Essays, Rants, and Reviews

Twenty-five Years in the Adventist Church

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“Every [Christian] sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed His will to man. To each reader the Bible conveys a different meaning.”

-Robert G. Ingersoll quoted in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (p. 182).

Those Jokes About it Being a Cult Aren’t Funny: It Is A Cult.

Baptized May 17, 1986. Deconverted 2012.
I was baptized on May 17, 1986, in a little country church in southern Michigan: Urbandale SDA Church. As of the end of my SDA career in June of 2011, I have moved quickly through the “former SDA” phase to “post-Christian.”

In at least three ways it fulfills standard cult definitions.

First: Despite official denials, one person dominated the founding years, in the same way Joseph Smith dominated the formation of the Mormon church. Ellen G. White’s career as the SDA (Seventh-day Adventist) prophet from her teen years in the 1840s to her death in 1915 shaped a major portion of early SDA history. She and her husband (and in later years, her large entourage of secretaries and servants) crisscrossed the territory of the growing church, molding the thinking of every willing follower after her own.

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Single Payer Healthcare Please!

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Single Payer Government Run Healthcare Q&A: Some interesting questions arose when I asked my Facebook friends if they were as ready for a single payer system as I am. I decided to answer them here, on my blog, so a potentially wider readership could chime in, too…

Disease-care, or Healthcare?

stethoscope
Have you checked your blood pressure today? Talk to your pharmacist about home pressure checking machines. It’s easy, and your doctor wants you to keep track of it.
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Review: Battlestar Galactica

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Why My Opinion Might Matter To You

Glen A. Larson and Ronald D. Moore’s 2004-2009 version of Battlestar Galactica was some of the best science fiction I’ve encountered on a screen so far.

If you knew how important science fiction is to me, and how much of it I’ve watched in search of that elusive perfect combination of “science” and “fiction”, you would be more impressed by that statement than I imagine you to be. Believability is the most important factor in my critical judgment of the quality of science fiction, especially that which is made for the screen. Whether the screen belongs to a movie theater, my television, or my gaming device, I can only grant a fully attentive glance to a story which grabs my mind and my heart from its first few frames and leaves me wanting more when the credits roll. If at any point in the storytelling I am distracted by inferior sound, music, visuals, acting, plot, or pacing, then what began as a fully attentive glance degrades into less and less until some mental rubicon is crossed, and I leave that story behind, never to have a positive thought of it again.

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Power Junkie Nation

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Power
is a lot like a drug.
We all have a deep-seated need
to control our lives, to achieve goals,
to accomplish and succeed; that is a healthy
and normal human need. But needs can be corrupted
into unhealthy obsessions. When the power need corrupts
a person, it corrupts them absolutely, overriding common sense
and morality, just like the abuse of alcohol or drugs does. It maximizes
selfishness.

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Mr. Miles’ Bible Class Lesson 2

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One of those awkward yearbook photos.

I used to teach Bible classes to middle & high school students in the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) school system. Now, I’m a secular humanist and an atheist. In this series, I review the major ideas I used to teach, in contrast with how I would teach them now.

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Jesus Changes Not

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“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever”

“For I am the LORD, I change not”

There is a logical contradiction in the beliefs of Christians, especially those who accept the whole Bible as their authority, not just the New Testament. But even those who lean heavily on the New Testament Jesus must cope with the connections Jesus himself made between himself and the Old Testament God.

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