#atheist women

[cyberthot666]

the other night I spent a long time watching this hyper-christian woman’s videos. her entire ideology was basically that women were made to obey their husbands and have their babies and keep their homes blah blah blah you know how it goes. they were super triggering but I couldn’t stop watching. it shocks me people think like that. and it made me grateful I live in a country with freedom from religion. it was forced upon me as a child which was traumatizing. as a little girl being told that my only purpose and the reason for my existence was for men to use me however they please.

this woman on tiktok seemed to have a common theme in her thinking. she mostly stuck to topics of how women should dress, how women should behave, how women should speak, how women should believe, and how women should cater to their husbands. her advice was condescending. her tone prideful. I thought it must be miserable to hate yourself and other women this much. I thought about the hypocrisy in her superiority complex. modern western christianity seems to be full of hypocrisy, pridefulness, and entitlement.

it takes entitlement to be so convinced your belief system is the only correct belief system and that you’re doing others a favor by forcing it onto them.

even though I reject religious ideology as an adult I still retained a lot of its messages. and if there’s anything I learned, it’s that very attitude of entitlement that stands in direct opposition to the teachings of christ. these fake christians tempt me to convert back as a form of protest to their hypocrisy. did jesus not teach us to walk in humility? to “love thy neighbor” ?

religion and misogyny rot the mind. religion is used as a tool to control.

thank ~god~ I had the choice to walk away

there are women in countries who don’t have that choice. there are women in THIS country who don’t have that choice. and with the rise in christo-fascism in america, woman-hating has become rampant. it’s important to educate ourselves. it’s important to have open minds. it’s important to protect our freedom. and it’s important to love one another. walk in love not ego. and I don’t need a 2,000 year old book to tell me that.

[atheostic]

Famous Nonbelievers

Nigella Lawson

Told The Times (UK) (and quoted on Wikipedia): "I was brought up an atheist and have always remained so. But at no time was I led to believe that morality was unimportant or that good and bad did not exist. I believe passionately in the need to distinguish between right and wrong and am somewhat confounded by being told I need God, Jesus or a clergyman to help me to do so."

[watermelinoe]

getting the sense that some of you are not as normal about atheists as you claim to be

[crownspeaksblog]

Marriage in general is fucked in the middle east..

I hate hate HATE living in a country where girls being married off at 15 is seen as something to be envious of.. is seen as something to be admired for..for fuck sakes! That's a fucking child!! I remember a classmate talking about i think a cousin of hers who's 15 who's married to a 29/30 year old man and how MUCH he LOVES her and how everyday he does her FUCKING HAIR FOR FUCKING SCHOOL!!!!

i saw a video of a 26 year old mother selling food on the street to make money and the top comment on that video was a man (sincerely) offering to marry her and he had like 100 replies of people asking him if he did it already and praising him for it..

And you know what's annoying is when i try to point out how fucked up those things are.. I'm almost always in the minority, I'm almost always argued against and people try to justify something like this by being like "this is our culture"....

fuck this culture and religion because you know damn well this shit is rooted in religion.. girls married off when they hit puberty to men twice their age is seen as an accomplishment.. men being encouraged to grace widows and divorced women with their kindness and marry them like they're broken or used (even if it meant getting a second, third or a fourth wife)...

And i know to most people reading this shit it sounds like I'm making it up but I'm not and you have no idea how much i wish i was..

[serpentface]

What are Faiza’s thoughts/feelings on (presumably?) seeing human sacrifice performed, or in theory, irt her religious beliefs?

It's a little complicated, but less than might be assumed.

This IS something she's witnessed personally, and been involved in the process (not participating in the rites themselves, but in organizing them). But she has no sensitization to it- she's grown up seeing people executed, regular everyday animal sacrifices, and the yearly dry season human offering. It's something that is entirely separated from the concept of murder (which is regarded as abhorrent, as murder is in basically every culture (it's just that definitions of what types of killing is and is not murder varies)) and nothing disturbing or unusual in of itself.

It's a fairly small part of a much broader framework of religious practices that she ultimately does not believe in. Her reaction is more 'this doesn't actually have an intrinsic point, but it is what it is and has some practical benefits'. Her views on the Wardi faith are conflicted but overall positive. Even if she doesn't Believe in 90% of its core elements, she sees it as Beneficial- it's the Only thing that unifies the entire Imperial Wardi cultural sphere. This is important to her both on the level that Imperial Wardin is a tenuous union of city-states and tributaries and dozens of peoples and that its stability relies on its shared religion, and that it's a grand equalizer- its benefits cross class and ethnic lines within this rather broad cultural sphere.

So like, when it comes to humans being ritually killed, she doesn't think there's a still-extant God that enters their bodies or that their deaths materially enable the seasonal cycles to continue and bring the rains back. But she does think it has a Point, in the same capacity that she doesn't believe most of the core tenants of the faith have material reality, but the religion's role in society has material benefits. It has a point, and it's not murder, so she ultimately has little beef with the concept.

The instance where it crossed the line to 'this is fucked up' is in the context of the drought. With the drought intensifying, the usual one-off one-person annual dry season offering was extended to dozens of people (which Was officially condoned). In addition, as the years went on and civil unrest intensified, there were instances of civilian suicides and murders that were clearly attempted offerings (as well as suicides and murders that were at least loosely Framed as offerings but definitely weren't). In the fifth year, over a hundred Ephenni Galenii offered themselves up in an independent mass-offering (condoned by the priesthood but not by the Usoma). And yet the drought wore on.

THIS all was disturbing to her. This wasn't the faith functioning as intended, this was symptomatic of impending collapse. This was a waste of life that was TRULY for nothing. The officially condoned sacrifices were clear and desperate flailing by the Usoma and/or priesthoods to spiritually address the drought and famine (in addition to really, really poor attempts to practically address food and water insecurity and social unrest), and the civilian sacrificial murders and suicides were this unrest and mass despair crystalized into horrifically needless, pointless death and brutality. (These civilian killings were widely seen as horrifying by devout believers as well btw, just because human sacrifice exists in a culture doesn't mean people think religious killing and suicide is Okay And Normal In Every Situation)

The horror of All That was one of the motivating factors in her role in organizing the pilgrimage as a more controlled, intentional, and directed use of religious practice to reassure the public, that would also attempt to practically re-unify the divided priesthood/military/royal family. The seven-beast offering is a long established concept (rather than desperate flailing of 'add more people to the dry season offering' or 'get a hundred Galenii to drown themselves in a muddy riverbed'), the pilgrimage format is a public show of unity and requires significant internal diplomacy to function.

---

I'm also going to just like take this opportunity to clarify her worldview:

She ascribes to a culturally specific form of atheism that posits that God fully, permanently died in the act of creation, Its death kicked off the cycles of the world as we know it but Its spirit no longer has any capacity to interact with the world. The existence of a creator god is reckoned as self-evident, but its continuing presence in the world is disputed. Therefore, the vast majority of religious practice (which is entirely built around interactions with God's continuously cycling spirit) has no intrinsic effect.

This stems from a niche branch of materialist Burri and Wardi philosophy. It's a very uncommon belief (and has its own subvariants- some extreme materialists dismiss the existence of the soul itself (God died and there is no soul so It's Gone) and some that characterize God as merely absent (God died and Its spirit is absent from the world, in the same capacity that the souls of the dead are absent from the world once they successfully move on) (Faiza falls into the latter camp). The heavy prioritization of orthopraxy over orthodoxy means that a person holding these beliefs in of itself is not often going to be a major cultural issue so long as they perform expected practices, but standards of orthodoxy are higher in the priesthoods and like. Her entire role is as a priestess. It's not something she can be open about. It's also not something she can talk about with any of her personal relations (she was introduced to the concept after maintaining contact with her childhood tutor and regularly discussing philosophy with him, but the guy was elderly and died when she was in her mid 20s.)

This translates to her being more open to questioning other elements of her cultural framework, but the rest of her worldview is fairly normative, there's nothing else she rejects as thoroughly as the continuing existence of God. She believes in the soul, ghosts, evil spirits, luck, curses, and spiritual pollution (though should be noted that the Ways she believes in them are influenced by a materialist philosophical lens, and as such her interpretations are non-standard). She also thinks there's some truth in the folk magic practices that attempt to influence luck and curses (these traditions rarely actually involve God in their framework), and the ones she rejects are on a more typical class-aligned basis of being 'Foolish Commoner Superstition', not in a 'magic is not real' capacity.

So like it's a mixed bag where she thinks the religion itself has material points and value, and she takes pride in being an Odonii. But she's still locked in a life of performing endless rites that have no internal meaning to her and give no sense of comfort beyond self-assurance that they're for a greater good, giving hollow reassurances to her religiously paranoid brother and not being able to fully connect to her extremely devout true believer sister. It's isolating, and it wears on her.

[niiwa-angel]

trans rights are human rights motherfucker

What rights do trans people not have?

Right to vote? They can vote. There are trans people who have held office in the US.

Right to medical care? They have access to medical care, hell, they have MORE access to medical care than non-trans people. I can't go get plastic surgery for free, but they can. Because it's 'gender affirming' and therefore covered by public healthcare.

All the things trans people are fighting for aren't rights. Males don't have the right to go into women's bathrooms, male athletes who can't cut it in the men's league don't get to go play in the women's league, just like I, an able bodied woman, can't go play in the Paralympics just because I'm not good at sports. Male prisoners don't have the right to female prisons.

Women (female people) have the right to single sex spaces. Trans people are welcome to make their own spaces, sports categories, and shelters. They don't do that, because it's not about the space, it's the women in those spaces.

[audreyrose7]

I think about this all the time.

[tazzertopia]

as an atheist one thing that has always confused me with god is when the same religious people who say that god has no gender would get super pissy if you referred to god as a she…. why is god only a he? you can never convince me that religion can align with feminism

[stonelovesbeer]

Wait, what?

[weemietime]

Y'all are stupid if you don't understand that the IRGC are directly responsible for a significant portion of current anti-Israel sentiment in the West. And their goal, in case you don't understand this, is to increase support for radical Islam.

The IRGC itself took over Iran and forced its citizens to adopt Islam, and it's so insidious that people to this day who cry about Israeli "colonialism" actively call Iran an Arab country.

I will give a shit about your Israeli "colonialism" when you give equal air space to Arab and Islamic imperialism and actual colonialism which is why Hamas openly says that their goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with yet another Arab and Islamic ethnostate.

People use the term ethnostate to apply to Israel when Israel is the single most diverse and liberal country in the Middle East while ignoring that every single Arab country around it is an ethnostate that rejects those who aren't Arab or Islamic.

I will give your arguments weight when you can point to a country in the Middle East other than Israel who have a 20% Jewish population with equal rights as the Arab citizens. I'll bring some popcorn and then starve to fucking death before you are able to do so.

The Houthis perpetrated a genocide of 200,000 people and the IRGC actively encourages Westoid idiots to make Tik Toks saying shit like "based Houthis," and then "I oppose genocide" lmfao, gooooooooo fuck yourselves.

Zero Jews in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. All Jews ethnically cleansed or murdered. Israel has a 20% Arab population with equal rights as its Jewish civilians but Israel is the ethnostate, and y'all don't even realize that this rhetoric you are spewing comes from an Islamic imperialist state who actively work to destroy Iranian and Persian culture.

NEW IRAN. WOMEN, FREEDOM, LIFE.

[apostate-in-an-alcove]

Despite claiming to be oh so loving, Christians really are the biggest haters and it just so happens that they often end up hating people who are already oppressed or marginalized in some way.

[atheostic]

Famous Nonbelievers

Eva Green

She told Total Film magazine: "I have no religion. I wasn't raised that way, and I have nothing now.”

[francesderwent]

let's get back to the classic catefrankie blogging we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted by my gauche airing of my personal crisis

so I think actually it's easier to talk about this coming at it negatively, because I think what we're circling around is less some inherent strength of masculinity or femininity as they were meant to be, and more some particular flaw that masculinity or femininity are prone to falling into. so I think for men it is irresponsibility - the irresponsibility of Adam standing by while Eve is tempted and threatened by the serpent, passively going along with her sin and then blaming her for it, instead of protecting her like he should have. the irresponsibility of perpetual-adolescent young men, of absent fathers, of detached husbands. but for women, what's crystalized for me over the last couple days is I think it is cynicism: the cynicism of Eve looking at her perfect situation in Eden and thinking that it can't be trusted and can't be relied upon to continue, so she has to take matters into her own hands. the willingness to quickly believe the worst, even of the God who loves her and walks with her in the garden. the cynicism of disappointed spinsters, of bitter mothers, of controlling wives. so men must work against their tendency by taking up responsibility, by purposely setting down roots and sticking to their commitments, making the choice to live for something other than power and pleasure. and women have to work against their tendency by clinging to the goodness that they find and believing in it, resisting the instinct to ferret out flaws and dwell on them broodily.

[ex-catholic-in-new-england]

Another stupid ass comment from Instagram.

One of my biggest reasons for being pro choice is because it saves rape victims and helps them heal from trauma that ni person should go through. As a rape victim myself (thankfully I am infertile and unable to get pregnant), I know how important it is for rape victims to heal from their abuse, and part of that healing might involve having an abortion. No rape victim, whether they are a child or an adult should be forced to carry their abusers baby.

[bellamygate]

the thing that gets me abt religious ppl is they'll demand u respect their religion & that religion hating your existence but they won't respect ur right to be like yea my belief says god isn't real so thats a dumb reason for hating other people or ye ok then ur god is homophobic thats kinda shitty they go APESHIT like. it goes both ways? like they can say i hate gay ppl bc of my religion but when a gay person says well i dont respect that religion bc it doesnt respect me its ww3. I'm not walking on eggshells for people who are too quick to condemn me to hell