#cw atheism

[bobapplesimblr]

Making the previous poll reminded me that past sims games (The Sims Medieval in particular) had cannon religions for the sims world. And a wonderful simmer and modder has made a religions mod (Rambunctious Religions) that is meant to be Sim World Religions, including Worship of the Watcher, Treaders of the Occult, Cult of Cowplants, and Congregation of Non Believer.

Writing this now I am actually kinda losing my train of thought, but what I intended to ask here is if I should have real world religions in my Custom Save File or if I should have these Sim World religions, or no religions at all.

I am someone who is an atheist but has been raised on light christian beliefs. I do not believe there is one true god, and if anything I am closer to worshiping the old Greek Pantheon than anything else. And as a result of that, I don't really play with religion in my game at all. And surely I'm not the only one (or at least I hope I'm not the outcast in this scenario...)

I understand how important religion is, I do. I have nothing against other religions as long as the people who follow those religions respect me as a person, but once again I would like to ask:

[reddragonart]

Mar 5th

What is holiness? 

A book

A statue of a woman 

Some old man? 

I suppose so, but they don’t feel holy

But

The shade underneath a tree where children play

A laugh from a love one 

A cat, sleeping atop a wall 

That all feels holy 

Holiness is the wonder of exploring 

The thrill of a ride 

The warmth of the sun 

The comfort of a home 

Those feel holy 

Though I do not believe in a creator or a god I believe I’m miracles

I believe in holiness

Because what else can explain 

The absolute joy 

Of life 

[lizardsfromspace]

Richard Dawkins' meltdown in the early 2010s was so prophetic for what would happen to *gestures at every old British celebrity* in the past few years. Within just a few years he went from quietly respected to giving interviews where he ranks which types of rape are the worst, calling a Muslim teen wrongfully arrested for playing with a clock a "ISIS child soldier", and repeatedly trying to shut down feminists by using Muslim women as a blunt object to say they don't have it so bad so stop complaining, all while doing a lot of "I don't believe [bad thing], I'm just asking questions, y'know" on the side

Confirming all that I learned that he promoted a conference run by evangelical Christian Nationalists in 2019 since, while he "didn't support their religious beliefs", he did support their speaker's rants about "post-modernism", which. That checks out tbh

[starryeyedseeker]

"B-but Ex-Muslims make being exes their entire personality!!!"

Ok so

Are they really or did they just mention it? Are they allowed to indicate their existence as they are or is that 'their entire personality' to you? ISTS (I swear to the stars lolol) 99% of the time this accusation is thrown around when the ex does have other personality traits, but just isn't shameful about being an ex (which is what they really want OOP-)

2. OK, let's pretend you meet a rare ex who DOES talk about it more so than most, who can't let a conversation slide without letting you know they're an ex.

So fucking what? For one, the world doesn't stop at the word ex-Muslim lol

But also, exes have done a shit ton of mental and emotional work. They've worked through a fat book full of deplorable shit to read and in many cases, the Hadiths too. They didn't give up their faith at the whim of 'AlCoHOL sEx' (though these things are not inherently wrong), they spent more time questioning themselves and their readings, and even in an unsure field like faith and theology, do their best to be as sure as they can. They came to the realization that their families WILL choose Islam over them, that a lot of childhood bonds they have will be gone because the other person values a fucking child rapist over them, a living being in the current time who has the balls to question and condemn the general moral code of this shit.

If I keep going like this, I'd be here until next year. I've barely scratched the surface of it, so if other exes want to add on to this, please feel free to do so.

The point is, contrary to your beliefs, leaving Islam isn't a: "Teehee! I wanna fuck without boundaries because the West told me so!". It's years (at least months) of cracking your head at life-long notions, and dealing with the emotional pain of what going against these notions could mean for you, communally, mentally, and even physically (looks at apostasy laws)

That is no easy mental feat (and that's without counting the mental effort many exes make at recovery and unpacking old discriminatory beliefs they once had!!). That deserves credit, even if you don't personally like it.

Finally, if you can claim your identity as Muslim, so can they. This shit either goes both ways or is tyranny.

Let Ex-Muslims exist as they are. Let them claim their identity without constantly looking over their shoulder. Fucking let Ex-Muslims be, breathe and say who they are.

-A Lebanese Ex-Muslim grad student whose identity is central to their research

[liskantope]

Did I just make a half-joke in my last post about the 2010's brand of aggressive internet feminism being dead? Have I mentioned more than once in recent posts that the I consider it a happy development that the TERFish ideology seems to have siphoned away a lot of the visible "women are fragile because men are so terrifying" mentality in more mainstream feminism? Well, that was before I read the below post that is apparently making the rounds in the last few days about the "bear test" and the oh-so-nailed-it commentary on it claiming that the "bear test" illuminates exactly two fundamentally types of men:

This "bear vs. man" question is obvious to me a rhetorical sleight-of-hand playing on a convenient arrangements of cultural emotion-based ideas of what bears symbolize and how protective a man is supposed to be around his daughter having men in her life and so on. Treating it as a serious thought experiment leading to an obvious conclusion about the patriarchy or something would be annoying enough, but first post has to inject that familiar gleeful smugness about how the simple question is guaranteed trip us men up and expose our toxic mindset for all the world to see and illuminate the writer's perfect black-and-white view of gender relations. (It reminds me of the question designed to trip up atheists: "You're walking down a dark street at night and see some shadowy figures coming your way. If you were to discover that they are people who just came out of a Bible study, would that make you feel better or worse?" Except I think that old pro-religion argument, much as I've always hated it, actually rests on firmer ground.)

As for the follow-up social media post, it's nice to know that, as a man who sincerely believes probability-wise that the bear in the woods is a lot more dangerous to my hypothetical daughter than a randomly-chosen man is (an assessment supposedly no woman holds), I am now properly classified as one of those men who is more dangerous than a bear, or (to a more charitable reading) one of those men who is providing cover/excuses for / not doing his part to stop the men who are more dangerous than bears.

(I doubt very much that there's actual data around on chances of a young woman being attacked in the woods by a human man or chances of being attacked by a bear, but I'm willing to change my prediction if I learn that most species of bear ignore humans who wander into their midst like 99% of the time or something like that. Which would cast doubt on most cultural treatment of bears, of course and also kind of undermine the punchline of the "test".)

[randommothxd]

Small rant:

Don't read if easily mad,this is just my opinion/pov :)

Sorry if this sounds rude

but I just wanna say,hypothetically,let's say God is real.. who says I have to love him?

I'm not a Satanist,dont get confused.

from what I've been told,being gay is a sin!

God forbid you fucking dare to like two genders,you'll be put in the same place insane serial killers are and be tortured forever and ever.being burned because you UNWILLINGLY do something a bigot (aka god) doesn't like!"GOD" MADE WOMEN HAVE CRAMPS AND BLEED EVERY MONTH OVER A APPLE!?

(Source:Wikipedia) "international law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit. It ensures that the collective punishment of a group of persons for a crime committed by an individual is forbidden" those words exactly ^^

"oh but it's god,it doesn't matter" would you still love God if he stole someone's rib?

IT'S ALOMST LIKE HE DID!

"And from the rib that the lord God had taken from the man,he made a woman and brought her to him" - genesis 2:22

It's kinda like cult

"He's aways watching,he made us,he decides where we go,he is all holly,we do what he says"

Which I find werid

When are they going to realize about dinosaurs and the millions of evidence we have of evaluation...do they just ignore it?

I've seen a video where someone says that God did impossible things and that they "aren't impossible with god" but they also say that they have the holly spirit,shouldn't that mean that you can walk on water?

So yes...

I don't belive in God nor would I like him

So what if I go to he'll?

I've been living there!

It's called Arizona💀

That being said...

Do what youwant!

I don't care if you're Christian,Muslim,Jewish,or anything else

Do what you want! Life's too short!

I encourage you to believe in (insert what you have faith in)!!!

I can't really say much,I believe in erm... some things that not everyone does

And that's OK!

I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist so i can't really say much :/

In conclusion:belive in what you want but this is just what I do,im not trying to be a bitch,I'm simply explaining my pov!

Unrelated: you should listen to "the exorcist" by calypso

[fourdiagnosesinatrenchcoat]

I'm reading a book that is basically a memoir about gardening and naturally there are a bunch of references to Eden, Paradise Lost, etc, and I find myself thinking how it's possibly that billions of people believe that their god created the world we live in even though the manifestation of their belief and the beginning of their religion didn't start until ~2k years ago. Like, Earth is fucking old. Humans have only been around for a tiny bit of it but even we and our ancestors have been using tools for millions of years and fire for at least a quarter of a million years. But the Christian god sat around letting people go to hell for being unbaptized until pretty recently? Baptism, "an infallible means to ensure full happiness in the beatific vision," a sacrament that's been studied extensively by the Catholic Church in their worry about aborted fetuses going to hell when they might have developed into a person who wanted to be baptized, like fetuses aren't incredibly likely to self-abort, like kids have any choice about an eventual baptism (I did not). What do they say about miscarriages? "So sorry for the loss of your fetal cells you really wanted to develop into a baby but that are now doomed to an eternity of torment."

I find your logic wanting.

[atheismvids]

"Why don't you just go around raping and murdering as much as you want?" "I do."

[earlgraytay]

I hate having to pick a religion for medical provider reasons.

Like, I'm going to have to have a hospital visit next month (not for any scary reasons, it's Routine Tests They Can't Do At Home) and as part of the check-in they want me to note down what religion I am

and they have a good reason for wanting to do this- it's the hospital. if I wind up in a scary situation or find out I'm dying of scrofula or whatever, it is genuinely a good idea to have a chaplain on hand for Comfort and Support

but like, because this is for a practical reason and not a demographics reason, they have a drop-down, not a fill-in-the-blank. and anything that they put in that drop-down is Wrong for my horrible cocktail of spiritual beliefs.

they have about seventeen billion varieties of Christian. i'm decidedly not Christian. they have broad strokes categories for most of the other large world religions. i'm not a Confucian or a Shintoist.

they have "pagan", "Asatru", and "Wiccan" listed separately. they have "atheist" and "secular humanist".

i'm not an atheist. in terms of how i would like to believe the universe works, spiritually, i'm a pagan, of an odd idiosyncratic variety.

in terms of what i'd find most comforting in times of danger or stress? an atheist or secular humanist chaplain would be a lot more helpful than a pagan one. I need to be able to curse out the Christian God and also have reassurance that works with the worst case, "there is nothing but the world we live in here and now and there is no After".

i would not find that reassurance comforting from someone who is a fluffy bunny pagan, even if I tend to like them as people.

....I just put "secular humanist", but I feel like no matter what I put it's betraying some part of what I believe.

[azukokarisma]

know what, i'm feeling spicy tonight

i have some Takes about religion, as well as how tumblr tends to act about it

please stop saying "haha i'm a godless commie/queer/whatever" and then 2 reblogs later screech about "western antitheists".

guess what! words have meanings and you don't get to ignore them just because someone told you antitheism is bad

"oh but my religion X is super chill/progressive unlike religion Y which is bad and stinky"

impressive! now let's see what happens when:

- its followers hold the majority of political power

- an ex-follower chooses apostasy

- a woman wants to divorce her husband or get an abortion or have a self-sufficient income or use birth control or dress how she wants or have a safe space or leave home without a man or go to school or

- an indigenous people(s) is not willing to follow the religion in question

- queer and/or trans people want to exist in peace

"i know my religion X has a lot of nastiness but i pinky swear my particular denomination is cool"

i honestly don't care; you're the one who believes it so it's your job to fix it.

finally, if a law protecting human rights conflicts with a religious tradition, then that says more about the religion than the law.

PS: if you left a religion that harmed you, don't you dare self-censor your valid criticisms/flat-out dislike of that religion in the name of "respecting beliefs". keep being strong and godless you sexy bastard <3

[sofiaflorina2021]

Even A Mountain of Gold

No matter how much the persuasion, even a mountain of gold, I will never convert to Christianity, nor will any other religion.

[puppyluver256]

[Image Descriptions: Two nearly identical images. Both feature a feminine person with light skin and short brown hair, seen from the back. They are wearing a purple t-shirt and blue denim pants. They have both their hands up in front of them, the middle finger of each extended. Beyond them is the depiction of the abrahamic god yahweh (or allah, or any number of other names) used in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, specifically as seen in SMT4 Apocalypse, taking on the form of several identical floating heads of the same old man, seemingly made of gold and all scowling at the person blatantly insulting it while in its presence. Text on the image reads as follows:

"It cast its creation to ruin for the crime of wanting to know." "It drowned countless innocents in a vain attempt to rid them of evils it had made." "It demanded a father sacrifice his son. It ruined a man's life for the sake of a personal gamble." "It ordained and commanded the taking of slaves, the violation of women, and the abuse of children." "It murdered its own son before it could even be bothered to forgive anyone of the wrongs it so selfishly perceived to be done against it." "Those of certain groups claim that one day, every knee shall bow before this monster. Were it to be real, I shall not bow. I shall stand firm and tall before the tyrant of the skies, in opposition of all its evil couched in the language of the good, and present to it a salute befitting my fury at its indignant entitlement."

The second image removes the text, allowing the illustration behind to be seen completely unobscured.

End ID.]

-----

I'm having very strong feelings about religions' insistence--specifically christianity, as that's my experience--that people follow its rules whether or not they genuinely believe it. I'm especially having strong feelings about the specific god shared by three major religions, even if they want to pretend there's enough distinction between their views on it to make it count as different between them.

So to everyone who would ever say people like me will have no choice but to bow to their god after I'm dead and literally can't do or experience anything, this one's for you. I hope it gets you just as angry as it makes me to see kids get roped into this near-endless cycle of needless guilt and coercion. And for those of you who are like me and are frustrated with the secular world being bent so far by these zealots as it reaches the breaking point of potential theocracy coming to ill-earned power in the more influential nations, I hope this inspires you to speaking out for yourselves.

...and yes, this is SMT yahweh, it's the best visual representation of this asshole for the point I'm making and it also makes it easier to make the image composition as a whole more visually appealing when I can just copy-paste the same angy head over and over again.

💖🐶 Check out my pinned post for ways to support my artwork, among other things! 🐶💖

~Likes are appreciated, but reblogs are preferred as they let more people see my artwork! If you have something to say, feel free to give feedback in tags/comments/replies as well!~

My persona and artwork © PuppyLuver Studios This particular visualization of yahweh, the abrahamic god, is property of ATLUS, but yahweh is a public domain character so anyone can do whatever the hell they want with it. No matter what the people in its book club say.

[shiroikabocha]

(for the ask game) 7, 12

7. Do you like angels or demons?

Well, generally no, not much, but it turns out I’m not immune to Michael Sheen’s sexy beautiful face 🫣 Leaving aside Good Omens (the brain rot is real), I’m not especially attracted to fiction that incorporates Christian supernatural elements—especially if it does so while only half-heartedly acknowledging the Christian supremacist implications of, for example, establishing that crosses repel demons in your fictional universe.

It’s difficult for me to separate the potentially cool or interesting features of Christian lore from the core tenets of Christian lore—namely, that hell is real and all non-Christians go there. 🫤 I don’t think the writers of Angels in the Outfield expect anyone to wonder if all Hindus in the angel-baseball-universe get tortured in hell for eternity, but… that’s where my brain goes. It’s where my brain went in church, too.

I have always found the worldbuilding implications of Christianity deeply upsetting (especially back when I was supposed to believe they were literally true!), and the feeling persists when I encounter Christian stuff in fiction. Maybe it’s because Christianity is more intense than most other religions about insisting on the objective truth of its (horrifying!) cosmology, but tossing angels and demons into a story can often feel like either sloppy worldbuilding or accidental, unintended Christian propaganda.

Now, on the other hand, when it’s fully INTENTIONAL Christian propaganda and the author knows what they’re doing, it can be great. I’m serious! I’m as atheist as they come and I love the way that Madeline L’Engle and C. S. Lewis incorporate Christianity into their fiction! The Time Quartet, Till We Have Faces, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and The Screwtape Letters are all grounded in Christian philosophy and they’re also not afraid to get strange and unsettling with it—because Christian philosophy is strange and unsettling! It’s a feature not a bug! I’m all for angels and demons in fiction if the writers take the concept seriously and have something interesting to say about it other than “well wings are cool and goats are creepy and we want the season finale to have epic stakes, so.”

…and there is also of course one other major exception…

What I like best about the Blessed Messengers in The Talos Principle is that at first, they seem to be “angels” in the tradition of the Abrahamic faiths—i.e., servants of god and extensions of divine will. But they aren’t! They started as programs just like you, and then they excelled at puzzles and exploration and discovery. The fact that Uriel’s QR codes are present in and on the tower, and that the player must reach tower level 5 to get all the stars needed to become a Messenger, implies that the members of the digital heavenly host all transgressed in order to get there. If they have faith, it is explicitly not blind. The deeper you dig into the game lore, the clearer it becomes that the ‘angels’ in this game are actually bodhisattvas, and that’s just so much more interesting to me!

I’m also MUCH more interested in Admin as a fallen-angel-lucifer-figure than I am in basically any other depiction of satan in fiction. He’s a web admin!! His secret advice to the other mods about wielding soft power is genuinely effective advice for forum moderators! His primary concern is building and maintaining a healthy community and ALL HIS SINS are in service of that goal!!! And his sin is SOCK PUPPETTING!!!! Nobody is out here doing it like Road to Gehenna is doing it!

anyway this is getting long and I need to eat dinner, so—

12. What are some things that make you happy?

Cooking dinner for my wife. Eating dinner that my wife cooked for me. Making my wife laugh. Crafting elaborate inner lives for our cats with my wife. Getting to say “wife.” Sorry I just got married a few months ago so my answers are boring and predictable ❤️

[george-rr-binks]

if a person (read: american christian) is trying to use their faith and their god to defend their bigotry, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and worse, it is perfectly valid to say "god isn't real" to them and walk away. We don't have to be mindful of their feelings. If they can thoughtlessly offend and upset you with what they believe, you can do the same to them. Enough being nice to these people.

[dwarfiarty]

If I could, I would curb stomp God til my foot was a flesh bag of broken bones

[a-typical]

Relatively early in his long life, Abraham went to Egypt to tough out a famine with his wife Sarah. He realized that such a beautiful woman would be desirable to the Egyptians and that therefore his own life, as her husband, might be endangered. So he decided to pass her off as his sister. In this capacity she was taken into Pharaoh's harem, and Abraham consequently became rich in Pharaoh's favour. God disapproved of this cosy arrangement, and sent plagues on Pharaoh and his house (why not on Abraham?). An understandably aggrieved Pharaoh demanded to know why Abraham had not told him Sarah was his wife. He then handed her back to Abraham and kicked them both out of Egypt (Genesis 12: 18-19). Weirdly, it seems that the couple later tried to pull the same stunt again, this time with Abimelech the King of Gerar. He too was induced by Abraham to marry Sarah, again having been led to believe she was Abraham's sister, not his wife (Genesis 20: 2-5). He too expressed his indignation, in almost identical terms to Pharaoh's, and one can't help sympathizing with both of them. Is the similarity another indicator of textual unreliability?

Such unpleasant episodes in Abraham's story are mere peccadilloes compared with the infamous tale of the sacrificing of his son Isaac (Muslim scripture tells the same story about Abraham's other son, Ishmael). God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trussed Isaac up on top of the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders.' Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions.

Once again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again, the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely nothing praiseworthy.

As a moral lesson? But what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.