It would be awesome though, wouldn't it?

I would love to see former believers tweeting about their deconversion and thanking Cruz publicly.

The more he spews hate and war and confusing rich men with minor deities, the more turned off they'll get.

You overestimate the allure of "liberal Christianity," I think.

Don' forget, many religious people don't really believe in the stuff of the religion, they believe it's good to believe. The church and religion are a necessary social thing to many. It's a weird "it's always been there; getting rid of it would destroy everything" kind of mentality. Tradition.

I think Daniel Dennett calls it "believing in believing".

So even if intellectually the whole thing unravels, socially and traditionally it stays tangled together.


I don't think Teddy boy come across as genuine to anyone but the loopy.... and the good ol' boys who pretend he's great so they can keep in power. But the good ol' boys have been miscalculating lately..... I mean, Palin?

That's such an excellent way to put it. Such people also have a tendency to over-emphasize the role of religion in people doing good things, as if religion is the only reason they would have done it. Seems like such a negative view of one's fellow humans - much harsher than the "horrible" "extremist" atheist who says "Hey, why shouldn't everyone be able to question this shit?"

I grew up in a fairly liberal Christian church, and even for me that first step of allowing myself to say "This doesn't make sense, and I have a right to not accept 'God's mysterious ways' as an answer" was hard.

I'm thinking of experiences as related by people like Dan Barker and Jerry DeWitt. Although they both dabbled with more liberal theologies on their separate journeys to disbelief, their journeys did not end there. Once one begins to question, the conclusion is not likely to be a different theological doctrine, but rather the realization that all of it is most likely untrue.

I like to point out that if you eliminate the "god" part, the mystery vanishes.

"Why would god create childhood cancer?"

Because he didn't.... he's not there. Mystery solved

"Why did god let all those people die in that plane crash?"

Because there's no god there to stop it. Mystery solved

"Why would god drown all of mankind and save animals and a single family?"

Because he never did that...he's not there. Mystery solved

when you don't have to make excuses for an allegedly all-loving, all-powerful being.

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." -- Richard Dawkins (yes, the atheist pope!)

People get sucked back in when they have kids and the kids want to be in church groups with their school friends.

They're just not going to get sucked in to nutball religion. Church will be an hour on Sunday and drive the kiddies to the group activities and that's it.

I'm an old Boomer. I've seen this a lot with my friends.

That a lot of mainstream Xstians in this country (Lutherans, Methodists, UCC, Episcopalians, etc) maintain their religious practice because it grants them a necessary social imprimatur, not because they really believe very much of it. But when religion starts to become more and more of a stigma, rather than a benefit, they ease away, at least from churchgoing and open identification, but it has very little if anything to do with their having less belief in "god" than they used to.

is a truly fucked up concept. Theocracy now to get to a renewed secularism later is the wrong way to get there.

In that way, yes.