By TJ ~ I grew up in a fundamentalist home with a father who believes the Bible is in the inspired word of God and a schizophrenic ex-catholic mother who at the time believed only 144,000 people would go to heaven, and of course our family of three, from her perspective, was unquestionably a part of this small minority. Their marriage was always on the rocks because my mother wished she had married money, and my father's philosophy is from my perspective one of Christian Nihilism. By Christian Nihilist, I mean someone who essentially believes that your body, your finances and pretty much anything in this world is of no meaning, and so for this reason he did not earn much money or take care of himself. To him, you're just waiting for death on this earth and because our lives are short and transient, we shouldn't concern ourselves with the world.  My mother became extremely abusive if I was sick and smacked me in the face because it would trouble her financially to

By stormcloud ~ "Dear Jesus and God, I love you so much, thank you so much for every little thing you've done for me and everything you continue to do for me. I pray everyone has a peaceful, easy-going night's sleep and a peaceful, easy-going awakening and existence. I thank you so much for everything in existence, please be with everyone who needs you. Please wipe all of my sins away and help me to be a better person from here on out. Please help me to be everything you've created me to be. And please bless everyone who has blessed me and all others a zillion times over. I pray someday things will be the way they're supposed to be. In Jesus name, I pray, Amen." N ow that I actually took the time to write out what I used to pray every night before bed, I notice the excessive amounts of "please this and please that" throughout this prayer. And I find myself being rather pathetic calling out to some unknown "holy spirit" every ni

By FoolNoMore ~ I fell into a religious fervor or stupor fell in when I became born again 2 years ago. After I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, I got baptized and I began do dive deep into the bible. I watched countless of religious videos on youtube learning from different people, as well as attending a local church. I completely changed my life: No sex before marriage, no masturbation, studying of the bible, prayers to God to deliver me from my enemies and to guide me out of my dire financial situation. I ministered to non believers or lukewarm believers, telling them to have faith in the face of hardship and tragedy. I watched their situation remain the same or worsen. i was no longer eating pork and shellfish. i was fasting with the hope of gaining more clarity, i was even starting to follow Saturday Sabbath which means not doing anything but prayer from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. I owned 6 different bibles. countless of Christians books. I

By MTC ~ I think we can all agree that double-standards tend to be stupid and unfair, especially in today's politically correct world. It is acceptable to criticize one group, ideology, etc., but criticize another and you're labeled an intolerant bigot. Big example: people aren't afraid to bash Christianity (who on here hasn't done just that? LOL), Judaism, or atheism, but bash Islam and here come the insults; bigot, racist (even though Islam isn't a race, hello!), hick, etc. What is with the hypocritical double-standard? Speaking of which, many people have nicknamed Facebook "Fascistbook" because the admins will discipline you in a heartbeat (often a temporary block from posting) if you share anything that insults Islam and Muslims, even if it is totally accurate or merely meant as a joke. But FB pages like "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" are perfectly acceptable. What is the deal with that, hmm?... In New York C

By Karen Garst ~ W hen I got enraged at the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby , I wrote a book about why women should leave religion: Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion . I started this blog and named it Faithless Feminist. I had always defined feminist as gender equality between men and women. Three years ago, I had never heard of third wave feminism , intersectionality , social justice warrior , atheism plus , or elevator gate . Needless to say, I have learned about all of them and more since then. Last spring I was contacted by the folks planning the Mythicist Milwaukee Conference (MMC) and asked to help advertise it by giving out free tickets to some of my blog subscribers. I had been on their podcast and did a presentation for one of their meetups and was happy to help out. In exchange, I was given two free VIP tickets for the Saturday, September 30 event. I called one of my best friends in Wisconsin and she was interested in goi

By John ~ M y parents and grandparents were Primitive Baptists. My great-great grandfather, and his father, were pastors of a small Primitive Baptist church in West Virginia, and my dad became a Primitive Baptist Pastor later in my childhood. I grew up believing in God, predestination, election, and other doctrines of the Calvinistic Baptists. My family didn’t just believe that God knew all things, but that he predetermined everything, down to the smallest detail, including sin. This doctrine is supported by many Bible passages, primarily from the Old Testament. I won’t take the time to reference them for several reasons: I’m tired of referencing them, few readers will look them up, and the readers who reject the idea wouldn’t be convinced by the verses anyway. My earliest crisis of faith was related to this theology. I knew that I was a sinner, and not just because a Sunday school teacher taught me about the “badness of my heart” or original sin. I was bad for real—I got in f

By Karen Garst ~ S ome aspects of culture are readily apparent to everyone: we live in different countries, we speak different languages, we wear different clothes, we eat different foods, etc. However, culture also reproduces itself by means that are much less apparent, but just as powerful. Ron and Scollon and Suzanne B. K. Scollon wrote a fascinating paper on the differences in communication styles between the Athabaskan and English speakers in Canada. [1] None of his analysis involved language per se. However, the different cultural norms of these two different groups showed up in how conversations got started, who spoke first, and the pauses between speakers. He showed that the Athabaskans paused about a second and one half between speakers and the English about a second. The impact of this minor difference caused the English speaker to speak again when his one second pause had passed, not waiting another half second for the Athabaskan to feel comfortable. This is a more ext

By John Draper ~ H umans discovered lust long before they invented religion, naturally, right around the time they concluded Flange A could be inserted into Slot B. Basically, the first humans lusted from the get-go, else there never would have been the second humans. But until they invented religion, humans had no problem with their lust. Suddenly, it was sin. The Jews restricted sex six ways to Sunday—or Saturday, I guess. From the first century on, Christians were told to take their lust, smunch it into a tiny ball, and slip it under the bedroom rug. If a Muslim woman doesn’t bleed on the wedding night, the husband can accuse her of moral laxity and unencumber himself from his marital bonds on the spot—a definite mood killer. Pretty much for the past 3,500 years, religion has been shining its flashlight into society’s backseat and chiding us to “get a move on, you two.” We hastily buttoned and zipped ourselves up, yet when religion was out of sight, we were right back at it.

By ObstacleChick ~ G rowing up in a Southern Baptist church and attending an Independent Baptist school definitely taught me ideas about women's place in society that were greatly at odds with what was going on at the time in the culture of the 1980s and even within my family's households. My grandmother, born in 1926, was one of the more fortunate children growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s because her father had a job and was able to provide food, though not much else, for his family. My grandmother and her older sister were able to attend school, and my grandmother was a top student until she became ill. At 16 years old in 10th grade, my grandmother dropped out of school due to severe anemia, and soon after she married her sweetheart who was soon drafted into the army in World War II. At 17 years old she gave birth to her first child and soon after went to work for 18 months in a boot factory while her mother or sister cared for her child. After the war

By Ben Love ~ I ’ve been an  atheist for only a short time compared to how long I spent crawling in the bowels of Christianity , and thus, echoes of my former biblical thoughts still tend to resonate within my brain from time to time. That’s why, when I woke up this morning, I was thinking about the story in Genesis, chapter 2, where God  instructs Adam  to keep away from the Tree of Knowledge. The text actually refers to it as “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” which might therefore be interpreted as “knowledge of right and wrong,” or perhaps even “knowledge of reality .” God informs Adam  that eating from this tree will cause his death. This, however, strictly speaking, is not true, for Adam  and Eve both lived for a very long time after eating from this tree. Christians will say that God was speaking of “spiritual death,” but they are adding to the context that which is not there. In any case, the implication here, it seems to me, is that ignorance is bliss and knowl