The same goes for apologetics in general, doesn’t it? Apologetics books aren’t written for “the lost,” they’re written for the “saved.” They exist to collect dust on the shelves of believers who will now sleep better knowing that someone took the time to think through all that stuff long enough to get it down into print.Ībout 24 minutes into the podcast, Rhett compares the development of human DNA to an instruction manual that gets two pages permanently stuck together, leaving the headers and footers in place to show exactly where one ends and the other begins. Of course, I had never looked at the evidence for evolution. I read books about it by people who didn’t believe in it.īingo! That was the key for all of us, wasn’t it? As an evangelical Christian, you learn to tackle controversial subjects by reading only books by other evangelicals as they talk through their own rationalizations for their beliefs. Evolution by natural selection seemed intolerably non-intuitive-it didn’t make any sense-and it struck him as a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to explain how a world like ours could come into being without an intelligent designer. He first tells the story of how during college he fell in with a crowd of Young Earth Creationists who maintained that the universe is only 6,000-10,000 years old, give or take-a perspective he would adopt for many years to come. Read: “ You Were Never Really One of Us“ Breaking Up with the BibleĪs with most former evangelicals (henceforth “ex-vangelicals”), the majority of key turning points in Rhett’s deconversion story coincide with changes in his relationship to the Bible, and to his own tradition’s reading of it. I’ll interact the most with Rhett’s “extimony” as it covered the lion’s share of their reasons for leaving the faith. I hope you’ll take the time to watch/ listen to the show for yourself, along with the follow-up episode in which Link tells his own story about how he left his faith behind after he became an adult. And I want to say that because I’ve noticed that when I tell my story, often people kind of conclude that I was never a true Christian…Īs far as I’m concerned, Jesus was as real to me as he possibly could be without physically manifesting himself in my presence. I want to emphasize how big of a deal it was to me. I’ve heard these things described dozens of times by now, but never before by guys I know my still-believing daughters have been watching for years.Īnticipating the response he would get for opening up about all of this, Rhett addressed the No True Christian argument right off the bat: He was basically telling MY story, along with the stories of a hundred people I know who went through the same thought processes and the same emotional struggles. I could barely stay in my car seat listening to Rhett’s story. Last month, the GMM duo moved one of their podcasts, Ear Biscuits, to a separate channel in order to devote that space to an increasingly personal line of conversations about what led them to leave their faith and look for new sources of meaning and inspiration in the world in which they find themselves. While their degrees and first jobs were in engineering, funny video production ultimately became their claim to fame. Rhett and Link met each other way back in Elementary school in North Carolina and they’ve stuck together into adulthood, at one time passing through a ministry phase as full-time staffers with Campus Crusade (now called Cru). Did you know that these entertaining goofballs were once evangelical Christians who specialized in student ministry? Before this week I did not, and now that I think about it, it explains A LOT.
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