• America Godless? Number of People with No Religion Soars (2019)

America Godless? Number of People with No Religion Soars (2019)

There are now as many Americans who claim no religion as there are evangelicals and Catholics, a survey finds

April 2019

“Religious nones,” as they are called by researchers, are a diverse group made up of atheists, agnostics, the spiritual, and those who are no specific organized religion in particular. A rejection of organized religion is the common thread they share.

…The meteoric rise of religious nones began in the early 1990s and has grown 266% since 1991, he [Burge] said.

Burge estimates that ‘No Religion’ will be the largest group outright in four to six years.

Experts still debate the factors behind this wave of Americans declaring no religion.

America Godless? Number of People with No Religion Soars

The number of Americans who identify as having no religion has risen 266 percent since 1991, to now tie statistically with the number of Catholics and Evangelicals, according to a new survey.

People with no religion – known as ‘nones’ among statisticians – account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

Those three groups now represent the largest the religious groups in America. 

• Captain Marvel Movie – More Rebuttals By Others to Sexist Essay by Morse (and Related)

Captain Marvel Movie – More Rebuttals By Others to Sexist Essay by Morse (and Related)

A few days ago, complementarian Greg Morse wrote a laughably bad essay where he was attempting to criticize the Captain Marvel movie (or women serving in the military, I’m not exactly sure what his essay’s ultimate point was).

That essay resulted in a few rebuttals, which I will include below.

I myself have done a couple of blog posts about all this on this blog, located here and here.

There is one essay I am linking to below which I may want to discuss further in a future, separate blog post.

Also, before the Captain Marvel movie even premiered, sexist fan boys all over the internet were complaining online that the movie is supposedly biased against whites, or is misandrist, that actress Brie Larson (who portrays the Captain Marvel character) is a man-hating harpie.

I am not a liberal, feminist, SJW, but even I could tell that a lot of sexists and conservatives were grossly mis-characterizing Larson’s comments pre-release to make her sound like an anti-white person, or a misandrist.

• So Really, Complementarians Would Rather Little Girls Emulate Male Actors as Male Characters than Women Actors Who Are In Women’s Roles – Very Strange

That hideous post about Captain Marvel by Greg Morse of the Desiring God site got me to thinking. There may be one or two more posts coming up by me on this blog after this one, also inspired by the dreck he wrote.

(I’ve already written one post about Morse’s awful “review” of Captain Marvel.)

For many years, many protagonists in American movies where white, young men.

Certainly, when I was growing up – 1970s and beyond – that was the case.

There were one or two strong female characters in movies here and there as I was growing up, such as Princess Leia.

However, for the most part, if I, as a kid or teen, wanted to have day-dreams or fantasies about going on exciting adventures, I had to mentally insert myself in the place of the male characters in the movies or television programs I watched.

• Christianity Did Not Help Me, It Did Not Work For Me

I was a very devout Christian from childhood up to my early, maybe mid, forties.

These days, I don’t know what I am (religiously speaking).

As I look back over my life, I can see that not only did the Christian faith not help me much, but as some of its teachings were taught to me, it created obstacles in my life, and kept me stuck in harmful patterns or ways of thinking.

Supposing there is an afterlife with a Heaven and a Hell, and acceptance of Christ means a ticket into Heaven upon death, that works out just fine. I can sure see how that is beneficial later on.

Christianity, though, did not really help me with very much in the present life.

Any pain, problems, or stress I’ve had so far were not relieved by the Christian faith.

Prayer, Bible reading, believing in Jesus, volunteering at charities, attending church – none of that alleviated my problems.

• Lydia Malone of TWW and Other Sites

Lydia Malone of TWW and Other Sites

(For those of you who signed up to follow this blog for its posts about mental health topics, sexism, complementarianism, or the Me Too movement, my apologies, but this is post will be a divergence from the usual.)

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I initially began a post about Lydia Malone of The Wartburg Watch blog, SBC Today’s site, and other blogs around February 2018.

That post has been sitting in the Draft Status area of this blog for a long time. I may copy and post large portions of it into this post.

It is now February 2019. I should’ve blogged about this months ago and never did.

It’s been a few months since I last blogged about this person, and I don’t recall everything I wrote previously,  and I may be copying some content from the draft status post into this one, so I apologize if any of this is repetitive.

Just as I warned people about former Wartburg Watch blog participants Christiane and Velour in an older post, I am warning people about Lydia in this one, or to be cautious about her.

She’s not quite what she seems.

I also wrote about my issues with Lydia in this post on my blog, here:

How and Why I Post and Tweet

History

Lydia is an individual who I got to know at first at The Wartburg Watch blog, and I think she used to post to Spiritual Sounding Board blog for awhile as well. As of May 2018, she occasionally posts to the SBC Today site.

Sometime in 2017 (or possibly late 2016?), I reached out to Lydia on Twitter.

I asked Lydia if I could chat with her via Twitter’s private message system (DM-ing, Direct Messaging).

• Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances – from WYG site

Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances – from WYG site

The one thing more difficult than losing my mother was the lack of emotional support I received after she died – that plus the insensitive comments and platitudes I got from other people.

I’ve been thinking of writing about my experiences with how horribly extended family, immediate family, online friends, real life friends, and church people hurt me or totally let me down in my time of grief, for this blog.

In the meantime, there is this page, linked to below, from WYG (“What’s Your Grief”) which outlines many of the ways you will be mistreated during your time of grief: you’ll either be ignored, wounded, insulted, or offended by the people in your life who should be emotionally supporting you (and perhaps offering practical help to you) during your time of grief.

I completely related to several items on this page.

I’m only going to place a portion of the WYG article on this page; if you’d like to read the entire thing, please use this link:

Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances

Nothing puts a person’s support system to the test quite like a crisis. When the clouds of hardship dull the glare of more happy and carefree times, a person often sees their support system accurately for the very first time.

For some people, this is a reassuring experience, as they find their support system is similar to what they had assumed it would be. For others, it’s a bit, shall we say, disconcerting.

Many grieving people find that changes and disappointments within their support system become a secondary loss. They had assumed a certain type of support would be given and they feel hurt and angry when it isn’t.

• Gender Complementarian Vs Gender Egalitarian Song Lists

Gender Complementarian Vs Gender Egalitarian Song Lists

This first song is how gender complementarians envision marriage and relationships between men and women.
It’s unbiblical, insulting, and why even so many Christian marriages with “traditional values” fail and end up in divorce.

1. Put Another Log on the Fire by Tompall Glaser

2. Strut by Sheena Easton

Complementarians often teach pure male entitlement (and lie and say it’s “God’s design”) – they also have a lot of false ideas about women’s sexuality.

Namely,  complementarians assume that only men want sex, and women don’t want it, don’t like it, and don’t need it. (Think of, for instance, complementarian morons such as “preachers” Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson.)

Complementarian pastors, who are male (of course), therefore never (that I’ve heard) address the topic of husbands sexually pleasing their wives. Pastors never address what women want and prefer in sex.

Complementarians value women only as brood mares: for wifey-hood (i.e., doing housework), sex, and having and rearing children.

Also, hypocritically, a lot of Christian men use pornography, including pastors, and some of them commit fornication (see again: Mark Driscoll for one), some of them are molesting teen-aged girls who attend their churches (see: Andy Savage), but every Sunday, they are paying lip service to being chaste or staying a virgin until marriage.

Anyway, the assumption with these sexist ass-hats (complementarians) is that a man’s sexual needs and preferences are paramount, so they coach wives in their sexist, stupid books, sermons, and blog posts, that the wife should always have sex whenever and however the husband wants.
Which results in this song:

Read the lyrics to the Strut song here or here.