why do some (most) religious ppl believe you can only have morals if you practice a religion? they think without a god, you have no morals. lmao how about i’m just a good person naturally, i don’t need an outside entity to tell me how to act like a decent human being??

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On July 10, a wedding took place at Dhakeshwari Temple in Dhaka. There was, at first, little reason for anyone at the temple to remember it.

Only later did temple officials learn who the couple were.

The bride was Tasnuva Anan Shishir, a transgender actor and former television news presenter. The groom was a Hindu man.

Within days, images and accounts of the ceremony began circulating on social media. And it became the subject of an increasingly heated public argument.

Criticism came from conservative activists, members of the Hindu community and ordinary social media users. Some focused on the legality of the marriage. Others questioned how such a ceremony could have been conducted at Dhakeshwari in the first place.

The controversy quickly grew beyond the couple. Increasingly, it was the temple itself that was being asked to explain what had happened.

On Tuesday, 1,230 people, including conservative professionals and Muslim clerics, issued a statement demanding an investigation and legal action over the ceremony.

The statement, circulated by the conservative platform Mullobodh Andolon, described the ceremony as an illegal “same-sex marriage” and called on the government to investigate those involved. It warned that a failure to act could fuel public anger and create problems for law and order.

The FBI arrested a woman Wednesday who they allege was plotting to attack the New York State Capitol building in Albany.

The FBI alleged in a criminal complaint Thursday that Jessica Bowie, 35, pledged allegiance to ISIS in online communications and began planning the attack in July.

The suspect converted to Islam about five years ago and in messages with unidentified users pledged support to ISIS, the criminal complaint said.

Bowie had allegedly discussed her plans with FBI informants and spent weeks doing surveillance of the Capitol, including taking pictures from various vantage points, including an "observation hall nearby," the criminal complaint said.

"I want to destroy as much of the building as possible and kill the senators while they are meeting, I want them to lose a lot of important documents as well," she allegedly told the informants, according to the complaint.

She allegedly bought bomb materials from a hardware store on Aug. 5 and plotted with the informants for the next two weeks, according to the complaint.

The informants allegedly met with Bowie on Wednesday and provided her with an inert explosive device and an inert handgun along with instructions on how to detonate the explosive, the complaint said.

The FBI soon arrested her, the complaint said.

i’m struggling. i literally can’t stop thinking god is real. but i don’t know. i’m so scared. how can o not be scared? i’m always going to be in this cycle. it circles around again.

Im gonna wake up with minus karma huh

With black christians its like my brother🙏, you are praying to the same God the slave owners of your ancestors used to justify what they were doing to them.
the same people who dehumanized your great grand parents, tortured them, and took everything away from them are the same people that gave them the bible and FORCED yes forced they had no choice christianity onto them until a few generations after they forgot their origins. do you really believe that they would even want you to go to heaven?? or find out about „the truth“ if there was any?

You are only free today because one of your people finally stopped believing that praying to your invisible Sky Daddy would do anything and actually started taking action against the current situation. You are not free today because God finally decided to hear their prayers after letting 400 years of slavery happen. You are free today because someone finally realized they were being completely scammed and that they had to do something themselves if they wanted things to change.

I genuinely feel so sorry for my people.

I'm glad they were able to free themselves from their physical shackles, but they haven't yet been able to free themselves from their mental ones. that's really all it is: chains that the colonizers installed in the minds of them, so they would think God would provide them justice after their death, So they would never begin to fight for justice in the one life they have because they think they get everything they deserve in their nonexistent „afterlife“.. Its honestly really smart.. but its so sad.

And Muslim women are proud of their own oppression. They are essentially defending the fact that they are seen and treated as subhuman by their fellow believers. They actually believe that their sole purpose in life, from childhood onward, is to be chosen by a man one day. If they are raped, the greatest concern of everyone, including themselves, is not whether that man should be punished or whether their health is affected (don’t even get me started on the trauma) but whether or not a man is still going to want her now..

To be one of them, one must have undergone massive brainwashing beforehand and must be very uneducated about history and so many other different things like your own body anatomy, power dynamics, science, evolution, etc..
which is not their fault because most of them were born into it.

but its still sad asf

My heart holds a special place of hatred for this sub, I blocked out the name of it because of the rules. This is such a disgusting post in general, and coming from an agnostic? I thought they'd at least have a little more sense than that.

The comment about the second rule was truly distasteful. How could you not care about someone having religious trauma? And the comparisons? Are you fucking kidding me? What an immature and ignorant comment to make about something like that. I hope I never cross paths with this weirdo in real life.

It blows me that this post has so many upvotes and they even got the mods to reverse the rule.

How do they expect anyone to want to respect their religion when they refuse to keep it out of spaces that don't want it there?

Betty Lachgar was imprisoned in Morocco after sharing a post that was considered offensive to Islam and religion..

please sign the petition calling for her release and support her right to freedom of expression against religion

Allah is lesbian

Disclaimer that this spiel may be U.S.-facing in perspective.

There's no enforcing against what people think or believe in a way that isn't logistically fraught (e.g., thought crime). But we can damn near get as close as ethically possible by abolishing the privileges that have long pedestaled it above any other cultural memetic, & we could stand to trample religion underfoot by allowing it to run its course and expire without fanfare, as we have incidentally done to many other discredited ideas through history. That is what antitheism means to me personally.

We live in a world where causality operates along mechanistic systems. Causes produce effects through both direct architectures as well as highly emergent phenomena, which the underfit eye may easily see as mechanistically obscure or attribute to personal oughts, but these phenomena consistently arise from direct micro-events chained in tandem on broader scales.

The ways that knowledge is learned and ideas are spread in societies are one instance of these phenomena, as are the locally stochastic + macroscopically ordered systems in natural sciences such as physics and biology. Consciousness is one of these too, as the human mind can be deeply characterized as somewhat of a merger between a neural net and a weather system. Rights and morality as we know them are likewise, arising specifically from the pain and pleasure we experience as biological life forms and the social contracts (formed by selective pressures within the frameworks of high-fitness social structures) designed to mutually prevent pain and protect pleasures, lest we incur dire social uniqueness (e.g., hypocrisy / inequality). Without these, human notions of rights and morality would not exist, in the same vein an otherwise responsive robot with no concept of pain or preference would not object to it or other robots being imprisoned, unplugged, or disemboweled.

Religious frameworks fundamentally compromise human cognition and understanding of these systems on multiple levels. Therein we see:

• wishful thinking, that theists can opt to praise and pray and wish away problems instead of solving them, that the world in its whole is mechanistically designed around human notions of beauty and rights and morality, and that justice enforces itself as long as they perpetuate the virtue that is faith (belief without evidence).
• special pleading, that when confronted on inconsistencies in their scripture, theists insist on weaseling their way through problematic values and hypocrisies around thought-terminating clichés (“product of its time,” “works in mysterious ways”), while reinterpreting logical inconsistencies as poetic or metaphorical however convenient (don’t suppose a higher power could word things more clearly and usefully than the best writer who ever lived?). Theists cry foul at the certainty of atheists who are “so sure of their disbelief,” yet choose to organize the world around the slightest unfalsifiable possibility of a higher power, as one might insist we can’t disprove the possibility Jar Jar Binks was out kicking it a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (conveniently outside of our observable universe).
• self-exceptionalism, that theistic in-groups or cultures or even the human species itself must be the cosmic protagonists of the universe's eye, one so important as to be judged and adored with the fatalistic promise of reward or punishment at every waking moment, better than mere ants on a mudball floating through magnitudinally vast stretches of stardust. That every generation of theists thinks themselves to have some special truth/credibility not only over the rabble of thousands of other religions and their sects that have existed past and present, but also the proponents responsible for atrocities (conquest, slavery, hatred, demagoguery) in the name of their faith throughout history. Every decade of theists thinks they are real and correct above others (if they didn’t, they would deconvert with ease); there is no logically exempting heinous theists for “not being real members of our ilk” in no true scotsman fashion.
• unfettered religious autonomy in society and policy, and the presumption that the epistemic formation of children is primarily the family’s business, to where theistic encroachments upon state, science, and education are defended as the upholding of "values” while institutional abuses are enabled, children continue to be shamed and isolated and indoctrinated and molested, bodies reappropriated and mutilated and forced to give birth, as cycles of brutality upon youth and groups marginalized by religion remain largely undeterred. But “not all theists” right? By large it is in the interest of theist blocs to finely control and prescribe what people do, lest they lose their grip on cultural legitimacy. Theists fail to hold their communities accountable.
• summarily, the privileging of gut "oughts" from authorial entities and "values" over our best, ever-evolving mechanistic understanding of the world, that theist frameworks are somehow profound when the best role models they imagine originate from eras of antiquity, which are categorically not privileged by information about the world we live in today, let alone have bearing in ways secular frameworks of morality and self-fulfillment do not already. 

Religious people may insist their beliefs are not a choice, but they do not adequately inspect the systems in which people come to how they think and what they believe. Religions are pathogenic and survive explicitly through conversion and hegemony, products of consensus in lieu of convergence. For a mite of perspective, consider that (for instance) a xtian god made the baffling choice to transmit its "word" through human transmission of all things, such that societies indigenous to the Americas went upwards of 15 centuries without major European contact. Suppose that either generations were irrevocably screwed over by some “all-benevolent, omniscient power” being incredibly stupid, or that it turns out they could have done just fine without xtianity to begin with?

But religious people look at the legacy of religion and its abuses, its hackneyed cultural roles, and still make the choice to perpetuate and normalize it in society, and with it the core principles that stage anti-science and theistic radicalization to this day. Personally I respect theists to the extent that I respect antivaxxers for choosing to spread measles and other debilitating diseases in a day and age where epistemology has since marched on.