Tag: christianity

Breaking Down God

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 14 Comments

I live in a strange, interstitial space between atheism and theism. While I no longer consider myself a Christian, I refuse to cut ties with the Christian world and my progressive Christian community. At the same time, I feel a great deal of kinship with the pagan and witchcraft communities, as well as the atheist and skeptical communities. My own religious home is The Satanic Temple, and I consider myself a practicing Satanist. I call myself a nontheist and reject unverified claims of the supernatural.

To many people, the question of God’s existence is simple: either there is a magical sky daddy or there isn’t. For me, however, this question is getting increasingly complicated. God is about more than just existence or nonexistence: it is also about definitions, worldview, and culture.

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Sacred Tension: Love and Quasars, feat. Paul Wallace

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 3 Comments

In this episode of Sacred Tension, I speak with pastor, author, and astrophysicist Paul Wallace about his journey as an astrophysicist who can’t shake his faith in God. We discuss Galileo, quantum physics, the interactions between faith and science, why I personally don’t believe in God, and much more.

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David Bentley Hart and Theological Gaslighting

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ Leave a comment

I hoped that I was done commenting on David Bentley Hart’s tiresome book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, but as I’m nearing the end of the book I think I have one more complaint that I need to put to writing. It’s a complaint that I’m starting to have with a great number of more “progressive” or “sophisticated” theologians. While I do generally think that their vision of God, humanity, and the cosmos is better than most of what’s out there, I find this particular trend aggravating.

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I Didn’t Leave Christianity Because I Was Hurt

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 6 Comments

A few days ago, I realized that the intense feeling of religious and spiritual homelessness I’d felt for so long was gone. Since the beginning of my deconstruction, I’d begun to feel myself forced out of my Christianity, like a child being forced out of a womb. This left me with a profound feeling of existential homelessness — drifting away from my religious identity and family, and with little to cling onto as a home.

But, a few days ago, I realized that I no longer felt that homelessness — my home is now The Satanic Temple, my spiritual and religious identity is Satanist. (Does this surprise you? I recommend reading my articles on Satanism.)

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On Reading David Bentley Hart: What Even Is God, Anyway?

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 7 Comments

David Bentley Hart’s ponderous tome The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss has been regularly touted to me as the book every nontheist must read. I’m happy to oblige, and I’m about 30% of the way through (including footnotes.) While I find Hart pompous, bloviating, and even an occasional bully, I’m also enjoying his erudition and mastery of the English language. As he makes clear again and again, he is not so much trying to defend God, but rather to describe the classical view of God, which he feels modern atheists have sorely missed. 

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When People Tell You You’re Deceived, Damned, or Sinful

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 22 Comments

If there is a God, he set me up for failure in the Christian world when he deemed it suitable that I be gay. Struggling with my sexuality in the church resulted in many well-intentioned people saying awful things to me. Now, I’ve left Christian belief behind and I’m a proud member of The Satanic Temple. Unsurprisingly, the comments haven’t stopped. I get called deceived, evil, damned, and much more on a regular basis.

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#Metoo and Confronting Evangelical Abuse

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 1 Comment

In this episode of Sacred Tension, environmental scientist Melissa Wilson returns to the show to tell us a harrowing story of abuse at a small Christian college in Appalachia. Instead of assuming this incident is an anomaly, or a tempest in a teacup, it is best to see it as a microcosm of the abuse and crisis sweeping all of evangelical Christian culture. 

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I Am Now An Outsider to the Christian LGBT Community I Helped Build, And That Hurts

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 4 Comments

Several days ago, an ugly battle over the resurrection of Christ exploded on theological twitter. It started when two prominent theologians started tweeting about a non-literal perspective of the resurrection, and the conversation quickly devolved into a morass of ugliness and bitterness. The details of the debate are immaterial to this post, so I won’t get into them. What stands out to me, though, is that many of the people defending the literal view of the resurrection were my fellow LGBT progressives. As I read through these tweets, and absorbed a toxic dose of twitter radiation, I had a painful realization, and I suddenly understood why my departure from credal Christian faith has hurt so much. I realized that, over the course of years, I slowly became an outsider to the very LGBT communities I helped build.

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