Well ok, I admit that I’m really scrabbling to find new names for these ‘short bites’ collections, which, with this piece, are now thirty-nine in number! But fragments (of anything!) come in various sizes, as do these short paragraphs, so I thought I’d use that word as it captures that variety nicely.

Here we go:

We are all the authorities over our own humanity.
– John Pavlovitz

The church spent centuries arguing about who’s in and who’s out while Jesus kept eating dinner with whoever showed up.
– Beau Stringer

The …wounds that had nearly killed him were  gradually becoming a part of his history, not a limitation on his future.
– J. C. Jarvis, Nordland

The awakening needed cannot break through to their religious crusted mind
– Glenn Regular

The fact that you learned from your mistakes and deconstructed from man-made culty religion is awesome … and puts you leagues above the ones who haven’t. Welcome to the progressive subset of Christianity! We may be smaller but we value the message of Jesus and His examples over the Pharisaical religion and even the cult most churches have become.
– Carla

Dear Christians, Jesus didn’t ask for proof of work before multiplying loaves. He fed the hungry because hunger itself was proof enough.
– Ortinel

There’s a Religion-free Jesus that belongs to all of us
– Rob Cottrell

The Spirit does not make Scripture less authoritative. The Spirit rescues Scripture from becoming an idol in the hands of Religion. The Bible becomes a witness rather than a weapon, a window rather than a club, a testimony pointing beyond itself toward the living Christ. That is what Paul meant when he said that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
– Glenn Regular

The negative comments [to someone’s joy-filled Facebook post] are typical of Puritanism. If you’re having fun; if you are happy, then somewhere along the line you must be sinning. And it’s their job to tell you that.
– Me

…a critical part – an important part – of deconstructing faith, is separating Jesus from Christianity^[1]
– Rob Cottrell

It’s like how the phrase ‘the whole counsel of Scripture’ simply means that they ignore different Scripture passages from the ones you do… 😉
– Me

“The most offensive thing about the Father of Jesus has always been who he accepts, not who he rejects; who he includes, not who he excludes. Religion has always gotten this precisely backwards, and this is why the way of Jesus is a narrow way. Not narrow in the sense that it is accessible only to an elite few, but in that those who think themselves elite reject it by default.”
– Jeff Turner

Now, if you want to make a populace that is dependent on its leaders, that will do whatever its leaders tell it to do, what better way than to tell them they can’t trust themselves?
– Susan Cottrell

Something that inerrantists invariably fail to notice is that when they use their Scripture verses to battle your Scripture verses, all they are doing is to demonstrate that the Bible does in fact contradict itself, and therefore it cannot in fact be inerrant.
– Me

As per usual, I liked to see the good side of everyone, which often left me feeling somewhat let down…
– Adrian Cousins, Death Becomes Them, Kindle Edition, location 1898

“Through those pages [of aviation magazines – Ed], as I grew up, I began to absorb all the good things that aviation gives you – a sense of captaincy, a passion for science, and the importance of discipline, to name a few. And I became increasingly aware of an apparent paradox of aviation, one that becomes increasingly familiar to those few ‘artsy’ pilots who venture into aviation journalism. Flying is primarily about emotions, it’s driven by the sense of freedom, the beauty and majesty of endless landscapes, and things like watching the sunset at the end of a flying day. But you can’t just abandon yourself to emotion and forget about the practicalities (“Carb heat on!”)^[2]. It’s a fine line to walk for me, my ideal pilot being part robot and part poet.”
– Eugenio Facci, Editorial, Pilot Magazine, May 2025

One day I was deep in prayer it was shortly after I lost my Sweet young baby Bluregard [a pet rat – Ed]. I was praying that God would let me see Blue again later, and he said “What kind of a father would I be if I didn’t allow that…”
– Jaime

“Pastor, can you please tell me why you neglected to inform me that tithing was required for my salvation the first time I walked into your church? I could have died and gone to hell because I wasn’t tithing!”
– Ross Canning

Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted
– Field Marshal Sir Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington

You are under no obligation to explain yourself, justify your calling, or submit to the interrogation of a broken, bad-faith system.
When people or structures approach you with “gotcha” questions—not out of a genuine desire to seek truth, but to control, judge, or categorize you—the most centered, powerful thing you can do is refuse to play their game.
You owe no data to a system that only wants to use it against you.
– Bob Young

[The] problem with ‘repentance’, as my old congregation’s leaders used to describe it, is that it denotes a ‘turning around’; a 180-degree turn. Therefore if you repent twice in a row, then you’re going the same direction as you were in the first place. And so on for each successive repentance. Which is probably why many Christians end up covering the same ground over and over again without actually getting anywhere; without moving forwards at all…
– Me

I know what it’s like to be trapped in religious legalism, and I know what it’s like to be free. I know what it is like to be overwhelmed with lies you think are true, and I know what it’s like to discover actual truth. This is why I am so passionate about pushing back on the new wave of conservative extremism. I’ve already been there and done that, and I know that none of it actually works. The formulas and promises are attractive. They seem safe and secure to fearful people looking for control. But they don’t deliver goodness. The true fruit of legalism and behavior-driven religion is emptiness, pain, confusion, and death. They pretend to be salvation, but they deliver destruction.
– Christy Lynne Wood

No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War XII, 18

During an early morning walk I was amazed to see an elderly gentleman collecting his dog’s excrement and taking it home with him. Holy crap, I shudder to think what his other hobbies are!
– Alan Thackray, Viz Letterbocks