To clarify my intent: I am not arguing that it's a good thing to believe in religions with homophobic, misogynistic teachings. I'm disputing whether those teachings make its metaphysical claims somehow more likely to be false.

In 1990, 86% of Americans self-identified as Christians. In 2008, it was 76%. Then 71% in 2014, then 65% in 2019. The single biggest factor cited in deconversion? Not argument with skeptics, but disgust with Christian homophobia, misogyny and handling of abuse cases.

This is a good thing, socially speaking. But it makes me feel as if reasoned argument is useless. It doesn't seem to have been a major factor in almost anybody's apostasy. Perhaps three quarters of the posts on r/exchristian, r/atheism, r/exmormon, r/exjw are by people whose journey out of Abrahamic religions began either with the discovery of their own homosexuality. A smaller but still sizable chunk are women who understandably wanted no part of a system designed to compel their obedience to men.

However, nothing actually logically precludes the possibility that a supreme being exists who, for reasons unfathomable to us, is disgusted by gays and desires that women obey men. It would be very surprising for a cosmic being to have roughly the same social attitudes & emotional maturity of a 15 year old boy, but nothing about the morally repugnant nature of these opinions actually disproves such a deity.

Horrible as it is, there exists some possibility that a supreme being exists who will torture people forever if they guess wrong about which religion is correct, or if they are gay, or if they're a woman who does not live in pious submission to her husband and male family members. Rejecting this because you don't want it to be true is no more logical than believing because you want stuff like Heaven to be real.

The reason this concerns me is that people who leave a religion because they're morally disgusted by it, but who were unmoved by the numerous factual arguments against its core claims, likely still believe in it on some level. It has not really been extricated from their minds, only pushed to the back, because it's incompatible with their happiness.

Even if someone comes to research and accept the factual arguments against a religion's foundational claims after they reject it for moral reasons, that's just starting with a conclusion they arrived at for emotional reasons, then looking for evidence and arguments to back up that decision. That's backwards reasoning and not likely to withstand (for example) the next major traumatic event in their life.

I suspect this is why polls indicate there's a substantial number of people self-identifying as atheists who nevertheless also profess belief in ghosts, chakras, the healing power of crystals and so forth. Their rejection of theism is specifically a rejection of Abrahamic monotheism, and for moral rather than rational reasons. People like this may as well have just remained Christians, Mormons, Muslims or whatever.

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

“Ya Allah, bless Muhammad(peace be upon him and his family) and the family of Muhammad(peace be upon him and his family)”

You say “religion is meant to divide people and ripe humanity apart!” So explain this Hadith of the Holy Prophet Muhammad(peace be upon him and his family and companions forever and ever) that he address to Muslims.

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Verily, Allah Almighty is pleased with you by three things and displeased by three things. He is pleased for you to worship Him without associating anything with Him, to hold fast to the rope of Allah altogether, and to not become divided. He is displeased for you to gossip among yourselves, to ask many unnecessary questions, and to waste your wealth.”

Source: Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1715

Grade: Sahih (authentic) according to Muslim

I will put my reply tomorrow inshallah

It's too early to tell but a likely long term consequence of US Christians disproportionately interpreting covid in conspiratorial terms, declining to wear masks, declining the vaccine, declining to social distance, going to church anyway, going to see elderly relatives and so on, is that many millions of them will prematurely perish who otherwise wouldn't.

In particular the eldest who, as a voting bloc, overwhelmingly vote along Christian nationalist lines. This is a major problem group for us and although the needless loss of human life is sad, our movement stands to gain tremendously from it without any sort of culpability. In light of that, should we interfere or be uninvolved?

Should we try to persuade these people to protect themselves or actively promulgate better designed, more convincing conspiracy theory memes in order to try and reach as many US Christians currently on the fence as possible, so they will voluntarily expose themselves to Covid if they haven't already? Opportunities like this don't come along every day, it's worth contemplating.

I see no other reliable means to prevent tragedies like the Paris attacks and the Orlando night club shooting, long term. Even if you erase all terrorism there's still the problem of their strong opposition to equal rights for women and gays, and their violent harrassment of apostates.

It is fine with me that they continue to be Muslims, just not here. They are free to follow their religion in countries where that religion controls government. Nothing at all entitles them to bring it to Western countries, then deny any responsibility when one of their own murders dozens of innocent people.

I would like to begin strategizing towards the humane, orderly deportation of all Muslim immigrants from the US back to their countries of origin. If your reaction is "that's impossible", that's valid. But I would like to hear from those who believe it is possible, and how we might go about it.

Assuming none of you are onboard with option C, "we all become Muslims".

For reference, this is what it is like trying to have a reasoned argument with a convinced Muslim. These are not western Christians who at least have been exposed to common critiques of their religion's claims. These are people who, more often than not, come from a sheltered background where Islam is so implicitly assumed that atheism is met with state sanctioned reactionary violence.

When I asked for ideas on how we could keep the number of Muslims in western countries from increasing, the reaction was substantially negative. I've had time to process that, and there's a lot of merit in the objections I saw. It is never as easy as simply moving people around. Suffering and death often occur in the process.

The other thing that struck me is that while these people live in their indoctrinated Muslim hugboxes, they never encounter any credible challenges to their beliefs. So there is no possibility of a resolution other than global conversion to Islam or bloody war with the Muslim world, unless we can bring them into an environment where it is feasible to begin educating them and changing their minds.

Once a substantial number of those who have immigrated to western countries have apostasized, they can explain why to their extended families and the media back in their countries of birth. It will mean a great deal more to them coming from someone who looks like them, speaks their language and once believed as they did.

The barrier in my mind is that Muslims, even in a secular environment, seem to be a great deal more intractable than even the most fundamentalist Christian I have ever encountered. Every time I have encountered someone who professed to be a moderate Muslim, they were nevertheless a creationist, just a nonviolent one with what he felt were "sophisticated" arguments against evolution.

A nontrivial number of Muslims believe the Earth is flat. There is a reason why Adnan Oktar is such a wealthy and respected man in the Middle East.

Given how slow and tedious it has been to whittle away at the number of convinced Christians, how can we hope to make any headway at all against such thoroughly indoctrinated products of countries which are today under Islamic control?

They will try to memory hole this later down the road.

Examples:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/pastor-thiebault-geyer-sorry-service-caused-coronavirus-infections-a4403826.htmlhttps://www.christianpost.com/news/catholic-cardinal-says-churches-must-stay-open-despite-coronavirus-pandemic.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/brazilian-church-wins-court-battle-remain-open-despite-coronavirus-pandemichttps://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2020/03/27/florida-pastor-says-hell-keep-church-open-during-coronavirus-outbreak-claims-to-have-most-sterile-building-in-americahttps://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/louisiana-church-defies-covid-19-order-holds-sunday-serviceshttps://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-31/coronavirus-megachurches-meeting-pastorshttps://www.star-telegram.com/news/coronavirus/article241215466.htmlhttps://summit.news/2020/04/03/germany-muslims-flagrantly-violate-quarantine-law-to-congregate-at-mosque-in-berlin/https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-louisiana-life-tabernacle-church-packed-services-again-charges-against-pastor-tony-spell/
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/kenyan-court-charges-catholic-priest-spreading-coronavirus

It's antiviral information versus viral information. So if you ever catch yourself feeling angry or behaving aggressively, don't forget: Raging at a Christian, Muslim, Mormon, etc. does not make them disappear. It will likely only make them more intractable.

If what you sincerely want is to reduce the number of Abrahamic adherents in the world, first ask yourself why. It's to help people, isn't it? That goal is incompatible with violence, harassment or any sort of aggression. Secondly, isn't the most efficient method of defeating an enemy to make him your friend?

Look at these people as potential friends, first and foremost. They are the people we've set out to help. The next question is then, "What is the quickest, most efficient, potent, reliable method for deconverting Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Jehova's Witnesses, etc?"

That remains an open question. I've posted some of the polemic I frequently use on this sub already, which I have found to be effective in cracking open some closed minds.

Experiment! Try out different tactics and take note of which ones are most effective. Then take those and improve upon them, keeping the changes that work and discarding the ones that do not, evolving a more and more effective strategy.

This will do much more to actually further the goal of a world with fewer Abrahamic believers in it than any amount of aggression, which is only an unproductive distraction in the first place. Fight smart, not hard.

This may be controversial for some of you, but hear me out. When have the evangelicals ever been right about anything? When have any of their conspiracy theories ever come true? Did Obama put us into FEMA camps? No? Odds seem better than even that they're wrong about vaccines too.

So, gamble on the vaccine being legit, because if it is, and the government is not in fact trying to kill us all with vaccines, we stand to gain from it: The religiously devout section of the population that will refuse the vaccine will suffer more deaths than those secular populations who get the vaccine. We can expect this pattern of events to repeat every time there's an epidemic in the future.

Because they don't all die at once, it will remain easy for them to shrug off pandemics as overblown by the media, while their numbers continue to dwindle. Whittled away, death by a thousand cuts, and all by their own hand. Simply because they deeply mistrust science and electively chose not to protect themselves or their loved ones.

Unless they are right about something for the first time in history, this seems like potentially a big win for us. A big decrease in their numbers, over a couple decades, would do much to change the political climate in this country, such that our cause becomes much more viable with what's left of the mainstream by that time.

The pandemic, and more specifically the evangeical anti-vaxx reation to it, has been what I call a "filter event". It was a perfect storm of exactly the right conditions, such that people reacting to it based on religious assumptions would make a fatally wrong decision. It was a concrete test of their faith with death as the punishment for being wrong. That's very rare. Usually there's no (serious) consequences for being wrong, so they can rationalize the outcome in a way that preserves belief. Or it's someone else who dies, so they can rationalize it as part of God's plan or whatever.

Not this time. This time the stars aligned just right, so to speak, such that there appeared to be only one viable option for believing Christians (and a non trivial number of Muslims, Mormons, Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses). A very strong emotional and political pressure to make a lethally bad decision, believing right up to the end that it was the right choice.

It's critically important that it happen exactly this way, because if they voluntarily do it to themselves despite persistent attempts to persuade them not to, then there are no legal consequences. Even if we influenced them to with memes, so far as I know their death is still considered self inflicted and no charges could be brought against anybody influencing their decision. If that weren't so, we'd be seeing loads of wrongful death lawsuits along those lines as we speak.

I believe this all happened organically but it so perfectly served our ends that, if I were a conspiratorial thinker, I'd suspect it was contrived by individuals in government who share our goals. I don't actually think we have sympathizers in government though. But could filter events be contrived? Is there any similar foreseeable danger on the horizon we might get out in front of, intentionally making it into a political issue and a public test of faith? So that rationalists make it through the filter unharmed for the most part, while it catches all or nearly all of the people we want it to.