The link from the screenshot: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/are-reddits-replacement-mods-fit-to-fight-misinformation/

Inspired by something another user said, I feel this question deserves discussion. Also, I am shamelessly creating exchristian content. We are still a small group but I like it here now and it will get better, but only if we use it. "Creating content" just means using the site. Talk to me. I'm open to input. Maybe I'm wrong.... but:

Liberal/Progressive/Apologist Christians should not get a pass. The Bible is clear on a number of horrific things and is totally open to interpretation about another bunch of horrific things. In both the new and old testament. I argue that liberal Christianity is both insincere and perpetuates fundamentalist Christian beliefs, within a society, generation over generation.

The key dependent is childhood indoctrination. Liberal Christians still feed their kids the dogma. It all works. Not every kid, but some of them, from this Liberal Christian family, will have a hard time with some part of it and go reading the Bible. They say the Bible is the truth right?

They read the Bible and see where their parents are fudging it. They want to do better. Depending on circumstance, they either tighten up the faith, or they go full in to fundamentalism. I have seen it happen multiple times in 1, 2, and 3 generations in people I've met an known. Anecdotal, sure, but still.

Then, I argue, the cycle continues. How did Christianity survive this long? I'd argue this is all part of it. Even "lightly" indoctrinating children adds a chance, I'd argue significant, that the child becomes a fundy 20, 30, or 40 years in the future, when the chips are down, and someone says "come to my church, they'll help"

Should I be more accepting? I'd love to hear what you think on this subject.

I met Sarah and Justin when I was working on In Faith and In Doubt, a book about marriages and other long-term relationships between religious and nonreligious partners. Whether to baptize (or christen) their daughter was their first significant disagreement over religious practices.

“I wanted her to make her own decision when she was older,” Justin explained, “without having to deal with a choice that had been made for her.”

“But I just couldn’t imagine not having it done,” said Sarah.

She talked to her pastor and learned that her church saw baptism primarily as a ritual to wash away original sin. “I was honestly taken aback,” she said. “I didn’t know that was the meaning. That seemed medieval to me. But I still wanted to have it done, and now I had to figure out why I wanted it.”

She and Justin talked it through. “Eventually I realized that it wasn’t even about the connection to Christ. I think that is a relationship that a person should enter into willingly, and it happens in the heart, not in a ceremony.”

She tried to imagine not having their daughter baptized, just to see what feelings it brought up. “And the funny thing is, my first thought wasn’t about Jesus. I probably shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. It was a simpler thing. My first thought was, ‘But I was baptized, and my mother and daddy were baptized! She has to be baptized! It’s what we do!’ So it wasn’t about salvation, or original sin, or connecting her to Christ. It was about connecting her to my family.”

...These Christians reject the idea of expressive individualism, because Christian ideology teaches that people shouldn’t be allowed to choose what to make of their lives. It teaches that there’s one set of gender roles, one kind of sexuality, and one model of relationships that everyone is supposed to follow. It seeks to hammer everyone into these constricting boxes, regardless of whether or not they fit, regardless of whether or not it makes them miserable. Any deviation from this rigid framework, any desire to think or choose for yourself, they condemn as sin.

Christian apologists say this because they’re blinded by the delusion that Christianity owns morality. They don’t think of their religious beliefs as one worldview among many, but the only way to live a good, moral, and happy life. In their arrogance, they dismiss every alternative, all the infinite variety of culture thought up by humans past and present. They would outlaw it all if they could.

I recently described why I think “woke” has become a vacuous word that means little more than “libtard” in modern parlance. It seems apropos, then, that Christianity Today also recently released a piece that saw the editor-in-chief claim (in a previous NPR interview) that evangelical Christianity is moving too far to the right.

It turns out that Jesus’s teachings are increasingly considered by many Christians to be too “liberal” and “weak.”

I (7+ years closeted to parents) made a comment about California's first hurricane in 80+ years, and she responded with something like,

Maybe it will wash out all the gays and wicked people

🙄😮‍💨

Really?! I didn't even know how to respond to that.

Also, somehow or another I guess it's gotta come out.

If you ever need clear proof that Christianity is bullshit, look at war.

Most recently the thought has been striking me while watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But its true of the majority of wars in recent history. Ukrainian Christians pray to God for safety as they bail out of the back of an armored carrier ready to kill in defense of their homeland. Russian soldiers pray to the same God for protection, huddled in their trenches, waiting for inevitable attacks. When troops die, back home, they pray for God's vengeance on their enemy, and both sides ask the same God for justice and comfort.

What ridiculous nonsense. Does either side ever think about how God seems to have fucked them over in favor of their enemy? If the god they were praying to were real, couldn't and wouldn't he intervene without them having to kill each other violently? Doesn't it actively disprove the existence of this "god" when he doesn't?

I am frustrated by the Christian notion to just use their religion as a salve to pain while not changing any behavior that causes the pain in the first place.

I'm tired of the powerful hiding behind religion and using it to control the brainwashed masses.

I don't understand how the rest of the world doesn't already see Christianity, and religion generally, as a harmful evil in society. Its like watching a bunch of deluded heroin addicts.

I've never been a fan of alt-right darling Jordan Peterson. This is a good deconstruction against his arguments that Christianity is necessary for Western values.

The title is satire from the author, but the story inside is familiar. How do you reconcile claims of love and morality from a belief system that creates the opposite?

I stay in hotel rooms fairly often for work. Usually I find myself keeping company with one of these damn things. Last time I hid it under a couch cushion, but I think next time its going in the toilet tank. Anyone else got any bright ideas for fun things to do with these things?

Covers the best guesses current scholarship and archæology gives about the origin of Yahweh following the Bronze Age Collapse.

Not many people are aware of Ingersoll's work as a counter-apologist and vocal critic of Christianity at the end of the Nineteenth Century. His analysis of the religion and its origins as well as criticisms of its practitioners remains relevant today.

Yahweh is supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, but there's a theme you can find within the Bible that suggests a weakness in his attributes.

https://biblehub.com/judges/1-19.htm

The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.

https://biblehub.com/1_kings/6-7.htm

In building the temple, only blocks dressed at the quarry were used, and no hammer, chisel or any other iron tool was heard at the temple site while it was being built.

While the Bible never says what was used to fix Jesus to the cross, tradition says it was three iron nails. There are two reasons why the account of the crucifixion is atypical of normal Roman executions: first of all, they didn't usually waste good iron nailing victims to their crosses. They tied them to the posts. Secondly, crucifixion victims normally took days to die of dehydration and suffocation, which is why the Romans did it that way. But Jesus allegedly died in hours, not days.

So clearly, Yahweh has a weakness to iron, and I fear no gods I know how to kill.

I was thinking about this issue this morning. Christians think they they have compelling evidence that their religion is true, and they just need to convince us nonbelievers of this evidence and then we'll start going to church (plus whatever else they expect/want). However, providing actual evidence that their god is real isn't enough, and I don't think they grasp that. Let's say that Christians are able to provide actual good evidence in this area: I would start believing their god is real, but I wouldn't repent or start worshipping him because their god is a genocidal monster.

In the end, it doesn't matter if their god is real, because we'd all be under duress to worship him just to avoid an eternity of torture. It's garbage. I'd rather suffer for eternity than worship a god like theirs. But they only think about the first hand of the problem, and many of them deny that their god is malevolent.

#CW: Bit of a religious trauma dump, religious C-PTSD triggers, depression, mentions of suicide

Hey all - this is going to be a pretty long post about my life and experience leaving the faith, just to get it out of my head to help me process what happened to me over the years. I come from a long line of evangelical Christians on both sides of my family. My dad was a pastor of some sort or other for the majority of my life, and to my knowledge still preaches occasionally to this day.

I've just come out of an evangelical college which was the most traumatic 4 years of my life, and have been working to heal the damage done to me there over the past year. Being treated like a prisoner there for 4 years wasn't good for my mental health, but I'm starting to get things turned around a little.

I kept the mask on - 8 years ago (2015), I started to have serious doubts. I started to learn more about the world around me, outer space specifically, and I learned just how much I was lied to over the course of my Abeka Book homeschooling. I had been in church every Sunday morning, evening, and Wednesday night, trusting every pastor that came up to speak - eager to learn and soak in everything they said. I used to be an honest to god zealot.

When that broke, so did I. It was my identity, it was my only connection to other people, to family. At that young age, I felt profound loneliness, disconnection, numbness, emptiness.

I had a girlfriend at the time. We'll call her Hailey. Hailey was abusive and emotionally manipulative. Extremely harsh, berating, just a really awful person at the time, though I can't speak for how she is now as I haven't had any contact with her since late 2016. We had started talking in 2013 after I had moved away, but I had known her since 2010. There was a specific time in 2013 that I remember waking up in the middle of the night, with the only thing I could think of being that family. I remember praying very hard, convinced this was a sign from god that they needed the support of prayer. The next morning I found out that one of her family members had run away from home that night - this coincidence fueled the fire of my faith for far too many years after.

Our breakup in 2016 sent me down a very dark spiral. I knew that it was for the best as I just mentally could not deal with her bs every single day. It was incredibly stressful - walking on eggshells every day. She had isolated me from every other friend I had, making me have no one besides her to make leaving difficult. But I left anyway. It was at this point I was also at my most zealous. A desperate attempt to feel comfort and control, to not feel alone in the midst of true loneliness.

For 6 months, I had no one. There were no kids at the church I attended. Only old people, because it was an old-style independent fundamental baptist church. For 6 months, the only communication I had with other people were near daily texts from her, about as long as this post, about how horrible of a person I was. Truthfully, I planned to kill myself in June of 2017, exactly a year after the breakup. It was too much for a kid to handle.

This was a turning point - I somehow managed to make some online friends through Twitch that helped me through my darkest times, and they've all stuck by my side to this day. I couldn't possibly be more thankful for each and every one of them.

I left the faith shortly after, around the start of 2017. But there was still the issue of family - I had to make a plan on how to handle the next 5 years of my life.

I chose the mask.

I pretended to be someone I wasn't, but someone who everyone else wanted me to be. I manipulated people into loving this character, someone who didn't even exist. I became popular and well respected by everyone - I even taught lessons and gave teaching advice to people that taught classes at church. I led a double life.

Going into college, I had to double down on it. Constant hypervigilance, always being on guard and in character, lest my only shot at a religion-free future crumble around me. Every teacher loved me. But I hated nearly every one of them. I made so many "friends" and was, again, respected and popular among my peers. But I hated nearly every one of them. I was surrounded by violent homophobia daily. Forced to sit in church services every day except Saturday. Forced to listen to their bigoted alt-right bile for 4 years to keep my only shot at a future in-tact.

But, I did it... and now I'm left picking up the pieces of the kid I left behind 6 years ago.

I'm somewhat optimistic looking forward. Things have been trending better after a year, but being alive is just a struggle. Enjoying my time on anything is just a struggle. Getting better, but a struggle nonetheless.

To anyone going through a similar life or heading to a similar point - it will get better, and you will be okay no matter how you choose to handle it. That being said... before you commit to playing a 5-year character, know that it will come with mental and emotional baggage at the end. For me, that baggage is the C-PTSD I picked up from college. Know that you will be set back 5 years of self-identity development. Weigh those risks, know the outcome, but stay strong. Be good to yourself during and after.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/905567

I recently deconverted last year. During the process, I learned to be skeptic on supernatural events after watching debates and some episodes in AXP.

That's just me after deconversion, so I'm not sure if all exchristians are the same. I'm wondering if there are exchristians who believe in other supernatural things like ghosts? Or aliens?

i already posted this in lemmy.one from my world account, not sure why it's not showing up so re-posting again to see if it goes through