The Best of the Blogging World This Week

I know it may sound like I'm being a lazy blogger with this post, but there truly has been so many great blog posts out there from fellow bloggers.

 I would like to highlight a few of them, so many great posts on everything from a great conclusion to a great series on leaving Christianity, to a blog post about Ken Ham (the founder of the Creation Museum/Answers in Genesis), and how his plans for theme park have gone down in flames.

Ken Ham and his disastrous "Ark Park" experiment:

Bruce Gerencser in his great blog, The Way Forward, wrote recently about Ken Ham wanting to expand his Creation Museum (which is already starting to struggle financially), by building a theme park based on the Old Testament and its stories. Ken Ham is struggling to come up with funding, and he is scrambling, trying to get the state of Kentucky, as well as the nearby town of Williamstown to cough up the cash to support him with direct funding and bond issuing.

Besides the problem of church/state separation, it will be a disaster if Kentucky and Williamstown go along with this, because much of his plans hinge on the financial success of this endeavor. In order for it to be successful, it will require 1 million people a year to be paying visitors, and he can only get about 400,000 people a year to visit his Creation Museum.

Read more at The Way Forward

Politicians Forced to Take Random Blood Test:

 That's the title of a brilliant parody piece written by comic and blogger Andrew Hall on his blog Laughing in Purgatory. It was apparently inspired by the case of House Representative Trey Radel supporting Florida's plan to drug test welfare recipients, right before he was arrested for trying to buy cocaine.

Read more of this parody piece, and I highly encourage you to follow his blog, Laughing in Purgatory for more laughs.

Teen Brides and Homeschool Apostates. 

Heather Doney of the blog Becoming Worldly talks about the survivors of fundamentalism and child marriage. If you don't keep up with the sub genre of former fundamentalist bloggers, you may have missed the post by Libby Anne of Love, Joy Feminism, about how a fundamentalist blogger was recently talking about how he married his wife in 1988 when she was 15 and he was 28. 

Heather talks more about being a fundamentalist homeschooling survivor, what it's like to be a part of that blogging world, and trying to help those left behind, and those struggling to recover afterwards. 

I have to say, I've been seeing the term "Homeschool Apostates" pop up on her blog, and other related blogs, and I absolutely love it. 

Read the post at Becoming Worldly 

Onward

Alice of the blog My Cup Runs Over has written a great conclusion to her series on drifting away from Christianity, titled Onward.

In her series, she talked about her transition from Catholicism, to becoming a Protestant evangelical, to attempting to reconnect with her Catholic roots, to giving up Christianity altogether. In this post closing out the series, she made a really powerful quote:

The decisions I've made in my life for the last 18 years or so were based on being a Christian.  I feel like I've lived my life not for me and my family, but for Jesus.

 I can identify with that. When you are in the fundamentalist/evangelical world, serving the faith consumes your life. It drains you of your time, your energy, your life, you can't make hardly any decision without at some level, your faith playing into it. You give up yourself, and morph into the identity of that culture.

When I finally made the decision to give up on Christianity, I felt like a major piece of my life and my identity had died. It's that serious. Now, looking forward, I plan to finally come out to everyone in my personal life about giving up the faith, and resigning my membership in the church this upcoming January.

It's going to be hard stepping out of that world, and that sense of community, because I have literally been in churches my entire life. Just trying to figure out what to do with the free time on Sunday morning will be puzzling alone, no less trying to build new social networks in person all over again, that's going to be harder for me than most people, because if my inability to relate to people.