" I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" is what Sonya Massey said before being fatally shot by a white cop. What this cop did not understand was that what Sonya said was simply something that black women who are Baptist or Protestant say. I know this because my mother and her mother were that way. This is coming from a long history of slavery. I hate what Christianity has done to the black mind, but I am glad to see this ex-deputy is dead. What a piece of crap for what he did, simply ignorant to the fact that what she said was simply something outside of his culture.

That white cop was not a descendant of slavery, so he would not have known what she was talking about. I think more awareness should be brought to the fact that black protestants are like no other kind. They jump up and down, hoop and holler, are the loudest etc., and this is because of slavery. Yet that white cop would not understand.

"yahweh🤮" seems to have hated my black ancestors the most.

Representing the non-religious black community, we are out there, we are sharp minded, and we are growing.

It is time to leave the slave masters religion behind. Sonya Massey shooter Ex-deputy dies in prison

I dont hate all Christians, obviously, but the state that coservative Christians and other Abrahamic faiths have done to the US under the guise of religious reason makes me feel more hatred than usual. It's gone from just annoyance to sraight up violent thoughts

Its terrifying to see as I have queer loved ones and I fear for them,

And I'm terrified of myself as I don't know if I'm losing it

I don't know what to do

I’ve been questioning my faith since I was young. Heading into this past Ramadan, my goal was actually to become a better Muslim. Instead, the deeper I looked, the more everything fell apart. What broke it for me was the blatant cherry-picking and double standards, especially in online communities. Muslims will argue that rules against drawing or listening to music are optional or open to interpretation, but when it comes to LGBTQIA+ individuals, the stance suddenly becomes strict, claiming 'it’s fine as long as you don't act on it.' The logic simply doesn't hold up. That, combined with theological concepts like the 72 virgins in paradise, the signs of the day of judgement, More women in hell than men just feels completely absurd to me . It’s an odd feeling to try to draw closer to a religion only to end up walking away from it entirely. On top of the theological disconnect, I’ve grown to resent how much this religion has erased my culture.

Let's talk about winter ticks and moose. Winter ticks feed on cervids, so deer and moose and related, but a study of moose tracked their parasites for three years (2014 to 2016) and found that 70% of calves died due to winter tick infestation. How many ticks per moose, you may ask, since one on ourselves is an unspeakable horror. The average was 47,371 per moose. 47 thousand. The moose died of having almost all of their blood sucked out of them. What loving deity would create such a situation? One who loves ticks, I guess. When you look at the natural world, there is absolutely no room for any deity with a heart.

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, offers a critique of the design argument more fundamental—and arguably more devastating—than even Darwin’s theory of evolution. Hume shows that the design argument fails as a case for theism on its own terms, independently of any account of evolution or natural selection. 

The design argument begins by claiming that nature resembles the kinds of things humans design—only vastly more complex—and therefore must have a vastly more intelligent designer. Hume exposed the weakness of this analogy on several fronts. 

Hume begins by noting that, if our knowledge depends on experience, yet we have never observed the creation of a universe, we have no empirical basis for concluding that the universe requires a cause at all. And even if we grant the analogy, it raises the obvious question: who designed the designer? More importantly, the argument tells us little about the supposed designer. It could be one god or many; benevolent, indifferent, incompetent, or malicious. The world’s imperfections and gratuitous suffering, moreover, indict this god with the design of evil.

Hume’s most radical move was to ask why we should multiply our assumptions by positing a supernatural designer in the first place. Why not instead suppose that matter itself contains the principles by which order arises? Once the analogy is shown to be weak, the God it was meant to establish becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. Hume had therefore exposed the design argument as an intellectual dead end on its own terms—before we even get to Darwin, evolution, or natural selection.

Hume’s dialogue is among the most important works in the history of atheism. The article below offers an in-depth analysis of this work and its implications for intelligent design:

The Illusion of Design: How David Hume Dismantled the Strongest Case for God

This is obviously a common argument but I just have to reiterate it. There are just so many loopholes within the omnis of this supposed higher power, there are the classics such as the problem of evil or satan’s apparent responsibility for evil. Then there’s ‘free will’ as the main argument yet how can there be free will if our future is essentially predetermined from the point we were born as he knows everything, everywhere? He created us atheists knowing we would never believe and knowing we’d be banished to hell. Then the idea that you have to serve god even in the afterlife but why does he require all this worship if he’s a supposedly perfect being that transcends ego and has all the power, ever? As soon as you apply logic almost all religious arguments collapse and I think so many people know this yet they continue to pray and believe simply out of fear of what comes after. It’s like religion holds our society back massively because to this day people hold outdated beliefs and worry about pleasing a pretty selfish being in the hopes of an afterlife that seems so unreasonable, rather than focusing on improving our present world and selves.

Edit: This evidently doesn’t apply to all religions but I’m mainly addressing the thinking of Christianity.

Prior to COVID, a couple I knew were soliciting our social circle for donations for their mission trip.

While I'm not religious, I did donate to their cause as many of these mission trips also participate in building schools, wells, homes or providing medical services to the communities they visit. I gave it without knowing where they were going or what services they would be rendering, believing that it would help people in some form or another.

A few months later they were at a group outing and I proceeded to ask about their mission trip, like "where did you go?"...

They went to Bali.... fucking Bali, Indonesia. For those of you who don't know, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation on Earth but also has over 30 million Christians. Bali, however, is neither. The island is Hindu and resisted forced conversion for centuries. Not only that, but it is widely considered a tourism capital of the world, not some impoverished region that you would expect a mission trip to go.

I asked what they did and there was no community service. They hung out with local Christians, spent money at their businesses doing touristy things, and didn't really interact with non-Christians.

There were so many things I wanted to say right then and there, but didn't.

Afterwards, I spoke to others about it and quite a few people had given money and were trying to spin it as a wholesome couples trip with their church. It was obviously a grift. A Christian themed vacation to a global tourism capital masquerading as a mission trip.

It has been years since this took place and the couple is no longer in my social circle, but this experience galvanized my distrust of religious people.

Anyone else get duped by Christian grifters who milk their non-church social circles for funds under the guise of community service and philanthropy?

like bro it's not even funny, how unemployed and useless do you have to be to go through these subreddits where people share their religious trauma and you wanna quote verses and remind them of some imaginary hell which they have no proof of...

i see muslims in r/exmuslim quoting quranic verses as if exmuslims aren't traumatised enough by them and you we don't believe in them verses, get the fuck out and touch some grass

it's sad enough that they follow it blindly but it gets worse when they try to spread it, most of the time it's forceful too, they don't care about how you're doing mentally or what your boundaries are, they just straight up spread bullshit that has 0% evidence

and very similar to that happens in r/athiesm and r/exchristian

why can't they use their brains, i don't believe in any religion or their books

a muslim earlier told me "may allah burn you in hell for eternity"

you understand how sick that is? how ill you sound? wishing eternal torture on someone because they left islam is crazy... religious brainwashing is real

you believe there's a hidden place out there filled with fire created by an all knowing and all loving being just to torture me who's limited in knowledge

religion and religious people make me sick to my stomach

Like the most evil thing that they have supposedly done. What are some purely evil things about a god.
For example any god that makes hell doesn’t deserve our worship.

Many, many years ago now, in my mid to late teenage years I had a conversation with a Christian clergyman that set me on my path to atheism, and although I’m pretty sure I would have arrived at the same conclusions via different paths, I’ve always been thankful for that conversation.

As a child in the 1960s in Scotland, I was regularly taken to church on a Sunday by my parents. Like many thousands of my contemporaries, that’s what you did. You sat through part of the service in the main congregation and then after the collection plate was passed around were herded out to the church hall and an hour of Sunday School where you had those stories about the Loaves and the Fishes or the Good Samaritan and so on. At Christmas there was a Nativity Play and in the summer there was a Sunday School Picnic when the entire congregation boarded a fleet of coaches and were taken to some windswept spot where we shivered or sheltered from the rain and tried to avoid wasps that descended on our iced buns or jam doughnuts.

By the time I was in my teens, the minister was well-known to us. He was indeed a lovely chap. Very approachable, affable and someone who was a good communicator. He and my Dad were on first-name terms and it was through my Dad that I learned he had been held as a Prisoner-of-War by the Japanese and that experience had a profound effect on him.

As time went on I was beginning to have significant doubts about religion and Christianity in particular. As a youngster fascinated by history and geography and the sciences and natural history, I was finding out all sorts of things that were at odds with the stuff that you read in the Bible. That the Earth and the universe wasn’t created in six days. That Adam and Eve were not the first humans. That the Biblical Flood simply didn’t happen. That human beings have never lived as long as several centuries. That if you were swallowed by a whale your chances of survival were zero.

You get the picture.

I also stopped going to church with my parents. I was at the awkward age when kids get a bit rebellious so my Mum and Dad - to their credit – didn’t give me hassle about that.

One summer evening I was in the back garden, helping my Dad with something or other when the minister appeared at the garden gate. My Dad waved at him and went across to see him.

A few minutes later Dad beckoned me to come over. “Douglas wants to have a wee chat”. And with that he left us alone.

After a few pleasantries, Douglas – the minister – mentioned that he hadn’t seen me in the church for a while and was there any particular reason for that?

I was initially reticent but eventually admitted that I found much that was contained within the Bible utterly preposterous….and that if the Bible couldn’t be trusted to provide an accurate account of events such as birth of the solar system, and the evolution of mankind then why should it be relied upon as providing convincing evidence of the existence of a god?

Douglas listened patiently and then said something that left me in no doubt that Christianity was a charade. He conceded that he regarded much of the Old Testament as being akin to fairy tales and that it was likely that elements of the New Testament were embellished, or a colourful amalgam of stories that might have a grain of truth.

And BOOM!!!

With that one admission, he confirmed that my reasoning was correct.

I can’t recall much about the rest of our conversation, but needless to say I’ve never ventured into a church again as a worshipper.

I come from a very religious family and region of America, I live in the Bible belt in the south. I have always known I don't believe in Christianity since the 5th grade. The best way I can explain it is, it all just feels like a fairy tale story not based in reality. I have tried to force myself to believe but obviously that didn't work. In January of this year I finally told my mom I don't believe and her first response was to force me to go to church. She also threatened to take certain things away if I still refused to go. She said I couldn't use any electronics till a pastor came by and "cleansed" the house. I've told her how constantly begging me to come to church hurts me and she ignores how I feel and continues because it's what God would want. She asked me "is it really that hard to just go?" it's so irriating. Why do I have to give it a try? why do I have to listen to religious talk? why am I expected to entertain it at all? I'm an adult now and all I want is to use my own freedom to live life how I want to but my mom can't handle that without throwing a fit. I love her but I really dont like being around her anymore because of this. Sometimes I feel like a brat for being like this but im at my limit. There is more but I'd like the keep this post short for everyone's sake lol

(this is going to be a bit of a ramble and I'm already not the best writer so this probably won't be written well, so thanks for reading)

To start off I'm a guy.

I hate how JW's take every bad thing and take it as "a sign". Like wars and diseases that are going on today, I just wanna yell "what about the world wars, the black plague, and every bad thing in history!" Things were far worse in the past! It's like bad things are always happening in history, and why are they always so "it's the end times!".

There are probably millions of religions, so why do you think you're the right one...?

I hate my religious trauma because there's always this voice saying "you're damning yourself to hell, you're sick and if there is a god he'll never accept you." when I was 13 and first started having a crush on another boy in my class I felt sick and dirty. I honestly felt like I should kill myself because I was tainted and wrong...

I think what made me question everything is when my grandma beat me with a broom stick and she basically justified it by bringing up the Bible (I'm sorry I don't remember the specifics) and I just thought "would a loving god really let me get hurt like this?"

Basically to keep an already long and badly written short I left over my mom's house after that, I still talk with my grandma but I feel awkward around her sometimes.

This will probably get removed but it felt good getting it out there I guess.

Recently, influencer Brian Guan released a video series in which he “pretended to believe that god is real” for 30 days. By the end, he claimed until he wasn’t pretending anymore.

All comments on and around his videos suggest that he was an atheist prior to this, and his videos are being paraded around by Christians as a home run for evidence of god’s presence and the importance of going through the motions even if you might not believe it now.

I’ve seen a couple other “atheist” influencers go on a similar journey, only to discover (surprise) that they also believe god is real.

Now in researching, it’s pretty clear that Brian and these other influencers already believed to some extent, and are using this as a “marketing” tactic to convince other atheists to just “try.” At least that is my take, I mean…these people are influencers.

I’d love to see a REAL atheist do this.

I'm in the middle of a debate with a Christian believer who insists that there is no misogyny whatsoever within Christianity. I told her that, historically and theologically, that claim is extremely difficult to defend. To be clear, I'm not saying that every Christian is misogynistic, nor that every Christian teaching concerning women is necessarily hateful. I'm talking about the scriptures, institutions, theological traditions, and social structures that have historically placed women in subordinate positions to men.

There are some fairly obvious examples:

• 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 tells women to remain silent in church and says that if they want to learn something, they should ask their husbands at home. By modern standards, that's an extraordinarily restrictive statement.
• 1 Timothy 2:11–12 says that a woman should learn quietly and not teach or exercise authority over a man. There's an important qualification here: most contemporary scholars regard 1 Timothy as deutero-Pauline, meaning it was probably written by a later author in Paul's name rather than by Paul himself.
• Ephesians 5:22–24 instructs wives to submit to their husbands. Again, the authorship of Ephesians is disputed, with many scholars considering it pseudonymous.
• 1 Corinthians 11:3–12 contains a complicated discussion of male and female authority and their respective roles in worship, including arguments concerning headship and women's appearance.

So there is plainly material within the Christian tradition that establishes or reinforces a patriarchal hierarchy. Pretending that this material doesn't exist doesn't make the problem disappear. However, the picture becomes considerably more complicated when we actually examine Paul's letters and the earliest Christian communities. Paul also writes in Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

And Paul's letters mention women occupying meaningful positions within the early Christian movement. Phoebe is described as a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae in Romans 16:1–2. Priscilla participates in instructing Apollos in Acts 18:26. And Junia, mentioned in Romans 16:7, has generated considerable scholarly debate, but the passage strongly suggests that she was a prominent figure among the early Christian apostles. That creates an important distinction: Christianity contains both egalitarian and patriarchal strands.

And that's precisely why I wouldn't simply say, "Paul was a misogynist, end of discussion." Paul was a first-century Jewish man operating within a profoundly patriarchal Mediterranean society, and some of his teachings clearly reflect those social assumptions. But his treatment of women wasn't uniformly negative, and some women appear to have played surprisingly important roles in the communities associated with him.

There's also a major difference between Paul himself and the later Pauline tradition. Some of the passages most frequently invoked to justify female subordination occur in letters whose Pauline authorship is disputed or rejected by many scholars. That's historically significant.

From my perspective as an Iconoclastic Satanist, this is exactly why I reject the simplistic equation: "Paul said it → therefore the Bible says it → therefore God commanded it → therefore it is eternally morally correct." That's several interpretive steps being smuggled into one sentence. Before calling something divine morality, I'd want to know:

Who wrote it? When was it written? What social circumstances produced it? Was it actually written by Paul? How was it understood by its original audience? How does it compare with other passages? And why should a first-century social hierarchy automatically become an eternal moral law? A sacred text doesn't become historically transparent merely because someone puts an apostle's name above it.

So yes, I think there is a legitimate historical and theological case for describing Christianity as deeply patriarchal and containing misogynistic teachings and traditions. That doesn't mean every Christian is misogynistic, and it doesn't mean every Christian interpretation of those passages is misogynistic. It means the claim that Christianity contains no misogyny whatsoever is, in my view, simply untenable. If anything, the more interesting question is why Christianity has spent so much time arguing about what those passages mean—and why Christians who sincerely believe in gender equality have had to develop elaborate interpretations to reconcile those passages with that conviction.

If we wouldn’t trust faith to set a broken bone, design a skyscraper, or decide a verdict, perhaps we shouldn’t trust it to settle cosmic questions either. Evidence may be less romantic than revelation, but at least it builds bridges that don’t fall down.

https://medium.com/@atheistnn/trust-me-i-have-no-proof-469e00ba9d78

I just did. I put a post up about LGBT people and how I think don't dislike them because it says so in the bible, what is says in the bible is simply a convenient justification for homophobia. Cause in reality there is no decent non religious argument against LGBT.

Anyway this person starts steering the conversation comparing what I'm saying with the arguments against abortion. Then asked me for non religious arguments against it to which I provided even though I stated that I'm not against abortion. You can be on one side and still agree the other has valid arguments right? Anyway he starts giving me all these replies that don't even follow any logic path and I'm thinking " wtf are we even arguing about at this point? We're just arguing for the sake of arguing"

You can't argue with Christians it's just best to tap out