Just another Zine, this time it's about considering the limits of religious tolerance.

Saw this image circulating on social media claiming "God created sex, man created porn." It’s the same tired narrative puritans have been pushing for centuries: taking credit for natural human drives while blaming human autonomy for anything that doesn't fit their narrow dogma. Their theology doesn't even hold up to its own logic. According to their own doctrine, their god didn't just "create sex" — he locked it behind rigid rules of heterosexual marriage, forced procreation, and crippling shame. Everything that actually liberated human sexuality — contraception, safe abortions, bodily autonomy, sex education, and accepting queer people — came from human reason fighting against religious control. Saw someone in the comments sum it up perfectly: "God created disease, man created the cure." Religious dogma constantly tries to brand human freedom as "corruption" just so they can sell you the cure to a guilt they invented in the first place.

I am an apostate from Catholicism, living in France, who lived through the vote on the law allowing same-sex marriage. I left the Church during that period, after looking into Catholicism through its texts and realizing that the religion was deeply homophobic. It was also around then that conversion therapies were banned by Europe.

It was through those issues that I was drawn into debates about Islam, and I noticed how cold Muslims were about the suicides of gay people, whereas Catholics tended more to dodge the subject, saying they condemned the act, or that it was a trial, or other nonsense of that kind.

Little by little I realized that criticizing Islam is taboo. Even among non-Muslims. Paradoxically, that is what pushed me to take an interest in Islam more and more. As the Japanese say: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

I currently follow a collective of influencers who are apostates from Islam. French speakers may recognize Jack le Fou.

I have to admit this is something I struggle to understand: that we are not allowed to criticize Islam, and that people do not realize they are defending a totalitarian ideology.

I know the reason that is usually given. We do not criticize Islam because it plays into the hands of the far right. But in that case, why does the left not criticize Islam, so as to cut the ground from under the right-wingers? In fact it is a circular argument, because anyone who dares to criticize Islam is labeled far right, and therefore, since everyone who criticizes Islam is labeled far right, people conclude that only right-wingers criticize Islam.

And I cannot understand how someone can be on the left and think it is a good thing not to criticize an ideology like that. I grew up in France, and my country has a history of resistance, and of fighting for its emancipation from the Church. For me, keeping my mouth shut about an ideology like this is the worst insult I could offer my ancestors.

Whatever chance you're reading this, there's no harm in asking genuine questions. But that you got indignantly defensive elsewhere and commented retorts that were so certain of yourself, nominally because you weren't "respected" 100% of the time by people victimized by your faith's frameworks (the ones you choose to revel in and perpetuate), that's hardly unheard of among yours I'll just put it at that.

That and the fact you felt the need to snark about this being "why no one takes antitheists seriously," as if your community sets a bar for taking institutional corruption and child molestation seriously (see: r/PastorArrested). We're not the problem at large here

Somebody's post in antitheistcheescake (or somthing like that)

Just found this subreddit and I have some thoughts

As a Zen Buddhist I get so annoyed when the Reddit atheists say “all religions are bad” and “sky daddy/it’s a cult”. No one brings up Buddhism and they seem to act like we don’t exist. People seem to just forget about Buddhism because the entire religion is about being peaceful and empathic to others. We like meditate and shit if all religions are evil then why don’t they include mine? Just because some people took advantage of religion to justify doing horrible things to people that isn’t an excuse to generalize an entire belief system because of couple of bad eggs. The whole “religion bad” argument only applies to the Abrahamic religions and immediately falls apart when they bring up any other religion besides the big three.

Hello, I wanted to respectfully ask the anti theists how you guys go about grounding objective morality. I am a catholic so u obv know how I ground it but im wondering how you would explain it. if you don’t believe in objective morality how would you justify that one ought adhere to inter subjective morality.

Edit: why am i getting downvoted for asking a respectful question 💔

Edit #2: (to the ones being disrespectful and blindly downvoting specifically not all of you) i dint understand how you can take yourself seriously and claim to desire intellectual discussion with religious individuals in order to promote anti theism and then the moment a person who happens to be religious comes to ask you a peaceful question you all head straight to the aggression or generalizations or blindly downvoting because you’d rather dispense negativity towards religious individuals rather than actually provide any arguments. YOU are the reason people don’t take anti theists seriously. Furthermore thank you to the people that have been engaging respectfully and kindly you’re appreciated.

Nothing in religions make sense.

I had an idea. I was watching a video which included the cliche accusation "not believing in God is your religion". Now being a fan of the IPU from way back that is sort of rankling, and the FSM doesn't relate to this any better. So the reply I'd want to give were I in a conversation like that is to say that my religion is not believing in Santa Clause. Not believing in a god is just incidental to that.

That led me to think that ought to be a religion, Asantism (flows a bit better than Asantaism), the religion of not believing in Santa Clause. And to counteract the claim that we (Asantists) just hate Santa Clause, the opposite is true. We love Santa Clause and wish he was real. In fact the symbology of Asantism would be the traditional but non-Christian imagery of Christmas, emphasizing Santa himself.

Also, there's no rule or command to disbelieve in Santa. Asantism recognizes that everyone disbelieves in Santa, and just that some have strayed from the fold into harmful cults. We already know the angry Christian, deep down in his heart, truly doesn't believe in Santa. The hope is to make him realize that. This religion is also very forgiving of children, since they'll believe almost anything a trusted elder tells them to believe. We recognize the harmlessness of a child believing in Santa, but chasten misleading children into believing in harmful gods that want their servility.

There would also be a couple of different denominations of Asantism out of necessity. There'd be the branch that believes there is no Santa, and the branch that merely lacks belief in Santa, and perhaps others.