romans 1:26-27: A Clobber Passage That Should Lose Its Wallop
This is yet another example of how close study of the Bible – in this case, the function of a single word – raises far more questions than it does answers.
* This post was written by Dan Wilkinson. Besides writing many great posts for the UC blog (including Creationist Ken Ham versus the Truth, The American Family Association wants Christians to boycott Radio Shack. But WWJD?, When Jesus and Satan Shared a Name, and Review: “The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World”), Dan also does pretty much all of the graphics work for both the UC and my own blog. He did the Patheos cake above, for instance. I, too, fancy myself a bit of graphics guru. Here is the Patheos anniversary cake that I Photoshopped PicMonkeyed before Dan decided he could do a better job of it:
I don’t like to embarrass Dan by showing off the quality of my own stellar graphics work, but this seemed like as good a time as any to remind him that he’s not the only double-threat in the blog game.
Har!
Okay, he is.
Hey, Happy 5th Anniversary, you perfectly precious and presciently perspicacious people at Patheos! Here’s hoping for many more to come.
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