You aren’t born religious. You are indoctrinated. I grew up in a cult. It wasn’t nearly as bad as cults get, but it has its own insane ramblings “teachings”

I escaped my indoctrination because I took it too seriously. I wanted to adhere perfectly, which resulted in finding out how convoluted and hypocritical it is. It is impossible.

So in my confusion, I started to look more critically at the hows and whys. The result, religions all use the same dirty tactics to get people to believe. False promises, comforting lies and empty threats that will seem real to those who were taught magical thinking.

I reject religion.

But I cannot hate people who are religious for just being religious. They were a child when taught, or an adult so downtrodden they needed a fairy tale to continue life. Or perhaps just are a bit naive. It’s a slippery slope. So… I can’t blame people. I get it. I know what it’s like and it saddens me the older people get, the less likely they’ll ever escape the mental constriction religion brings.

I sure as fuck hate a religious person for commiting hate crimes. They can go to hell.

I treat religion like my penis.

It’s ok not to have one.

It’s ok to have one.

It’s ok to be proud of it.

But don’t display it in public, and don’t shove it down people’s throats.

And NEVER whip it out in congress.

Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of “religion” being attached.

Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don’t sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you’re good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.

Prayer? Okay, take “religion” off of it and they’re meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That’s good. Unless they’re thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.

Going to worship services? Okay, they’ve got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about “everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever” and the speeches are about hate politics. If they’re about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of “religion” on it, great!

Dietary rules? It’s okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn’t Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)

Mostly I find them annoying. I mildly understand the need for human meaning as it kind of, tends to come up later at night, or for the elderly, or when life really sucks or you tend to even just be really really bored right.

I also understand some of the benefits, right, like. As much as people will despise to admit it, you don’t get, say, the number zero without the Muslim science guys, and you don’t get science without the enlightenment which stemmed out of some weirdass Catholic Christian theory guys. and then everyone’s all like, oh no well you can’t attribute that to the Catholics and if anything they hampered progress, and I’d say, well, maybe, maybe, but also maybe science sucks as we commonly understand it and maybe also you can’t really divorce any part of things from their cultural context, or else things get fucky.

On the other hand I find them annoying and I find that all to be totally null and void because the vast majority of people are just using it as an opiate to placate literally all of their anxieties about the world with a bunch of meaningless thought terminating cliche style statements, and even actively reinforce their own participation in some of the worst aspects of their own culture and society even at points in which they really don’t want to or know that it’s horrible and is causing them pain.

So I dunno, mostly it sucks.

I hate the belief not the believer

I’m an ex-Christian, the more I read the Bible, the more it doesn’t make sense. But I respect others choices to believe in their higher power, whatever that may be that makes their life work. Double points if they respect back. They all can’t be right.

Don’t ask don’t tell

I just don’t support dogmatic thinking and indoctrination, especially when it creeps into politics, which is inevitable at the scale of the most popular religions.

In theory I have no problem with other people’s faith, but in practice it degrades the critical thinking capacity of our population and, paradoxically, the moral capacity as well. That’s a net negative in my opinion.

Charities exist without religion. I think religions often teach good moral frameworks, though very traditional. But those come with a huge caveat that you cut out a big hole in your brain for the belief that God exists and cares about how you behave. That one idea leads to so much trouble, from false prophets to normalized misogyny and hatred of gay people.

I myself am Christian and have never had trouble getting along with others no matter their religious beliefs. The only conflict is when someone thinks their religion or religious precepts should be made law; I have no tolerance for that.

I respect the fact that people believe. They even can form their own clubs as far as I’m concerned. Forcing those beliefs onto other people is something I do have an issue with.

Keep it to yourself and don’t hurt others. So long as that’s the case, what someone else believes is generally not my business.

I was raised in various evangelical protestant denominations of Christianity, went through a Neopagan period, and landed in atheist-leaning agnostic.

Religious or not, I don’t care. What matters is their personality. (except for jehova’s witnesses, every time I’ve interacted with them it made me think they’re some sort of cult rather than a religion, so not sure if this counts.)

I do have religious friends that I get well with.

When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don’t generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn’t really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in “heaven”(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it’s a really nice thought that I don’t want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.

The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.

What is your general attitude towards those

I pity them.

Do you get on well with any religious friends and neighbours?

Yes.

Have you ever thought of believing in a religion at some point?

I was quite religious in my youth.

If you do not like the faiths, why?

I believe that they limit human growth and enable the “evil” that they pretend to protest.

I remember the huge fad of atheism that struck a few years back and led to the psychological liberation of a huge number or subjugated people. It was an inevitable eventuality of the rise of internet usage. It seemed to be mainly impacting Americans, but mass outbreaks of enlightenment also struck other western nations such as Ireland (where I’m from), freeing people from a society dominated by patriarchal oppressive and highly abusive social regimes.

Of course there was then a backlash to the backlash and now forces of liberation are ridiculed on the western internet. Liberalism has held sway and the institutions of oppression still maintain power, particularly in the USA. This continues to enable massive human suffering, for example with America’s latest genocide, enabled in part by apocalyptic Christian death cults.

I’m not very familiar with the details but I understand that the Christians are in cahoots with the Zionists in destroying some Muslim place of worship to bring about the end times. And there’s some cows mentioned in a thousands of years old book that need to have the right colour coat and stuff.

But of course, as usual, they’re not true Scotsmen religious people… etc…

tl;dr Religion is a net negative influence in the world. Trying to suppress it is counterproductive and will never work, meanwhile it’s going to kill us all.

Attitude: I generally don’t care unless they try to tell me what to do based on their religion. This is generally never a problem, I’ve had more vegans and environmentalists bother me.

Getting along: we have some high faith denomination of Christianity here. I’ve worked with a few and generally don’t notice unless they drop something heavy on their foot and don’t swear.

Thought of believing: not since I was 12 or something.

Do not like faiths: I acknowledge they can create a sense of community and belonging. I have a dim view of the dogma that tends to come with them.