If you’d ever actually read this thing, you’d figure out immediately it was obviously fiction.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Why did this show up in ‘based on your likes’ :/

and yes block me if you like but yes I’ve read that thing several times (at least fifteen times through) and it is that that convinces me that the Bible is true and it really happened, and God is real and true and the God of the Bible.

LOL. Exhibit A.

Maybe it showed up “based on your likes” because “god” is sending you a sign and wants you to know that he’s fictional? Who are you to question his wisdom and mysterious ways? Doesn’t he have a “plan” for your life? What kind of blasphemy is this?

The book with the talking snake; the talking donkey; the talking shrub; the food that fell from the sky; the man who lived inside a fish; the entire universe made from nothing in one day after spending five days making just Earth, where the sun and moon are both “lights” set into the sky but there was light before either existed; every animal in the world was a vegetarian; the time god ordered an unnamed man picking up sticks to be stoned to death; the time god gave a spell to induce an abortion; the Egyptians who had sorcerers; the sticks that turned into snakes; the witches; the satyr; the dragons; the man with the magical hair who killed 1000 men with a donkey jawbone; the people made from dirt and a rib who populated the Earth through incest; the time the only remaining son of the only other two humans in existence went to the next town over to find a wife; the time all the people spoke the same language until they built a tower and were cursed; the god who can be defeated by things made of iron; the humans who lived to 900 years of age; the literal giants; the worldwide flood that covered Mt. Everest in 40 days; the magical zoo boat with millions of animals on it, including the kangaroos that hopped over from Australia and the penguins that came from Antarctica, that then repopulated the Earth, again, with incest… again, but not before they had a barbeque and killed and burned some of the rescued animals because god likes the smell of meat; the Exodus that even the Jews say didn’t happen; the two million people who wandered for 40 years in a patch of desert you can walk across in a week; the time the Earth stopped rotating so the murdering could be finished; the time two angels came to town and the only righteous man in the village told the horde who came to rape them that they could rape his virgin daughters instead; the time those same two daughters got their (righteous) father drunk and raped him so that they could have his children/grandchildren; the time god commanded a man to have sex with his widowed sister-in-law but he didn’t want to so god struck him down on the spot; the time the omniscient god tricked a man into murdering his daughter; the time the omniscient, all-knowing god and Satan punked a man just to see what would happen, murdering his children, and replacing them with new, better children in the end; the time two bears murdered 42 children because a bald man asked; the time the magic man floated up into space like a weather balloon; the time the magical man went up to a high place to see the entire flat Earth; the time a man cut up his sex slave when she was raped to death and then sent her body parts through the post; the time the entire Nile turned to blood (but nobody outside the bible story noticed); the time the “good” god told his army to take little girls as sex slaves; the prophet of god who married his sister; the time the “loving” god told his army to put their swords through babies; the time god told the people to bury their poo so he wouldn’t keep stepping in it; the time a marriage dowry was 100 human foreskins; the time zombies - literal zombies - rose out of their graves and walked around Jerusalem; the prediction that “the stars will fall” down to Earth; the time the magic man who thought sickness was caused by “demons” sent the “demons” into a ton of pigs who jumped off a cliff; the time the magic man destroyed a fig tree out of spite; the time the magic man used spit to cure people of illness; the time the magic man yelled at people who wash their hands and scolded them for not stoning their disobedient children; the time the magic man is alone praying to himself and someone who wasn’t there wrote down what he said; the time the magic man was alone with the “Devil” and someone who wasn’t there wrote down what they said; the two different, incompatible genealogies from dirt man to the magic man; and perhaps most devastating of all, the time the magic man insisted that you’ll know he and his ministry are true because all his followers will be - *giggle* - “brought to complete unity”?

This book? This is the “true” book? This is the book you’ve read “at least fifteen times”? This is the book you’ve read thoroughly multiple times and come away every time going, “yep, well, that all checks out, nothing fishy about any of that, none of that sounds made up to me”? You’re saying that all of this passes your sniff test? You read all of this and said “that all sounds completely legit to me, sign me up”? Unrelated, I have a large, impressive canyon available for a very reasonable price…

What’s really interesting is that Islam replicates much of the above nonsense. Dirt man, rib woman, the zoo boat, the man raped by his daughters, the talking shrub, the flat Earth, the dome over the Earth with the sun, moon and stars set into it. Yet you would likely laugh at it and say how silly Islam is. Yours is true, but they’ve been mislead by stories that are obviously false.

Saying it’s “wrong, wrong, wrong” doesn’t mean it is. You might have come to “faith” and belief through mindless recitation and repetition, but the Argument from Repetition is a fallacy.

Never mind the fact the magical man is dependent upon the non-metaphorical dirt man and rib woman who are disproved by evolution; or the fact the “Cleansing the Temple” fable would have been an antisemitic scandal, yet is recorded nowhere in Jewish record; or the genocide of every firstborn human and animal recorded nowhere in Egyptian history; or the fact the fable of the “crucifixion” violates known history (bodies were left up to rot as a deterrent); or the fact the magic man is recorded nowhere in Greek or Roman records of the first century; or the fact the resurrection fable is a known forgery added much later (Mark 16 stopped at verse 8); or the fact the nativity was added more than a hundred years later; or the fact that Pilate is depicted as radically different than history records (which is why it’s historical fiction); or the fact that the gospels are either quoting each other verbatim or contradicting each other in completely incompatible ways, such that nobody can write a coherent timeline that includes all story elements (i.e. you have to lie to make it fit) - John even depicts an entirely different character than the Synoptics.

The bible describes its god character with contradictory and incompatible attributes, such as the “omni” attributes: omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, etc. These are self-refuting and canceling.

For example, if this character is omniscient and knows everything, then not only does it know what you’ll do, but it knows what it, itself, will do. Therefore it has no choice but to do it, otherwise it’s not omniscient. It would not have any choice but to create the universe, for example. And if it has no choice, it has no free will. It also is not omnibenevolent (it can’t do anything for benevolent reasons, because it has no choice but to do them), prayer cannot work (it has no choice but to do what it’s going to do), and is not omnipotent (can’t defy its own omniscience).

If it’s perfect, it cannot be blasphemed (made less) or praised (made greater). If it’s omnitemporal - that is, exists in all time - it cannot be angry or pleased, because it exists at every moment in time simultaneously.

The bible itself screams at you that this character not just isn’t real, but cannot be real. If your god became real, the universe would be contradicted out of existence.

So, sure…. it happened. And Santa flies a sled, and that dog you had moved to a farm upstate.

The magical, logical and storytelling absurdities are littered entirely through its nonsensical pages. If you’ve actually read the bible - and I have strong doubts that’s in any way true - you’ve just ingested it, rather than actually putting any real thought into what it’s telling you. For example, you’ve never read the gospels horizontally (side-by-side).

No scholarship recognizes that any part of the bible was written by anyone who could claim to have been there; it’s well known it was written decades or even centuries later, and much of it even announces outright that it was written as propaganda to proselytize, not accurately record. Paul openly states that he lies - he becomes like one of whomever he wants to convince. The author of John, in a section literally called “The Purpose of John’s Gospel,” claims to have written it so “that you may believe,” not to state reliably what happened. The author of Luke begins by saying that there are a lot of stories about what went on in those days, and that he’s going to provide the true account. And then proceeds to mostly regurgitate Mark. And much of the bible is known to steal directly from earlier myths, like the Epic of Gilgamesh. We linguistically know the bible is myth, because we can tell how those myths evolved from earlier myths.

You… you didn’t know any of this, did you? Nobody told you about all the scholarship and analysis that tells us how cobbled together the bible is? How authors invented pieces wholecloth centuries later? Nobody told you that they invented a word, “pseudepigrapha,” which literally means “bible lies”? Nobody sat you down and admitted or explained to you that the bible is well known to be copied, plagiarized or outright fraudulent? Ooh, ouch. It’s like not find out until you’re 20 that the toothfairy is just your parents. Must sting a bit.

Your ignorance of the bible - both its contents and its origin - and determination to hold onto fairytales that your parents told you in order to avoid reality, is not evidence that any of it happened. Especially when it’s trivially known that it didn’t.

But you have “faith,” don’t you? You have empty, useless, worthless faith. The same kind of faith every believer in every other religion has that you’re wrong and they’re right: the steadfast determination to believe not just in the absence of supporting evidence, not even just because of the absence of evidence, but because of the evidence to the contrary. Faith is not just ignorance, but denial. Which will persist your belief even though you intellectually know you should abandon it like you abandoned belief in the Easter bunny.

Sure, you’re convinced. But not for reasons you should be proud of.

Now, tell me why I shouldn’t believe those things? Tell me why I shouldn’t have faith, exactly. Ignore the Bible and its origins.

I’ll be real with you, I don’t know anyone who takes it so literally. It’s use is from the story it tells, even if it’s not completely true.

I am proud of my faith. I am proud of my creed and my doctrine.

Secularly, I eat healthy, I exercise, I go outside and spend time with my friends. These are things everyone agrees on is good, but what is proof without belief? A million studies can come out about how good certain things are, but whether or not I believe it, if I don’t apply it to my life, I will get nothing out of it. I can just decide that I don’t believe in taking care of myself, but I will reap exactly what I sow when I end up sick sooner.

I believe in goodness and spreading goodness, and getting rid of evil or negativity. I believe in helping the poor and needy. I believe in being kind and thoughtful. I think these are ideas we all can get behind.

I don’t know what sect of Christianity you have roots in, but I am curious. More than anything, I just wonder why do you think faith in God is so wrong if it does usher in very good things in the present world? Imagine the amount of people who would not think to feed the homeless if not for Christmas, or the people who wouldn’t donate to charity if not for Jesus, or the people who wouldn’t do anything for anyone else simply because they don’t know that it is good to.

Now, I don’t intend to change your faith, either. I can’t, but you must realize that it’s longevity is due to something. I’m aware the amount of atheists is rising, and I am sad about that, but I hope that you will find something better to do with your time other than seethe about something that probably doesn’t affect you half as bad as you believe it to.

Love to hear a response.

Apparently “because they’re not true” is insufficient to you? Truth is apparently not an important consideration. I guess it gets in the way of belief.

Because faith is not a reliable way to discover truth. Faith just prevents you finding out if your beliefs are false. Anything that disconfirms your belief will be handwaved as “well, I just have faith.” Faith is impervious to evidence and truth.

Name any belief that cannot be held entirely through faith alone. Any. Just one. Can anyone believe in anal-probing aliens based entirely on faith? What about believing their race to be superior? What about believing that god wants you to kill certain people? That an invisible unicorn lives in your garage? That aliens send telepathic messages at midnight from their secret base on Pluto? Can any of these not be believed entirely based on “faith” and nothing else? if not, what is the difference between faith and delusion? What is mental illness if we must endorse someone’s assertions because they have “faith”?

If someone believes such a thing based on “faith,” what evidence or argument can you provide to convince them otherwise? If there’s nothing that can’t be believed using only faith, then faith is irrational and unreasonable, and we need not endorse it.

If you believe things based on faith rather than truth, then there can be no good and bad, right and wrong. People kill their children through faith-healing. They had faith they were doing the right thing. So how can you judge them as wrong when they had faith in their beliefs? Their faith told them they were correct. The reason we know they were not is only due to objective reality, from discovering truth, about how human bodies work and medicine works and how diseases work, and so on.

In a world of faith, you cannot assert anything being right or wrong, good or bad. Because someone somewhere has faith. Faith holds us back. It poisons our interactions with the world.

As Christopher Hitchens said, “the suicide-bombing community is entirely faith-based.” And as Sam Harris pointed out:

Well, you might say that their faith was wrong. Except, you don’t get to say that, when you use faith to protect your beliefs from disconfirmation. When they’re using the same process as you (faith), you don’t get to tut-tut that they got the results of that same process wrong.

Every believer claims to have faith. Every believer claims to have the correct beliefs based on faith. But every believer can’t have the correct beliefs. None of the believers can figure out whose are correct and whose are not without resorting to more faith. “I have faith yours are wrong.” Faith cannot be used to determine truth.

If “faith” is the basis for your belief, you’re saying that you don’t care what’s true. And honestly, you’re terrifying. You will believe and do anything without regard for evidence or truth, if your faith tells you so. Your beliefs and intentions in the world are explicitly not aligned with reality.

Yikes. Your doctrine describes all that nonsense up there that you’ve chosen to pretend isn’t there.

Your doctrine also describes an eternal deity who will let you commit any atrocity you like against humans as long as you don’t hurt its feelings, prescribes slavery, commands killing girls who aren’t virgins on their wedding day, and wants you to stone your disobedient children to death. And who (supposedly) murdered over 20,000,000 people. It describes an afterlife where you will spend eternity at the foot of its throne praising it “day and night”, and that you are obligatorily compelled, at the threat of hellfire, to “love” your god more than all humans, all animal life, our planet, the universe itself. An eternal god who cannot be hurt or harmed must be your number one priority, and everything else in the universe is a secondary concern.

If you’re proud of it, you must not have understood it… I hope. It would be much more disturbing if you did understand it and still were proud of it.

Your creed gives priority to an imaginary ghost over real, flesh and blood humans. Your faith makes you credulous and impervious to truth. Your priority isn’t this world.

I might not be able to stop you, but I’m damn sure not going to endorse it, and I’m going to defend society from being influenced by your baseless beliefs.

So, you’re saying it isn’t true. But you don’t care. Most people want to believe as many true things as possible, and as few false things as possible. But not you.

If it’s not literally true, then we can conclude that the characters in it are not real or true either. The characters in a metaphor are themselves metaphorical. No tortoise and hare organized a race. If you don’t take it literally, we can conclude that the existence of the god and Jesus characters is not literal either.

If Adam and Eve aren’t literally true, if the Garden of Eden thing didn’t literally happen, then there was no Fall, no Original Sin. Therefore, Jesus either died for a metaphor or was a metaphor. The latter would make the most sense, since the bible gives a (two) direct (and contradictory) genealogies from Adam to Jesus. The descendants of metaphors are themselves metaphors.

https://www.atheistalliance.org/thinking-out-loud/the-bibles-final-metaphor/

I mean, is there anything in the bible that is literally true? If your god and your savior didn’t literally do these things, then why even think they exist at all?

It is concerning though that you believers have been adjusting what’s metaphorical and what’s literal for hundreds of years and still haven’t gotten it right and still don’t agree on it. If none of you have figured it out, why should non-believers take the word of any of you?

Importantly, that assessment comes from the believers themselves. That is, Xians make themselves authoritative over their god and their savior.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908374106

Unsurprising.

Your defence is simply that it’s useful. Okay. So is the Iliad and Odyssey. So are Grimm’s and Aesop’s tales. So are Shakespeare’s tales, So are many episodes of Star Trek. If the sum total of your religious belief can be replaced by any modern moral tales - you know, without all the slavery and stoning - why do we need it?

All of this would be fine, except you seem to object to me pointing this out. Seemingly, you know it’s not true - you said so - but you felt obliged to respond to my post anyway? Simply because I pointed out what you already knew? Am I supposed to keep this a secret or something?

Things aren’t true because you believe they are. If they’re true, they’re true. Like any believer, you’ve granted yourself primacy over objective reality. You don’t need to believe things when you can understand them.

I don’t need to believe in gravity when I can understand how it works. I don’t need to believe in evolution when I can understand how it works. If I don’t believe in it, it doesn’t stop being true.

You have a need to believe which supersedes your desire to know. That’s where your faith comes from. You prefer to have comforting beliefs, rather than understand inconvenient truths.

You named a handful of good things. None of them require “god”. None of them require religion, least of all Xianity. Do you think that none of that happens outside of Xianity?

The problem is you discredit and disregard humanity in the equation. You attribute all that is good to Xianity and your blood-god, and ignore everything that it costs humanity.

Never mind all the evil it has perpetrated, all the atrocities you’ve chosen to ignore, pretend didn’t happen, or handwave away with “well, they weren’t a true Xian.” You know the ones. The child rape ring conducted by the Vatican. The opposition to same sex marriage. The opposition to birth control. The religious motivation for race segregation. Hitler’s campaign against the Jews was him continuing the mission of Christ.

He had faith. He had faith in Christ and what God wanted of him. He was continuing Jesus’ mission. His faith told him so.

There is no better way to convince someone to do something awful than to say that it is divine will. Look at Abraham getting ready to stab a knife into his son.

“Faith” in god’s will is unassailable and short-circuits every evolved moral impulse. “It’s in god’s plan” is a great way to ignore people’s suffering. Or even blame it on them (”you didn’t have enough faith”). “I’ll pray for you” is a great way to do nothing and still feel virtuous.

Now, am I saying all Xians are Nazis? No. But…

If your religion doesn’t outperform all other religions - and no religion - then why would we keep it around? If your car breaks down every third time you drive it and fills the cabin with carbon monoxide, well, it still does good things like getting you from A to B. Why replace it? Right?

That any amount of “good” comes out of it is is not the point. What about everything else? What is the total cost of this amount of “good”?

Here is the Born Again Again podcast, a podcast by two ex-Xians where they talk about how their belief gave them messed up ideas about sexuality, family and gender roles, about how it corrupted how they figure out what is true, about imaginary wars of good and evil, about judging people outside their clique, about minimizing themselves to be more godly, about what a friend is and the illusion of friendship with others just because they’re Xian too, about the fear, about the manipulation, about the thought-terminating cliches, about the discouragement to think critically, about the delusion that completely normal emotions were “god” or the “devil”, about the creation of dependence, about how worthless and broken they were without an imaginary space monster, about always wondering if you’re good enough, about the abusive relationship that they had with both the religion and the god character, about never having chosen to be Xians, about never being free to choose to “love” god with the threat of hellfire hanging over them, about the completely normal experiences they forfeited to be more Xianly…

Listen for yourself. I dare you. You asked why I think “faith in God is so wrong.” Well, let two people who were there tell you. They were no lukewarm Xians. They were fully involved in their church, in ministry, in all of it.

Here are “40 Harmful Effects of Christianity.” Now, whether you agree with them or not, they’re justified by the faithful through the same bible as yours. Your book is their book.

And if you don’t agree with them, then that’s kind of my point. Despite their scriptural basis, you again give yourself primacy over your god and your scripture.

2 Peter 1:20-21

2 Timothy 3:16-17

Maybe those aren’t to be taken literally though, and therefore neither is the “truth” of the bible.

You judge your god by your secular morality. You shape your god’s beliefs, preferences and demands according to your personal interpretation and morality. You ignore what you find appalling (”no longer applies”), privately interpret what you think you can rescue, and zero in on the cherry-picked good bits. All of which reflect you.

You yourself said that the bible stories are not literally true, and the meaning that you then give them, comes entirely from you. You have a tight choke-chain leash on your god and your scripture. It’s time to acknowledge that.

Someone who was actually faithful, someone who believed on faith wouldn’t find anything wrong with the scripture. They would have total trust in their god and its word, that whatever it said was correct and not to be manipulated or interpreted by sinful, salvation-needing humans.

I don’t have faith. I don’t need faith to reject baseless god claims. It doesn’t require faith to say “I don’t believe you.” It requires no faith to read the bible and see what it’s telling you and reject it.

Faith is only needed when evidence and reason is not there. Your preachers even encourage you to have more faith when evidence contradicts your belief. Faith is inversely proportional to evidence. Which should tell a reasonable person all they need. If you believe something on the basis of faith, it’s because there’s no evidence, and it’s more than likely untrue.

Religion’s longevity has been due to power and the ignorance of the people, not due to truth. The Appeal to Tradition is a fallacy.

Non-belief has risen in proportion to knowledge of the world around us. The priests used to be able to keep humans stupid and credulous, cloistered into small villages, but non-belief is correlated with exposure to the outside world, to science, to new ideas, to knowledge, to education and the greater reach of people’s worlds.

Non-belief is rising because people have figured out that Xianity isn’t true. As you already recognize. The difference is that they care about what they believe. They recognize that we need to orient how we work with and navigate the world to objective reality, not superstitions and wishful thinking. That we can’t solve our problems if we don’t accurately understand them.

Ex-believers tell me all the time “I thought I was the only one.” When they find out there are more like them out there, who questioned and rejected silly superstitions, they say “I wish I’d known earlier, I wouldn’t have wasted so much of my life.”

What you’re really saying is that you would prefer your absurd and obviously false beliefs go uncontested. But what I post is a reaction to the intrusion of religious nonsense into society and the world at large. You all started this, not me, and then you act indignant and pious that I would dare to push back, that the fault lies with me getting in your way, that I’m “seething” or fighting something, as if I started this.

I’m sure oncologists would rather live in a world without cancer, but as long as it exists and they have the skills and the will, they will keep working away trying to make people’s lives better. To tell me that I should find something better to do with my time is to miss the point. I wouldn’t have to spend any time at all rebutting religious nonsense if religionists would stop promoting or even producing it in the first place.

I look forward to the day when we don’t have to talk about religious nonsense and the harm it does. You shut up, and I’ll shut up.

So, I really don’t need or welcome your sanctimonious pity. My time is very well spent, indeed.

Well, this is a lot.

I just don’t agree with you. My experience with religion has been good, and I see nothing wrong with my life. At this point, I think if I tried to explain myself, I’d get misconstrued. Well, I think I already have, but I digress. So, I won’t really get into it.

I think you are just mad at a person or group of people who may or may not exist.

I know there are bad priests, bad clergymen, and bad people who follow the faith. The point of it is just to try to make it right. You can call yourself a Christian, but never fast, almsgive, or pray. It’s just what happens, sometimes.

Also, I do mean what I said genuinely. I am curious, and I enjoyed reading what you said. I just remain unconvinced, and you sound very tied to this subject.

I think instead of hating, your time would be better spent doing something for your community.

So you literally asked me, and I spent all that time bothering to answer, and you ignored everything I had to say and then yet again tried to present it as some kind of issue on my part, that I’m “mad at a person or group of people who may or may not exist” or that I’m merely “hating,” when I responded, specifically to the ideas of Xianity.

Ones I suspect you don’t even know exist, since most Xians have never read their own bible all the way through.

This is part of the illness of this ideology. Your immoral, disturbing, irrational theology needs to be so carefully protected that you need to pretend that it’s an attack on humans in order to deflect. Since they cannot stand up on their own. And you need to throw someone in front of them as a human shield, even if it’s a hypothetical or imaginary someone. You can simply hypothesize someone into existence and pretend that nothing I’ve said has any merit, because I’m really just angry at the strawman you erected.

Your strawman even includes its own nested No True Scotsman fallacy; to wit, the strawman I’m mad at isn’t even really a Xian, so Xianity skips away uncontested. For reals? This is how dishonestly you operate?

“I can ignore all the bad parts of my religion by pretending the people who perpetrate them aren’t really Xians.” Wantonly dishonest. You can pretend as much as you like, they don’t go away, and we won’t stop noticing that they’re Xians. And plenty of them will say that you’re the one who isn’t. People aren’t as foolish or gullible as you think they are.

This is the mentality that is supposed to attract people to Xianity? No wonder people are leaving in droves. Keep at it. You’ll help make the world atheists in no time.

At no point did you actually address or even acknowledge anything I had to say, at no point did you respond to any of my points, and when I gave you references to everything, including a recommendation on listening to ex-Xians who could answer everything you (pretended to) want to know, you just breezed past.

1 Peter 3:15-16

I would argue that you’re not the True Xian, since you won’t do this.

You even assume that I don’t do plenty already for my community, or that I can’t do both. Methinks thou might be protesting and projecting too much. You couldn’t respond to anything I had to say honestly, so you had to turn it into some kind of ad hominem, one that would allow you to flit off feeling pious and superior.

Your questions were not serious. You were disingenuous, ignored everything said, everything you didn’t want to hear, and acted in bad faith (LOL). You’ve made that perfectly clear by not even addressing a single point raised.

Your intellectual dishonesty has been noticed and recorded for posterity. You already admitted it isn’t true, and truth is what I care about.

Next time don’t impose yourself onto someone else’s meme - remember, this was my post, which you inserted yourself into - when you’re just planning to be a proselytizing troll.

Go away. I’ve wasted more time on you and your dishonesty than you are worth.

P.S. Thank you for reblogging my essay onto your blog and just saying the equivalent of “nup” though. I look forward to people on your blog viewing what I have to say and noticing that you didn’t have anything worthwhile to say in response.

It amazing how often this is the kind response we get when we dare to raise a legitimate point against blind faith in an absurd belief system. I find it both hilarious and sad that they bible thump so hard at us, yet can't even make the smallest of effort to follow thru on the things they proclaim to believe and follow with upmost devotion...

If your religion can’t withstand the barest amount of scrutiny without you having to make excuses for it than perhaps you should question why you follow it. To me this whole thing seems a lot like what is seen with Stockholm syndrome where the victim sides with the person who kidnapped them and we see a similar pattern of false beliefs that have to be broken with those that escape religions. To quote Paul Hokemeyer who is a psychotherapist, licensed marriage and family therapist and certified clinical trauma professional when he was speaking about Stockholm syndrome as it relates to domestic violence victims “It's illogical on the surface, but Stockholm syndrome provides the survivor with temporary relief that, over time, they can use to safely and permanently extract themselves from their abuser. To do this, however, they must connect with someone outside their relationship with the abuser to get out of it, and also have faith that a better life awaits them. This is an incredibly difficult task, although far from impossible. Survivors of Stockholm syndrome have three doors to pass through to freedom. The first is the door of distorted reality. They must push through a false sense of love. Then, they must pass through the door of terror that is represented by the potential annihilation at the hands of their abuser. Finally, they must pass through the door of faith and trust that there is a better world waiting for them. I've witnessed success in these transitions time and time again so I know it’s an attainable goal.” in the case of religion they have developed a false belief in a deity as a coping mechanism often due the combination of the power position of a parent or authority figure and the fear that is instilled in them at a early age before they have been given the reasoning skills to see the glaring signs of falsehood that permeate religions. Unfortunately this results in the situation being by the time those reasoning skill are developed the false reality has been deeply ingrained and they have been conditioned to resist any and all attempts at questioning that false reality and quite often they have been taught to respond with anger as this was the only real response they received when they pose even the most minor of question. 

By: Colin Wright

Published: Dec 2, 2020

==

For several hundred thousand years, and long before anyone knew what a chromosome is, our ancestors have been able to figure out how to make a baby. Nobody needed to be a biologist to figure out who does what.

When grown adults either lie - or otherwise make it clear they legitimately don’t know - about something as basic as where babies come from, they should not be trusted on any other topic.

Seems pretty simple to me. Makes me wonder how people can get this so wrong short of ether total ignorance of the subject or deliberately presenting to wrong.

This is not a drill. Our new Community Guidelines are here. 

We recently introduced Community Labels to give everyone more control over their dashboard experience. With this new feature, you can adjust your feed to your preferred comfort level by setting the types of content you want to see. It was our first step toward a more open Tumblr. 

Today, we’re taking the next step: We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).

So, even if your creations contain nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes, you can now share them on Tumblr using the appropriate Community Label so that everyone remains in control of the types of content they see on their dash. 

We have updated our Community Guidelines to reflect these changes; the rest of our content policies remain the same: We still don’t allow hate, spam, violent threats, or anything illegal, and visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr (if you want to know more about that, our CEO Matt recently explained why it’s not feasible for us to safely and successfully support porn communities at this time). If you come across these types of content, please continue to report them to us.

Similarly, if you come across content on Tumblr that doesn’t appear to be appropriately labeled, please let us know. This is how we’ll work together to create safer spaces for everyone on Tumblr, whatever their interests and needs. 

We hope this shift creates more room for artistic expression to flourish on Tumblr while empowering each of you to craft your own experience and safely explore and discover the things you love.

@staff would say I appreciate the return of art to the platform but you made sure to write in a loophole so you can still apply Censorship whenever you want.

As usual @staff half-assed the measure just enough to be able to still Censor whenever it pleases them. To that I say Screw you @staff for once again being hypocrites

The “free will” argument logically disproved.

Many times I have had people try to use “”Free Will”  as a excuse for why there deity does not intervene in to correct/stop horrendous acts and events. Normally the conversion goes something like this. you claim your deity is a kind and caring one, “so why doesn’t [insert deity name here] step in to stop murders and other such acts against innocents?” to which they reply “if [insert deity name here] were to do such a thing that would violate the ‘free will’ of man.” To which I then respond “What about sickness, disease, genetic disorders, cancer etc? you can’t possibly be saying that to allowing such suffering is required to allow man ‘free will’ as that would only leave three possibilities. 

(1) if your deity is all-knowing and all-powerful: that while this kind of suffering maybe exploitable by man but its basic existence to start would require that your deity gave it creed, and that would require a cruel and malevolent deity not a kind and caring one as you claim your’s to be. 

(2) to continue on that thought if we assume your deity is kind and caring then it must not be all-knowing and all-powerful: as no kind and caring deity would allow this to happen if it could prevent/stop it.

(3) your deity does not exist and violence/cruelty are purely the actions of those who commit them. Sickness & Disease are no more complicated then they appear and just the consequence of a diverse biome and the failure of evolutionary mechanisms. 

If we apply occam’s razor ( https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor )(simply put “the simplest explanation is usually the most correct”) then option (3) is most likely true as anything else would require a mysterious deity that defies every known principle of science that we have relentlessly and repeatedly proven are true. there fore we can conclude one that the “free will” argument is not only ineffective but very quickly leads us to the logical concussion that there is no deity and we are simply responsible for our own actions and our existance is simply the product of a very long chain of events and statistically not that special as even the most conservative theories allow for there to be many worlds capable of life as we know it and that does not even touch the very real possibility of life that has come about using other possible bases of life other than carbon.

I want to expand on one of the things I touched on here. Another complete sticking point in the "free will argument" when applied to the example of if [insert dirty name here] were to intervene in the case of Rape, Murder, Etc that it would be negating the aggressor's free will is that by his very inaction he is negating the victims free will. So it makes the entire argument of not negating free will a complete logical fallacy as its very nature contradicts it's viability as argument.

Also to add to what I find a laughable argument that all these things from murder & rape to diseases & illness are not the creations of [insert deity name here] but instead of [insert anti-deity here]. Do people not realize this isn't helping thier case just adding to mine? By making this statement you are openly admitting your deity isn't all-powerful because if it were the anti-deity of your statement would never have been a problem to begin with.

Ok lets follow this a step further even in many of this origin stories the anti-deity is the creation of the "all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect" deity... Does anyone else see the gaping hole in this? I mean come on this is just dumb the supposed all-knowing deity creating the anti-deity makes no sense because if it is "perfect" as you claim then it would not only know that it was creating it's antithesis but have had to make a conscious decision to do so knowing fully the evil it was unleashing in doing so thus negating any argument that it was a good/kind deity and this also now requires the deity to have the capacity for evil not just good, thereby negating it as a perfect being as well as no perfect being would have any need to inflict pain/suffering. Much less to create said evil aspect and then furthermore punish it's other creations for things you attribute to that evil aspect since all evil is the sole domain of the evil aspect. I can not fathom how people can't see the massive flaws in the statements they try to use to rationalize the failures of thier religions to standup to the mildest of scrutiny.

Well put