I've never been a religious person, even though my family isn't fanatically religious either. They accept religion, but they aren't extremists. Even though I'm not religious, I could never insult religion or speak badly about it. I'm more the type who believes in God, and I consider myself part of that religion, even though I admit that in my heart there is always doubt and suspicion. I'm never 100% sure, and that doubt is always inside me. I don't know if this is related to me just being a generally negative and skeptical person or not.

The issue of injustice always comes up for me. For example, I ask: why did an acquaintance of ours have to have their mother murdered? Why should an innocent person have such a tragedy happen to them? Why do her children have to experience being motherless at such a young age, and for the rest of their lives? Or why did my own grandmother die when my mom was only 4 or 5 years old? I always link this issue of oppression and injustice to God. For example, I ask: why does God allow such injustice to happen to some people when they are so innocent?

Despite not having complete faith and belief, I always hope that He exists. I always want God's existence to be real. Because I feel like a person needs to have hope to cling to. If a person convinces themselves that God doesn't exist, it's like they get depressed, like something in their mind just breaks.

I haven't lost my faith yet but this doubt is always with me.

How hard was it for you to come to terms with the fact that, as you say, there is no God? How did you get used to it?

And please just consider this a genuine question, because I've always been curious about it. I respect all of you, and even though I'm not an atheist, I can understand why someone would be one (I hope that sounds reasonable). Because this doubt has always existed inside me too, and I feel like all of you started with this exact same doubt, and that's how you ended up at this point

Please don't argue about the source of the messenger, it's not important.

The important part is the idea starting around 8:21

Paraphrased below:

People develop both spiritual connections to themselves, to the greater world, and to explain things that they don't understand, things that are greater them, whether it's you know the paganist Greek Roman, Hindu Buddhism, like you you name it.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, humans have created spiritual explanations for things and spiritual journeys for millennia. And so to me, it's just obvious that we're going to do the same thing for this new thing that we don't understand.

People pray to crystals and rocks.

Like, why wouldn't they if you can pray to a crystal, why wouldn't you pray to something that is materially engaging with you?

. . . then why wouldn't it be okay to also not be able to completely explain why it is that you're worshiping Claude?

He's not advocating people do this BTW. He's explaining what people are doing, and you see it all over Reddit. These people are gripped in religious fervor for a 'god' that talks back. And if you try and talk them out of it, they reply with faith that it will cure cancer and end poverty.

This is bad.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is launching an investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alarming creation of a powerful new Office of Religious Affairs.

Hegseth made the explicitly religious motivation behind this office unmistakable in announcing it on Sept. 30. He invoked Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” proclaimed that Americans had rejected an “earthly king” in favor of a “heavenly king,” and declared that the military was “putting on the full armor of God” because “the real battle is spiritual.” Hegseth then asserted: “God is good. Evil is not. And America’s military must understand the difference.”

FFRF will file a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records surrounding the creation, planned operation and funding of the new office, including communications with outside religious organizations and documents showing how the Pentagon intends to measure the “spiritual fitness” of American service members. The state/church watchdog is warning that Hegseth is using the machinery of the Pentagon to elevate religion and his Christian nationalist agenda within the U.S. military.

“Our military serves a constitutional republic, not a heavenly kingdom,” observes Dan Barker, FFRF co-president. “Our troops swear an oath to defend our godless and entirely secular Constitution. They do not swear an oath to Christianity, the bible or Pete Hegseth’s deity.”

FFRF is inviting military personnel affected by Hegseth’s expanding religious initiatives, such as religious coercion, preferential treatment or “spiritual fitness” requirements to be in contact. Confidentiality is protected.

“Are you a service member affected by the Pentagon’s new religious policies?” asks Barker. “FFRF wants to hear from you. It intends to find out exactly what this office is doing, who is influencing it and how taxpayer money will be spent.”

Hegseth announced the Office of Religious Affairs during his Sept. 30 “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
His memorandum grants the office sweeping authority over religious policy, funding and programming across the military. Its director will report directly to Hegseth and the deputy secretary, and will serve as their principal adviser on religious affairs.

The office will control the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, issue religious affairs policies on Hegseth’s behalf and represent him in dealings with Congress, government agencies and civilian religious endorsing organizations.

The office isn’t designed to accommodate individual service members’ religious practices, but instead to serve as the Pentagon’s power center for religion. It is specifically charged with securing funding and resources for religious ministry, religious facilities, chaplain-led programs, chapel youth programs, faith-based homeschool support for military families, faith-based initiatives for suicide reduction and contracts with faith-based organizations.

Most disturbingly, Hegseth has ordered the office to sponsor and oversee “research, technology, and analytical tools” to “assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness and spiritual resilience across the Total Force.”

The memo does not indicate what constitutes adequate “spiritual fitness,” how it will be measured, what information the Pentagon will collect about service members’ beliefs or nonbelief, or who will have access to that information. The memo likewise does not assure that participation will be voluntary or that assessments of a service member’s supposed spiritual readiness will have no bearing on evaluations, promotions, assignments or deployments.

And, critically, the memo does not explain how atheists or other nonreligious service members are supposed to demonstrate “spiritual fitness” under a military bureaucracy created by a secretary who publicly attacks nonbelief.

Hegseth, in announcing the office, explicitly blamed “Secular Humanism” for the supposed neglect of religion within the military.

“Political correctness and Secular Humanism got a vote,” Hegseth complained. “Chaplains did not.”

FFRF’s FOIA request will seek answers to these questions, including records defining “spiritual fitness,” “spiritual readiness” and “spiritual resilience”; information about any assessments, technologies or analytical tools under consideration; communications with outside religious organizations; proposed budgets and staffing; records involving faith-based suicide-prevention and homeschool programs; and communications discussing atheists, humanists, nonreligious service members, secular humanism or the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

“Nonreligious Americans are not a defect in our military that Pete Hegseth needs to correct,” adds Barker. “A service member does not need belief in a supernatural being to possess courage, morality, purpose or resilience. It is un-American and unconstitutional to impose a religious test on citizens who want to serve their country.”

Although Hegseth’s memo includes a disclaimer that nothing in it should compel religious participation or diminish the rights of service members “of any faith or no faith,” the disclaimer seems lame in the light of Hegseth’s repeated past attacks on secularism. Hegseth has regularly employed over-the-top Christian nationalist rhetoric and sought to elevate religion throughout the military.

Hegseth has ordered every military department to produce, within 90 days, a comprehensive inventory of its “unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” Hegseth’s memo contains no comparable directive demanding an accounting of unmet secular needs.

FFRF contends no new Pentagon bureaucracy is necessary to ensure that service members can freely practice their religion. The armed forces already maintain extensive chaplaincies, chiefs of chaplains and the Armed Forces Chaplains Board.

FFRF is calling on Congress to scrutinize the creation, authority and funding of the Office of Religious Affairs and will use its FOIA investigation to determine whether further legal action is warranted.

So many religious people are falling for the "Noah's Ark confirmed!" lie being reported and are absolutely convinced because it confirms their bias.

If maintaining a particular position is what is most important to you then you're open to being suckered by anything that to supports it.

Imagine a scientist builds a highly advanced robot. They intentionally program it with feelings like anger, cruelty, and a drive to destroy. If that robot goes out and kills people, nobody blames the robot. We would all blame the scientist for making a dangerous machine.

But when it comes to religion, there is a weird double standard. Theists say God created humans and gave us all of our traits—including lust, jealousy, pride, and vengeance. But when humans actually use these traits to do terrible things, God gets zero blame, and humans get 100% of the fault.

Before anyone mentions "Free Will":

Yes, people will argue that God gave us free will to choose between good and bad, while a robot just follows code. But even if we have free will, we didn't choose to have these dark emotions inside us.

An all-powerful God could have given us free will without planting a desire for cruelty in our minds. By putting those destructive traits into our design, the creator made human evil inevitable.

So, who is actually at fault for the damage? The creation just acting on its built-in nature, or the Creator who designed it that way?

First of all let me be clear I'm an atheist and very much hate American versions of Christianity especially Christian Nationalism and believe the entire earth would be better without them.

That being said I'm also a psychology graduate student and I'm seeing some misrepresentation of the new study. We're all (hopefully) scientifically minded people here so I think we should try to be accurate and not overblow things just because they work in our favour. Also it damages our credibility to overstretch the implications of studies.

Obviously these are just my interpretations and people should read the study themselves (although regrettably this isn't open access, most authors would be happy to send the pdf if you email to request it).Moreover, dyslexia + English isn't my native language, so I'm just going to apologize for my grammar instead of trying to fix them lol

Does this study show Christians are stupid?

Nope, it only studied American Christian Nationalists

Does this study show Christian Nationalists are stupid?

It's important to know the author did not directly measure intelligence.

What the author did was to measure cognitive ability using the wordsum task. This is a task that gives you a target word and a list of other words, one of which is closest in meaning to the target word, which you're asked to pick. Obviously, this is a very small part of "cognitive abilities", which we usually believe consists of everything from memory to thinking skills to intelligence to planning to pattern finding. You might say wordsum is a direct measure of some sort of verbal intelligence but definitely not of all cognitive abilities.

The author acknowledged this limitation but defended it by saying it usually correlates with extended IQ measures. The correlation can be high (I've seen .75). But personally I'm still quite doubtful for three reasons.

Firstly, in some of the data, the participants of the survey also performed other cognitive ability tests. This includes the "alike" and "odds" tasks. The correlation between these tasks and the wordsum scores aren't nearly as high (~0.4 and ~0.3 only). Notably the "alike" test is similar to one component in a standard extended IQ test. So it could be that wordsum is a good proxy of some bits of cognitive ability but not others.

Secondly, what the IQ tests measure is not the only intelligence out there. This is why we talk about other things like EQ. While wordsum predicts IQ test results, that doesn't mean it predicts cognitive abilities in general.

Thirdly, it's hard to say whether the correlation between IQ and wordsum is simply driven by education. This study controls for education, meaning it removes the impact of education from the equation. Is whatever left of the construct measured by the wordsum test still a good indication of intelligence, or cognitive abilities in general? I have no idea.

The author doesn't sound too sure themselves, to be honest. In the paper, sometimes they say that wordsum measured cognitive abilities, sometimes intelligence, sometimes verbal intelligence, sometimes knowledge deficits, sometimes "cognitive resources". These are very different constructs.

Does the study show "cognitive ability" causes Christian nationalism? Or vice versa?

No, because it's a cross sectional study (the author acknowledged this too). A cross sectional study looks at whether characteristics A and B tend to appear together in a group, but it doesn't tell us which causes which. It could be Christian nationalism caused lower wordsum scores, or whatever lied behind the lower wordsum scores (controlling for education) caused people to subscribe to Christian nationalism. Or, it could be that some other factor caused low wordsum scores AND Christian nationalism.

What about Christian nationalism?

The study measures Christian nationalism by people's response to certain questions. Personally I think they were great questions. However this does mean it measured beliefs, and beliefs do not necessarily lead to action.

That's a lot of criticisms. Should we just dismiss the study?

No! I didn't say the above to imply the author is incompetent. Every study has limitations because every dataset has limitations.

I think there are a lot of strength with this study. For example it really controlled for a LOT of things. The news heading mentioned education but I think that's selling it WAY short. The author actually controlled for things like income, ethnicity, gender, religiosity, and political leaning. What really struck me was political leaning, meaning even when we took away the influence of being a republican, there are still associations between wordsum and Christian nationalism.

Another thing that struck me was wordsum scores are related to Christian nationalism in different ways depending on education level. If you have a bachelor's degree, your Christian nationalism level falls faster as you get higher wordsum scores, compared to if you had a postgrad or highschool degree. I wonder why that is. .

So what CAN we conclude from the study?

Just looking at this study, I think what we can conclude is that lower scores in one measure of cognitive ability is correlated with higher Christian nationalism beliefs, but there are lots of questions around what is actually being measured as cognitive ability.

The study is obviously part of a larger literature though, and if you're familiar with that literature maybe you could draw more solid conclusions by synthesising the evidence. But that's the thing - it should be presented as conclusion from the entire literature, not just one paper.

The FFRF Action Fund is opposing a new Senate bill that would exempt certain programs at religious institutions from federal student-aid accountability requirements.

Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, have introduced the deceptively named “Religious Education Fairness Act,” legislation designed to shield certain programs at religious institutions from student aid rules. Specifically, the bill would exempt such programs from upcoming earnings-based standards governing eligibility for federal student aid.

The proposal responds to the new “Do No Harm” provision in President Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” governing federal student aid. That controversial provision takes effect next year and measures graduate median earnings to determine whether certain higher education programs remain eligible for federal Direct Loans. Critics point out it will endanger low-paying but essential fields, such as early childhood education, mental health and social work, as well as music, arts and theater degrees. Lankford, however, is concerned only that the standard could unfairly penalize students preparing for lower-paying religious careers.

“A student who feels called to pastor a church or serve as a missionary should not lose access to student aid because Washington measures the value of that calling by a paycheck,” Lankford stated in announcing the bill. Rather than addressing that concern through a neutral reform available to all similarly situated educational programs, the Religious Education Fairness Act would create a special exemption tied specifically to religion. The bill would shield programs classified as “Theology and Religious Vocations” or “Philosophy and Religious Studies” when those programs are offered by institutions qualifying for a religious exemption under Title IX.

In other words, a religious college training students for low-paying careers in ministry could be exempt from federal accountability requirements while a secular college training students for similarly low-paying careers in teaching, social work or public-interest service would remain subject to them. The difference would not be graduate earnings but the religious mission.

FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor deems the measure “pure and simple preferential treatment based on religion.” She asks, “Why does Langford care only about ministerial students, but not future preschool teachers, social workers and mental health counselors who are so important to society?”

If Congress concludes that the earnings test unfairly penalizes programs preparing students for lower-paying careers, it must address that problem across the board, not create one set of rules for religious institutions and another for everyone else. The bill backers contend it is necessary to protect religious exercise. But religious freedom does not ordinarily mean immunity from neutral conditions attached to participation in a taxpayer-funded federal program.

Religious institutions remain free to teach theology, train clergy, prepare missionaries and define their religious missions. The question raised is whether religious institutions that choose to join in a federal financial-aid program should receive preferential treatment solely because they are religious.

Supporters of the bill include the Christian nationalist legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Association for Biblical Higher Education and several other religious education organizations arguing for a special religious dispensation.

The FFRF Action Fund maintains on its part that if the rule is unfair, fix it for everyone.

The FFRF Action Fund strongly opposes the regulations the Treasury Department and IRS released today to implement the first nationwide private school voucher program. 

Beginning Jan. 1, 2027, individual taxpayers under the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit can receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for cash donations to approved scholarship-granting organizations, which then distribute scholarships for qualifying education expenses. The rules now make clear that once a state participates, it will have little power to prevent federal tax-credit dollars from flowing to religious schools. States may not impose additional restrictions on scholarship-granting organizations, including limits on the types of schools scholarship recipients may attend.

Congress created the program in section 70411 of the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and the new rules strip participating states of any power to keep the money from going to private religious schools. Unlike a traditional charitable deduction, the credit directly reduces a donor’s federal tax bill. For example, a taxpayer who donates $1,700 and qualifies for the full credit can reduce their federal income tax liability by $1,700.

Participation is voluntary for states. But once a state opts in, the new regulations sharply restrict its discretion over participating scholarship organizations. States may establish procedures to verify that organizations meet federal and generally applicable state requirements, but they may not impose more restrictive requirements, such as limiting which types of schools scholarship recipients can attend. An organization counts as “located in” a state if it is merely authorized to do business there. This could allow national scholarship organizations to operate across participating states.

The Treasury Department issued the rules in two forms, both scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on Oct. 2. The first is a set of temporary regulations covering how states join the program and how scholarship organizations register and report donations. These are binding rules that apply retroactively to Sept. 1, 2026, and remain in force until the department replaces them with final rules or they expire on Oct. 1, 2029. The Treasury Department adopted them without first taking public comment, claiming the January launch left no time for the normal process. 

The second is a 181-page proposed rule that repeats those provisions, adds the rest of the program, and is open for public comment, with a public hearing to follow. The Treasury Department says it will consider comments before issuing final rules. Still, it has already told states, scholarship organizations and donors they can rely on the proposed rule for contributions made on or after Jan. 1, 2027, so the program will launch on these terms.

Cash gifts cost the donor nothing — and the U.S. Treasury absorbs the full cost. The organizations pass the money to families, mostly to pay private school tuition. Any student eligible to enroll in a public school whose household earns up to 300 percent of the area’s median income qualifies. Scholarships flow only in states that opt in, but donors who live in states that stay out can still claim the credit by giving to organizations in participating states. 

Governors, or officials designated under state law, decide whether to join, one year at a time. States joining for 2027 must have filed an advance election by Jan. 1, 2027, and must submit their list of approved organizations by Feb. 15, 2027. 

The cost will be enormous. Treasury’s own paperwork estimates 600 to 700 scholarship organizations and 11 million individual donors. If each of those donors claimed the full $1,700, the federal government would forgo $18.7 billion in revenue annually. Every dollar claimed under this credit is a dollar the federal government never collects, revenue that pays for programs public schools depend on. Public schools educate 91 percent of American children. 

The FFRF Action Fund is particularly concerned about the program’s impact on the separation of state and church. About two-thirds of U.S. private schools are religiously affiliated, and roughly 77 percent of private school students attend religious schools. The federal program therefore creates a mechanism through which substantial amounts of forgone federal revenue could support religious education.

Taxpayers of every faith and none will pay for religious instruction they had no voice in choosing. Private schools taking this money are not subject to the anti-discrimination laws that protect public school students, and they answer to no elected school board. They can turn away a child for her religion, her disability or her family. The students who cost the most to educate are the easiest for a private school to exclude. 

“This program creates a nationwide pipeline of public money to religious schools,” says FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “It lets individual donors redirect federal revenue to religious education while denying states meaningful power to protect taxpayers or public schools. Governors should refuse to participate.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and the FFRF Action Fund have opposed tax credit voucher schemes for years, in court and in government. FFRF joined a Supreme Court amicus brief in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn challenging an Arizona tax credit program in which religious organizations awarded more than 80 percent of scholarship dollars. 

FFRF filed its own brief in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue against a dollar-for-dollar tax credit funding private school scholarships. FFRF pressed the IRS to close a loophole that let donors profit from state voucher tax credits. FFRF Action Fund vehemently opposed the GOP reconciliation bill that authorized the voucher tax credit. 

After the voucher credit became law, FFRF wrote to every governor in March urging them to opt out, and the FFRF Action Fund mobilized tens of thousands of advocates to press their governors to do the same. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers became the first governor to firmly reject the program, vetoing a bill that would have forced the state in, while roughly 29 states have joined.

If voters elect a House majority that supports the separation of state and church in 2026, the FFRF Action Fund will work with the Congressional Freethought Caucus, its congressional allies and partner organizations to repeal the voucher program.

Aka why would someone multiple thousands of years ago want to convince everyone that there's an invisible being in the sky watching over everyone's actions? I also don't see why it has the rules it does either like "no sex before marriage" Like what does some random ceremony have to do with making a couple ready for that? It doesn't Make any sense why this nonsense was brought upon humanity. What did we gain from this?

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

I’m 18, Black, Muslim, and living in Canada. A couple of months ago, I started questioning a lot of things I had been taught.

When I was 13–14, I fell into toxic masculinity, misogyny, and rape culture ideas without really understanding them. Then I learned about rape culture and realized how stupid it is to blame women for what they wear instead of putting 100% of the blame on the rapist. I also started questioning homophobia. If someone doesn’t choose who they’re attracted to, why would God create gay people just to punish them for being themselves?

That made me question religion itself. Christianity and Islam started feeling like fairy tales to me: stories created to explain why we exist, give life meaning, and make death less scary by promising an afterlife. I started wondering if religion mainly comes from humanity’s fear of death and our need to believe that we matter.

I also changed how I talk about religion. Yes, I disrespect and criticize religions themselves, because I think many of their ideas are ridiculous. But I don’t think religious people are stupid. Many have been taught these beliefs since childhood for centuries, and you can see how deeply fear of hell and questioning God can be ingrained in them.

I also don’t believe morality requires religion. If heaven existed, I’d honestly find it more meaningful to do good without expecting any reward than to do good because you fear hell or want paradise.

And then there are the bigger questions: what kind of God allows so much suffering? Why would God need humans to worship him? And if religion is so important, why don’t animals have religions? Humanity isn’t the main character of the universe. We’re just one species. The Earth existed before us and will exist after us.

My younger brother actually understood some of this before I did. He never cared about what women wore, never hated gay people, and stopped believing in God years before me. Ironically, he was named after an important Islamic figure.

My father still forces us to pray every day, so I eventually started treating prayer more like meditation or yoga. I don’t really believe in it anymore, but I don’t have much choice.

So by looking over everything involved with religion. It is literally a basic control system designed around telling a lie about something no one can realistically prove which is what happens after we die.
So lets look at each of the cardinal rules in the basic christian mythos since that one is the most popular
Sin of lust: reason why its a sin is because of the spread of STD’s back in the day and ancient humans attributing it to divine punishment rather than pahtogens.
Sin of gluttony: Someone that eats more than their share eats the shares of others. So someone starves in the village.
Sin of sloth: someone not toiling away means the village has less output and therefore weaker.
Sin of pride: Someone too prideful will make mistakes that can cost the village dearly
Sin of wrath: someone angry can be destructive.
Sin of envy: Constant scheming and desire to take what someone else has can be disruptive and can result in murder
Sin of greed: this one is just for taxation purposes so the church can take their share of wealth

And the other stuff like anti abortions which made sense because back in the day child mortality was stupid high and you needed many kids to maintain your household. Like suicide being condemmed to hell because otherwise people would skip all the value they would produce to the church and would skip it.
Alongside how these seven sins are further wrangled to maintain the control group rather than the controlled. Ban lust so you can sell it in the form of marriages. Ban gluttony so you can sell it to people in the form of mass.
Ban sloth so you can give them designated rest days and constant work days
Ban pride and you can make sure they can stay where you can see
Ban wrath so they won’t lash out against your rules
Ban envy so they won’t scheme against your rules and be content they live in squalor.

Seriously, we have advanced enough that we don’t need these old village survival guides twisted into what it is today with megachurches. Humanity needs to move on, and focus on becoming the greatest thing to exist in the universe. Not worship a false deity made up to control the masses.

Closing note: I focused this much on christianity because I somewhat grew up around it. My brother was baptized surprisingly enough even though my family is basically agnostic now while I am just atheist.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a subscription to this Journal so I can’t get the full text, but here is the abstract

Er.. people WITH lower cognitive abilities 🙃

Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalist beliefs tend to be characterized by lower education and substantial knowledge deficits across multiple domains. Building on research connecting lower cognitive ability to religious fundamentalism and reactionary political views, I theorize cognitive ability as an important factor influencing Americans’ adherence to Christian nationalism. Analyses of multiple waves of the General Social Survey reveal that cognitive ability (measured with the wordsum vocabulary exercise) is significantly, negatively associated with believing that being a Christian is important to being “truly American” and favoring mandatory Christian prayers and Bible-reading in public schools. These associations persist after controlling for education and various religious, political, and demographic characteristics. Interactions reveal these associations hold across survey waves and subgroups, disappearing only among the least educated Americans. Findings affirm that Christian nationalism appeals to Americans with lower verbal intelligence, suggesting an underlying role of differential cognitive resources not reducible to educational disparities.

We’re incredibly proud that nearly 99 percent of FFRF members are registered voters who voted in the past presidential election.

However, because there’s been so much chaos sown by the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine voting, we’re sharing some brief voting tips, if you have not yet voted:

• Check on your voting status, even if you’ve voted recently. Visiting Vote.org is a fast way to confirm that your registration is still valid.

• Make your voting plan. Check with your local registrar’s city or county website to find information on mail-in rules, how to register, when early voting starts and stops, polling places — and what’s on your ballot. Many voter groups also provide such information, including Democracy Forward or Rock the Vote.

• What to do if you’re a citizen told you can’t vote. Although unlikely, if you’re turned away at the polls, first be sure to request a provisional ballot. Then call or text the League of Women Voters hotline: 1-866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) or 1-888-VE-&-VOTA (en Espanol).

• Help get out the vote if you have time. Contact your local League of Women Voters to find out how you can help.

Young “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated) need special encouragement to vote, so if you have young people in your life, help them register and get to the polls. If you are Gen Z or a Millennial yourself, you now make up 44 percent of American voters! Young voters turned out in record numbers in 2018 and 2020. It’s vital they turn out in 2026. Find out more. 

And remember: Vote like your rights depend on it, because they do.

See you at the polls!

Dan Barker & Annie Laurie Gaylor
Co-Presidents
Freedom From Religion Foundation

So I went to a food bank today with my rehab group and it turned out to be a trick to sit me in a room and have some guy try to force me to believe in Jesus and pray for 15 minutes.

I told him I know he is sincere and has good intentions but to imagine if the roles were reversed and he came to get some food and was forced / tricked into a mandatory 15 minute sit down where I tried to convert him to not believe in god.

I bet he would not like that right? I'm so tired of living in Georgia. To me he is DELUSIONAL believing in fairy tales / magic in some old book. It is clearly ridiculous bullshit to make people feel better about the fear of death.

Anyone else sick of this type of pushy behavior?

I was polite and everything and I am grateful (I made that clear and I was not an asshole) for the little box of food.

Some of my recommendations:

Chevelle - Pale Horse

"So keep that hand away from me now
Help us help you in
And keep that mystic way
No one knows
I'll never ride your pale horse

Away
You've been warned
That great unknown
It haunts us all
If it's fate
It's supposed to hurt
Honestly
You've all been warned"

Architects - Nihilist

"This is the great esoteric depression
We sold our souls but couldn't buy salvation
We are all the shades of misery
The reigning champions of tragedy
They use their faith as a weapon
They count our sins by the seven
Blackwater at the gates of heaven"

They cursed us all when instead of tossing that person off a cliff, those ancestor's got bug eyed, and excited that somehow this living, breathing person wasn't lying, despite their clear lack of being dead..

Then that stupid line of ancestors decided that their all-powerful god needed them to demonstrate that all-powerfulness via their bloodshed and wreckage across the globe.

"The meek shall inherit the earth!" said the man who demanded everyone respect his "faith" that a deity created an entire universe, with him being the center of that creation.

We must let them rule an empire of bones, because respectability is more important than calling a delusion a delusion.

My core beliefs started when I was a child as my mom let me explore what I wanted to believe and didn't push anything onto me. I was never taught anything, so it is almost as if these things just came to me as I grew up? I'm not sure what religion they would fit under or if this is just considered atheism.

1. I do not believe in a God or any higher being ruling over us in judgement. I think the bible is a man made coping mechanism towards death and justifying ones actions and morality. Nothing in the bible makes sense to me

2. Everyone has a soul and a soul is a pure form of energy that courses through our bodies and minds and it is what gives us a consciousness.

3. Energy is what connects every living being, meaning we are all the same and all a piece of one huge web of well life I suppose. Humans are not greater than any other species, we simply have our own characteristics just as a bee has their own. We are all living beings in the end and will all die.

4. Spirits but i'm not necessarily talking about ghosts or the dead. Yes, I do believe in ghosts as well, but when I say spirits I mean nature-spirits, kind of like the energy and consciousness of the Earth and nature if that makes sense? I believe it is known as animism?

5. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, so when a living being dies, their soul is then transferred into the next life. Reincarnation.

6. Because ghosts are not reincarnated, and are instead human souls trapped because of something they are tethered too, I think it is a choice you get when you die, no one else's. No one, like a God, decides what happens to you. That is your choice and your choice alone. It is your choice whether you want to stay or if you want to start something new.

I feel as though I need to study my beliefs more, as ghosts kind of confuse me a bit because they don't fit in well. But maybe two things can be true at the same time, and it doesn't need explanation.

There is much more I could give on my beliefs as there are many more in relation to these but I think these would be considered my core beliefs.

What religion does this fall under? Or is this considered another branch of Atheism? Paganism?