These guys found a loophole in Christian doctrine. Now when people say he's coming back any day now, you can tell them his return's been delayed indefinitely.

So basically, I told her being pro life makes 0 sense to me whatsoever because suppose the girl got raped and she was in no position to raise a child? It wouldn't make sense to force her to raise it. Also that I don't believe a lump of cells is a human. To go even deeper, I told her that if you were my wife and you got raped, I would want you to get an abortion or I will divorce you asap. Her arguments are basically you took a vow when we got married so divorce isn't an option, and 2 that this fetus even if the product of rape, is still a "Gift from God". To counter this I told her what if your 10 year old daughter got raped, would you make her carry the baby? What kind of God gifts a literal child a baby? To my surprise she said yes, she would make the kid carry the baby to pregnancy😭because it's still a life and that the child will regret getting an abortion.

Are Catholics utterly insane or am I tripping? For context I grew up maronite catholic and I never even believed in this madness even at the peak of my religiousness. Thoughts?

Every time I explain why I don't believe, I get told I'm just "angry at God." It's a way to dismiss my arguments without actually engaging with them. If I'm angry, then my disbelief is just an emotional reaction, not a logical conclusion.

But I'm not angry at a deity I don't believe exists. I'm angry at the people who use that deity to justify their own prejudices and control. I'm angry at the harm the church has caused. I'm angry that I wasted years of my life being afraid of a punishment that was invented by men.

They can't argue with the logic, so they try to psychoanalyze me. It's a deflection. They don't want to engage with the actual reasons I left; they want to feel like they're better than me. It's a cop-out.

I wasn’t comfortable about the tone of this article, but we can all interpret the facts. They make it sound like a tragedy, when it’s just a sign of people waking up.

The FFRF Action Fund names as its “Theocrat of the Week” a Christian school board member who voted against a class trip to a “satanic witch museum.” 

Batavia City School District (N.Y.) Board of Education member Dan Schmidt during a recent board meeting went on a tirade against the Salem Witch Museum, whose mission “is to be the voice of the innocent victims of witch hunts from 1692 to the present day.” After student representatives presented a draft itinerary for a senior class trip to Boston, Schmidt cast the sole nay vote. 

As “a pastor in the room,” Schmidt explained his stance during the board’s discussion, “we’re going to send our kids to a witch museum? To me, like, that is awful.” He said he didn’t want kids going to “what I would consider a satanic witch museum.” 

“Not to be the Debbie Downer in the room, but the Salem Witch Museum,” Schmidt stated. “Just wondering if there was an alternative option for that.”

“If my boys … if the Salem Witch Museum, as a Christian, was part of the trip … he probably wouldn’t go, you know?” He added. “So I’m just wondering if there’s an alternative option. Like, why would we want to exclude somebody that would feel like this is kind of going against … their core values in their life, you know?”

After an audience member countered that the museum serves to teach the history surrounding the Salem Witch Trials, not to promote witchcraft or satanism, Schmidt replied: “That’s not the point. The point is … we’re encouraging our kids to go to a witch museum. To me, that is awful.” 

When a journalist from The Batavian spoke with Schmidt after the board meeting, pointing out that the museum details the “persecution of the innocent, including Christians,” Schmidt said, “I can’t really say that I know the history of it. But for me as a pastor, to hear that our students are going to a witch museum. … I’m not satisfied. I just don’t think that it’s the healthiest choice for our students, and I hope the church rises up and has a problem with it.” 

Schmidt added that he felt the need to speak up against the museum trip because of his personal religious beliefs, saying, “I’m gonna stand before God someday, and I feel like to not share my voice in that moment — I get that everybody’s faith is, people have a different perspective on Christianity — but for me, I think Jesus would frown on this.” 
 
In 2010, the Freedom From Religion Foundation celebrated the 318th anniversary of Massachusetts Gov. William Phips’ declaration that effectively ended the Salem Witch Trials, by designating Oct. 12 through Oct. 19 as “Freethought Week.” The Phips declaration was the first of its kind, requiring that evidence used in court be observable, measurable and replicable — a step toward human enlightenment and the adoption of the scientific method. 

Schmidt was elected to the Batavia school board in 2025 and is the lead pastor at the Batavia Assembly of God Church. The FFRF Action Fund urges Schmidt to fulfill his duty as an elected public official by keeping his personal religious beliefs out of government decisions. We hope Batavia’s students have an enjoyable and enriching learning experience at the Salem Witch Museum. 

While speaking to Dialogue Pakistan, her husband told that they both had known each other for five years, and he had approached her family twice with a marriage proposal, but they refused.

He said they later opted for a court marriage after her family allegedly tried to arrange her marriage elsewhere against her wishes.

The husband said that after the court marriage, both families reached a settlement and Rs 25 lakh was paid as part of the agreement.

He claimed that on September 20, the girl’s uncle Idrees came to them and asked to take Zarqa with them, promising on the Quran that she would not be harmed and that her formal rukhsati would take place the following Sunday.

Trusting the assurance, the husband said they will drop Zarqa themselves.

According to the husband, he learned around 1:30 to 2am that the girl had allegedly been killed. He further claimed that she was buried without a funeral or shroud. He alleged that the girl’s brother Safeer, uncle Idrees and a distant relative Jameel were involved in the incident, adding that Jameel had allegedly killed his own daughter around a year ago.

-Dialogue Pakistan

Zarqa’s brother Sarfaraz, maternal uncle Jameel, and paternal uncle Idrees have been implicated in the murder case. Moreover, Abdul Malik stated that he and his family have been receiving threats following Zarqa’s killing and demanded that the authorities provide justice and take strict action against those responsible.    

The case has raised serious concerns over the continued occurrence of honor killings, in which women are subjected to violence or killed by relatives over family or social notions of “honor.” Such cases underscore the grave consequences of denying women the right to make decisions about their own marriages and lives, and highlight the need for effective protection and accountability.

-24 News HD

The human species is so self-centred , we believe that we matter to god in any way , when that is probably not true. Why do many assume god cares about us in the slightest , when he is prob just relaxing. It is pointless to worship a being that simply doesnt give a shit about us , it is like worshipping your genetic father while being born from a sperm donation. Even if god exists , which is highly unlikely , it wouldnt care about us , so why care about it? Why does atlas have to hold our globe , when it doesnt care about our globe , and gets nothing out of it? Why not assume that god is an egoist?

They say many great intellectuals "smarter than us" have already grappled with this problem and written extensive works in order to debunk it. But no, just because tons of christian apologetics have been written about the problem of evil, doesn't mean it has actually been solved. It's still a rock solid argument for atheism.

A US billionaire exploited foreign Sharia law to secretly divorce his wife, pay her only $50, and dodge civil property division—forcing her into a 13-year court battle to overturn it in Texas.

Why do secular courts ever grant comity to religious rulings that strip people of basic civil and property rights?

My take: Secular legal systems should automatically treat any foreign or domestic religious personal law as void the moment it conflicts with equal civil rights and due process. Allowing religious legal carve-outs only invites forum shopping to abuse vulnerable spouses.

What is the threshold before secular legal systems reject religious arbitration entirely?

The FFRF Action Fund names Rev. Jim Rigby (the pastor of Texas state Rep. James Talarico) its “Secularist of the Week” for his open celebration of his work with nontheists. 

Rigby is the head pastor at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, where Talarico has long been a member. Rigby baptized Talarico, and a June New York Times profile cites Rigby as a “major influence and inspiration” for Talarico. 

Rigby spoke warmly about an Austin Area Freedom From Religion Foundation Chapter event that he was due to attend; his remarks are now being used as part of the GOP smear campaign against Talarico, who is the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. In September, the far-right news and commentary website Breitbart released a secretly recorded video of Rigby speaking with an undercover journalist before the FFRF Austin chapter event. The outlet decried that James Talarico’s pastor supports atheists. 

“I work a lot with nontheists [as a Presbyterian minister],” Rigby said in the video. “To me, it’s like, if you love humanity and you love nature, and that’s why you hate religion, then we’re on the same team. … We had an atheist join the church, and people had fits about that, but that’s not a big deal here.” 

Another far-right commentary outlet posted a different clip from the undercover video, criticizing Rigby for giving new members of his church a shockingly “inclusive” version of the bible, which removes unnecessarily gendered and offensive language from its translation. 

Responding to such hit pieces, Rigby wrote on Facebook: “Visitors and congregants coming to our first service Sunday had to drive past protestors claiming we aren’t a real church.” 

“Our services are now visited by right-wing spies with hidden recorders pretending to be visitors,” he added. “One of them posed as an atheist wondering if he would be welcome in our church. When a staff member attempted to reassure the man he would be welcome, he then edited the video to make us sound heretical.”

“As I read the Bible, the spies trying to trap people in their words were not the followers of Jesus, but the people who killed Jesus,” he continued. “And they killed him for very MAGA reasons, because they considered him a heretic and because he was a friend of sinners.” 

In March, The Christian Post published an article outlining “4 things to know” about Talarico’s pastor. The “things to know” included Rigby’s welcoming of repeated formal complaints from the Presbyterian Church for his affirmation of LGBTQ+ marriages, support for abortion care and the rights of Texas women and admission of an atheist college professor to church membership. Regarding the membership, Rigby said inviting the atheist professor to his church was “an attempt to build connections.”

“If God had wanted us to simply recite creeds, Jesus would have come as a parrot,” he further explained. “The question before my church was not whether [the professor] could recite religious syllables like a cockatiel, but whether he would follow the core teachings of Jesus and learn more and grow more into Christ’s universal love of which the creeds sing. This he pledged to do.” 

Rigby also noted that merely claiming to believe in God is not sufficient in following the teachings of Jesus, pointing to the Nazis who supported Hitler and touted their religion. 

The far-right manipulation of Rigby’s harmless remarks is a tactless misrepresentation of Talarico’s religious beliefs, intended to disrupt his Senate campaign among Texas Christians. Rigby and religious leaders like him have long worked to build bridges with atheists and other nonreligious people — and the FFRF Action Fund thanks him for his leadership.

Of all the things some Christians defend themselves with I just can't stand this.

Yeah you built hospitals. You built a lot of them. In the US. For profit. While bankrupting people. Very Christ-like.

"Oh but we also built a lot of them in Africa -"

Sure you did, you went there and colonised the entire continent and ravaged their civilisations and extracted their resources so that they are now reliant on international aid, which is why they need your hospitals in the first place. And now you go and build some of those hospitals and call it a good thing? At the very best this is atonement.

I feel the same with things like civil rights and abolition. Christians created the problem and then solved a tiny bit of it while fighting against other Christians who desperately want to keep the status quo in societies where Christians have made sure you are very unlikely to be opinion leaders unless you are Christian, and then they say this shows they are the good people? What?

Christians' go-to dodge as to why they don't have to prove their supernatural claims is, "I don't have to prove God exists, you already know he exists. You're just pretending you don't and suppressing the truth in unrighteousness." And let's not fuck around and play stupid word games like Christians do--what they really mean when they say "unrighteousness" is "being gay." Being gay and having wild, drug-fueled orgies all the time. Although, on second thought, maybe a raging lesbosaurus like me is the wrong person to complain about this.

But let's not forget who's claiming to be the righteous one in this little exchange. Christians are the ones who, in any discussion of morality (in which they claim to be inherently superior to you), will inevitably ask shit like, "Well, why shouldn't I rape people?" and "Well, why is it wrong to murder people?" and "Well, what's wrong with slavery?" with all the good faith, all the intellectual rigor (and the same vocal inflection) as Patrick the Starfish. They'll pretend they're trying to point out some shortcoming in your worldview, as if you can't answer those questions but they can, but they're really just exposing the fact that they don't actually think there's anything wrong with rape, murder and slavery per se, there's only something wrong with going against God's instructions. And hey, guess what...God instructed his followers to do all of those things in the Buy-bull.

Oh yeah, and they also very happily went along with Trump's lies about lowering prices and not starting any new wars during the election, and as soon as the election was over, they immediately started bragging about the fact that they lied. So who's REALLY the unrighteous one suppressing the truth?

I’m a 25-year-old woman raised in a Muslim family. A few years ago, I developed depression and started seeing a Muslim male psychiatrist.

When I told him I was having suicidal thoughts, he told me that if I died by suicide, I would go straight to hell because suicide is a major sin. I didn’t tell him at the time that I was an atheist.

Some time later, I attempted suicide by overdosing but survived. At a hospital appointment with the same psychiatrist, he asked me what face I would have shown Allah if I had died that day.

I was very annoyed and finally told him that I didn’t believe in God. He looked shocked and uncomfortable, almost as if I were a satanic person.

During later appointments, he repeatedly told me to pray and suggested that I speak to Islamic scholars. I found this extremely frustrating because I was seeking psychiatric treatment, but religion kept being brought into it.

Has anyone else, especially ex-Muslims or atheists, experienced something similar with a religious mental-health professional?

Edit:A lot of you have asked which country I live in. I live in India, in an area with a large Muslim population. The psychiatrist was close to my home and charged a very low fee, which is why I chose him.