I feel great sympathy for the families, but those “what if...” questions will do nothing but make you crazy. What if my loved one had a cold that night and stayed home? What if he had been standing somewhere else? What if the security guard had shot the assailant? You can’t rewind time and change the events. No…

They should sue the state of Florida instead, for allowing guns to be so easily accessible.

Wait...wait..wait, so the lawsuit is claiming they wanted unspecialised beat police officers to storm a crowded and dark nightclub full of civilians guns blazing in the hopes that in the crossfire they might kill the gunman when said gunman had already claimed to have a suicide vest and explosives...

He was a complex man. He said certain things that I found very offensive, but he also was extremely honest about his own struggles and failings. I got the impression he was a man who was trying very hard to be a better person.

I know that many aren’t really fans here, but I loved Anthony Bourdain. I read his book many years ago and related to him so deeply. A person that also struggled with drugs and depression. This makes me really sad.

I was that “bad friend” to a “good chaste girl”. Back in high school, my closest friend, who I am going to call “Alice” (not her real name), was very religious. I grew up without religion and consider myself “agnostic, leaning heavily towards atheist”. Already you see the problem here.

One of the few times where I managed to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment was in my senior year of high school, when I mentioned to a fellow student who happened to be a conservative Mormon that my father was older than the fathers of my fellow classmates because the marriage to my mother was his…

I remember talking about this in philoosphy of psychology class my senior year in college. There were the women who were championing the whole Electra BS, along with the most of guys save one of my best friends in ROTC and a (conservative!!!!) contrarian dude.

100% what you said. This is a megachurch with multiple locations and a congregation full of college students and young families. It infuriates me to think of how influential this pastor is, and the harm he’s done to people who think they can’t rightfully leave for good. It’s fucking irresponsible to put the burden of…

A Creeker, eh?! :) I went to a tiny, evangelical, liberal arts college in Elgin. Many people went to Willow Creek. I may have gone once or twice. I remember being overwhelmed at the size, as a small town Iowa girl.

As an adult, I laugh and cry at the random, arbitrary characteristics that have been assigned to sexually active and celibate women. Being a straight A student is about as random as having black hair or a name with one syllable. None of it has any connection to sexual activity.

you’re surrounded by saucy young jezebels who are going to destroy your reputation the first chance they get

Although my parents weren’t religious, they were terrified that my sister and I were going to have sex while we lived at home. My brothers, on the other hand, could travel halfway across the world because “boys are safe.” They convinced us our lives would be over if we had sex. My mother even went as far as to tell me…

It’s not widespread, but some people call Evangelical Christianity “Paulism” because that’s what it is. Although, modern biblical scholarship attributes much of the awful Paul stuff to another even later writer.

As someone who grew up in southern Evangelical Christianity, I don’t know how you solve this problem without breaking the foundation of the church. People do recognize that it’s a problem, but the solutions that are always proposed are even more of what created the situation in the first place. More focus on female…

White evangelicals are obsessed with maintaining cultural dominance, which they don’t understand (or actively deny) as a central tenet of white supremacy. This was a really great and important piece.

President Obama said that people cling to their God and guns. People didn’t get mad because he was wrong - they got mad because he was right.

I was a missionary/volunteer in Romania for 2 years and that’s when I realized the nefarious power pyramid I was involved in: Missions wasn’t about helping people put food on their tables, but rather Americanizing them in the name of Christ. Making them like White American Christians. Keeping power in the traditional…

Sometimes I wonder how Christianity would have fared if that asshole Paul had never shown up. I’m an atheist, but reading Jesus’ words it’s hard not to like the guy- he was a radical determined to shake up those in power, he taught that people deserved to be treated well, preached that the poor should be fed and…

I mean, this show has always managed to find the humor in even the bleakest of situations... I think that they could pull off an episode like that. Obviously they’d probably throw in some meta humor about her self-destructive addiction to “Ambien tweeting”.