If I was on the fence about why there was a reason to come back and start blogging my usual tirades against religion, I was given the final push over the edge. Earlier this week, I had a friend attempt suicide due to untreated depression issues. It was tremendously sad, but it and the nearly 50 stitches accompanying it were a wake up call she dearly needed. But what happened yesterday is on a whole extra level of just fucking wrong.

A friend from high school, we'll just call him D, realized that after years of trying his best to deny who, at his very core, he truly was, it was time to accept reality and help the people near and dear to him to accept the same. The problem is, everyone near and dear to D was strongly tied to a particularly conservative group within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, aka the Mormons. When D told them that he is, and always has been, attracted to other men, his  his friends ostracized him. His church shunned him. His family disowned him. And when D realized that there was nobody in his life who cared more about his well-being than in the immutable writings of books written hundreds or thousands of years ago, D tried to kill himself. More Here...

By Nic Don at Theopolitical

I became a believer and began reading the Bible not long before I turned eighteen.  It didn’t take long before I recognized that the writers of the New Testament often seemed to be reading a different Old Testament than I was.  The gospels or epistles would cite a passage, and like an earnest first-time Bible student, I would look it up, expecting to find basically what the New Testament author said I’d find, but with more detail.

Instead, I often found completely different wording, sometimes completely unrelated or completely opposite what the New Testament author is saying.  Other times the quote is correct but lifted completely out of context, the very next verse modifies the meaning.  Other times the quote is correct but the original author is clearly referring to something that had already happened or was currently on-going. More Here...

By Sharon at SheWorships

Some of you may remember that when I was preparing to marry Ike, I struggled a lot with changing my last name. It’s not that I didn’t want to take his last name–I very much did!–but I had been Sharon Hodde for 28 years and that’s who I was. I had earned two degrees under that name, written and published under that name. That name was entwined with my identity, so the name change felt like a loss of self. For about the first year of my marriage, I felt as though I was neither Sharon Hodde nor Sharon Miller. It was weird!

For those of you who are married, you know that this identity shift is not limited to the name change alone. The idea of marital unity is also a reality that, though instituted on the wedding day, requires living into. It was not something that I necessarily felt right away. Only over time did Ike and I grow into that spiritual unity in a way that was palpable to me. We grew into our new identities as a married couple. More Here...