this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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To me, at least with Judeo-Christian religions that believe in hell as the destination for people who do not believe in their god, I find it so baffling that people can have mixed or non religious serious relationships, with the idea "well we just don't try to convert eachother".
How the hell do you square.
I love my spouse.
I love my God.
One day my god is going to send my spouse to be tortured for all of eternity. I will then spend the rest of my life happily hanging out with my god.
It only makes sense if you either don't really believe what you believe, or you are very certain your partner is going to change their view. From the atheist side it doesn't really matter.
I was a young adult in Orange County, California, in the Age of Reagan. And at least back then, Christian girls could be pretty freaky.
Not everyone is a purist. Lots of the more open minded religious types are willing to entertain the possibility that their god cares more about people living a good life rather than selecting the right religion. Those types are fully compatible with a multicultural society. Often they’ll play lip service to fit in with the more extreme religious nuts, but the fact they can coexist happily is proof their views are more nuanced.
I’m fine with anyone who is fine with anyone who is fine with anyone.
I don’t care how “progressive” a Christian is. They worship a god that thinks it’s okay to sell your own daughter into sex slavery and murder infants of the offense of their ancestors supposedly rebuffing Israelites during the exodus (and rightly so! Look what they did to Cannan.) even though the exodus never happened.
It doesn't make sense, does it? Some traditions give birth to opposing schools, and it's unjust to conflate the two just because they share a name. What your describing is fundamentalism, not Christianity, and “progressive fundamentalism” doesn't have any sense, just like “anti-authoritarian stalinism”.
No, they were just describing events from the Old Testament.
Again, the Bible ≠ God, except for fundamentalists.
I didn't say it was god. These are alleged historical events. You don't get to just say it didn't happen.
Slavery was real, and the Old Testament has explicit rules about it. And Jesus never had a single thing to say about it (besides the thing about fulfilling the old law. Which, again, explicitly includes slavery).
This has NOTHING to do with fundamentalism. You don't get to hand wave this shit away, it's at the very core of the religion you claim to believe.
You can't change the subject of the discussion on a whim. The original argument was that Christians worshiped a God that condone slavery and child murder. I showed that, for most Christians, it isn't the case.
(And by the way, these events did not happen. The Exodus is a myth according to the historians, so yes, I'm allowed to say so)
Jesus stated unequivocally and emphatically (at least according to the scriptures) that the Law of Moses is eternal and will remain in force until the earth passes away.
And he cited a law that directs people to stone kids that talk back as a gotcha in a legal beef with the Pharisees- who were like “maybe stoning children to death doesn’t fit the crime of sassing your parents, so we should not do that”
That same legal code that Jesus explicitly endorsed expressly states that slavery is cool, and goes so far as to say that beating your slave to within an inch that slave’s life is acceptable.
That legal code also says roughly half of all women should be stoned because whoever wrote the damn thing didn’t understand female anatomy.
That legal code says it’s totally cool to sell your daughters as sex slaves.
It says you should stone kids that talk back.
That is “biblical morality”. They might be a decent person but they worship an awful scum bag that makes Epstein and Trump look positively benign.
And that is all just reading the damn book with some honesty.
Suffice it to say you’re analogy is stupid and doesn’t follow. Christians worship a dude who had more to say about paying taxes to your oppressors than he had to say about slavery.
The morality of Jesus isn’t a political spectrum. He’s a raging asshole and his morals should be left to rot in whatever unmarked grave his disciples hid his corpse in.
Jesus also said, “The law was made for the man, not the man for the law.” He disobeys the law more than once and asks his disciples to do the same. Then, after Jesus’s death, Peter is instructed to disobey the law even more. So no, the Bible is quite clear that when Jesus says, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished,” he doesn’t mean that all the horrific commandments we find in the Bible must be obeyed. Just a few verses later, Jesus even changes the law!
You can always take verses out of context (both literary and historical) and make anything look horrible. Here, Matthew is actually doing the opposite of what you think. When he writes, “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,” he isn’t addressing u/FuglyDuck, an American from the 21^st^ century, but people of his own time. He’s saying that those who “relax one of the least of these commandments and teach others to do the same” will still enter the kingdom, while many Jews of his time believed they wouldn’t enter it at all.
And right after that, he says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Yet the scribes and Pharisees were well known for their meticulous observance of the letter of the law. So he’s saying that people who observe the letter of the law won’t enter the kingdom of heaven, while those who “relax” the “commandments” will! You see, if you read the text thoughtfully and take its context into account, it says something quite different. It's convoluted indeed, but that's the literary style of the time. You can't make strong assertions like that without studying the subject a minimum. You can't read 2000 years old texts like they were written yesterday. Even in translation, they have to be decoded.
I have no idea what you mean when you say that Jesus explicitly “cited a law that directs people to stone kids who talk back.” There’s no law in the Old Testament that says that. There’s Deuteronomy 21:18–21, which is a pretty bad law, and as far as I know, Jesus doesn’t cite it. But this law doesn’t speak about children: the “kid” in question is described, among other things, as someone who drinks alcohol. He isn’t a little child. But yes, Deuteronomy 21:18–21 is a shitty text, even without your exaggerations. There are other bad texts in the Bible, and not only in the Old Testament. But they have to be read in context.
For example, you say the Bible “says it’s totally cool to sell your daughters as sex slaves.” I assume you’re talking about Exodus 21:7–11. It’s another shitty law by our standards, but at the time it was a step forward: it protects women who were sold. Yes, selling a daughter is a horrible practice, but it was the norm for much of human history. The Bible wasn’t written in a cultural vacuum. It takes people’s practices as they are and tries to push things in the right direction. And it worked! We moved in the right direction, so those laws now seem backward. They seem backward because they succeeded. Jesus says as much in Matthew 19: the law was imperfect because it was given to an imperfect people. And when Jesus gives a commandment himself, it’s still the same principle.
But what you don’t understand is that only a small part of Christianity considers the Bible to be the “inerrant Word of God.” Jesus didn’t, and neither do “progressive Christians.” So no, my analogy still holds. You’re applying something that’s true of only one part of Christianity to all Christians, and that’s intellectually dishonest. Your criticism is completely justified when directed at people who believe God actually approves of killing people or selling slaves. But that doesn’t describe most of us. We objectively do not worship the God you’re describing.
No it isn't, or else this conversation wouldn't be happening.
The Bible is a thousands-year-old compilation of local folk tales and the musings of illiterate sheepherders, munged together by rich elites who saw its usefulness in controlling the masses, and has been translated. modified, and reinterpreted dozens of times to keep it effective at controlling the masses. It's fraught with inconsistencies, and calling anything in it "quite clear" is honestly just laughable.
The parts aren't, the whole is, and I showed why. You have the right to disagree of course; but then it's not a bad thing to answer to arguments by arguments.
🔥
I think a lot of religious people are happy to bend the rules of their religion to match their desired lifestyle. God will forgive them and Jesus is coming for them on white horse with a choir of angels. As long as you meet your performative obligations and ask for forgiveness later, you can do whatever you want.
Note this is not true of all religious people and while it is representative of my interactions with many American Christians of various denominations, my interactions with Christians in South and Central America and Europe have been quite different.
I grew up in a half-religious home, but it was a very chill "God Loves everyone" kind way. Nevertheless, religion can be dangerous. While my exposure in the home was harmless, just a little casual low-key exposure to a local church put me on a path to being a very devout young Evangelical for a decade or so.
My parents got along well and I barely remember them fighting or arguing. They made it work despite the religious gap. I now consider myself a non-theist/atheist/agnostic/non-religious/Buddhist-adjacent/Satan-loving/philosopher. I dated a few Catholic women (some more devout than others), a non-religious woman, but mostly people who just went to church with their parents or grandparents a few times a year and otherwise just lived a normal life.
Would I date a religious person now? Probably not if their values were tied to it and it wasn't just a cultural connection. Sounds like hard work and life is difficult enough without intentionally setting everything to hard mode.
A god like that has no right to exist.
They probably don't subscribe to the entire package. Very few people do. They always cherry pick what is convenient.
Seems like a lot of Christians likes to ignore/forget the 10 commandments.
I wish you were more correct than you intend, but you are grossly off the mark of reality.
Most people that hold onto religion into adulthood do so because it makes them feel special above their fellow humans. It doesn't matter if all of it is correct so much as the things that make "believers" special are unique.
TL;DR: Most religious people want to be special, not moral or correct. Which makes them evil piles of shit.
I'm not even religious but this just feels like reductionist BS. That and that you're projecting just a wee bit.
If you studied the theology of judeo-Christian religions, you'd learn that this view is very much a minority one. In Christianity for example, outside evangelicalism, nobody teaches that (Catholicism teaches for example that a “hidden Jesus” saves outside the church). In Judaism, as far as I know, no sect teaches that at all. In Islam, outside a few sects, nobody teaches that either (in shia islam for example, most non-Muslims are Jahil-e-Qasir, “inculpable ignorant”).
First I would like to clarify my words a bit, when I said "judeo christian religions that believe X"
I intended to mean "in the case of religions that believe X" (as in, I wanted to apply my I don't comprehend how a mixed religion relationship works for people who believe salvation is tied to belief), not to imply all judeo christian religions believe belief = salvation.
However.
At least from what I can see, just looking up different catholic sources. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding, https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-there-really-no-salvation-outside-the-catholic-church , more or less from what I can gather, that's primarally applying for say people who.. literally have never heard or rejected the gospel. IE, not someone who's married to a catholic wife and had a bible in the house and has the choice to refuse church every week.
Sort of the old joke
Eskimo "If I did not know about god and sin would I go to hell"
Missionary: "of course not, if you didn't know you couldn't be blamed"
Eskimo: "Why did you tell me then?"
IE the concept of "invincible ignorance". and from what I'm searching the "inculpable ignorant" in islam. basically applies to people who have never been exposed to the religion. IE if they were around people of the faith... had access to a church/mosque etc.. that doesn't seem to apply.
Pope francis had his line in 2018 that he implied atheists could go to heaven, but the vatican was quick to say taht should not "be considered as a faithful transcription of the Holy father's words". In other words, the vatican isn't fully standing behind that, and that's very far from anything that the previous popes would have said.
I apologize for that! Now that I read you again, yes your wording was pretty clear, I misunderstood. As you can see by my poor expression, English is not my mother tongue, and I often misunderstand some nuances like that. Sorry again!
No it's still apply. I'm not Catholic myself, but I'll use again Catholic texts, as they are a very hierarchical denomination it's easier as they have authoritative texts. In Gaudium et Spes, a document from the last council (so one of the most authoritative texts of this church), it is written:
One can then be atheist not because they never heard of Christianity, but because the Christians themselves taught by their words or their acts something wrong about the Church. And I mean, I'm a Christian, and I can't reproach people to hate the Church (and by Church here I mean the Christian one, not specifically the Catholic one) when I see how far from the Gospel it often is! I didn't heard what Francis said about atheism, so I have no opinion on the matter.
For Islam, as it's a more horizontal faith, it will be harder to find clear proofs, but from discussions I had with Muslims I know, it's more or less the same thing. They said to me that Islam is badly spoken about in our Western society, so even if they know what Islam is and have mosques around them, they still are seen as ignorant.
That's a fun story, I never heard it, thanks!
If I were this missionary, I’d answer something like this: outside evangelicalism again, the Christian faith is only secondarily about salvation. If you read the Gospels, for example, Jesus almost never speaks about the afterlife. And when he does, he generally isn’t actually teaching about the afterlife; rather, he uses it as a metaphor to teach us how to live a full life here and now. The same is true of the Old Testament.
Paul emphasizes the subject more, but his point is something like: "This question is settled: you are saved by grace, so stop worrying about it and do good instead!" The problem is that his definition of “doing good” comes from a man living 2000 years ago, and some people (within evangelicalism, but unfortunately not only there this time) nowadays focus on the details of his definition of a good life rather than on the spirit of his teaching.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/05/29/187009384/Pope-Francis-Even-Atheists-Can-Be-Redeemed
I'll give a bit more detail there. also looks like I was way off on the year. First off I'll admit, majority of my knowledge of Christianity is based on American versions. Of which I gotta admit, American believers are a different animal than European ones. IE hence American Catholics are basically considering our current president more authoritative than the pope in spiritual matters. But even so from what I've seen of say actual bishops debating with Hitchens etc... It still seems to me that at least a fairly significant portion even at an international level. This ain't a Jubalee fact check episode so obviously we shouldn't do it as, oh if 49.9% believe belief = salvation, then you are right and if 50.1% believe it than I'm right. I'm just saying it's not an insignificant portion. My point is someone who believes belief = salvation, and also marries someone who doesn't believe. Is either not as convinced of their belief as they claim, or they are expecting their spouse to change, maybe thinking that being around them but not preaching, is it's own witnessing strategy (IE let them see the light in your life),
Your god condones slavery. You can pontificate all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that your religion is vile.
It doesn't. Parts of the Bible do, but I do not believe that the Bible is the inherent word of God. Only fundamentalists believe that.
How convenient for you that you get to pick and choose which parts you like.
Even though your own lord and savior said that he didn't come to abolish the old law but to fulfill it, and that not a single bit of that old law will change until the end of the earth (paraphrasing Matthew 5:17).
You don't get to pick and choose what that "old law" was, it's literally the entire first part of your holy book. And it explicitly condones slavery (among a litany of other heinous shit).
It's not cherrypicking, it's interpretation. I do not arbitrarily choose, I study the context, and use the Love of God as an hermeneutical key, to cite Martin Luther.
I answered about this text here.
I have no interest in your pathetic apologetics.
I hope that one day you're able to escape the abusive relationship you've chosen to have with a non-existent entity. It's so very freeing.
I feel free, thank you. I hope than one day, you'll learn that it makes more happy to actually think that there's more than one legitimate way to see the world.
i also find christians funny, especially the rightie/fundementalist types, they are purist when it comes to christianity, when its been portrayed in media.
Doubt.
god hangs out with his angels/demons, not lowly humans. evangelicals get mad, if its not the well known traditional angels, and not the more obscure angels in the older texts. they even have a "Great chain of being" ANGELS/demons are above men, who are above women and animals.
That's only a minority of religions. Don't paint every religiin with an evangelical Protestant brush.
Mentioned in a different post on that, but I did phrase my statement badly
IE I meant to say I find the concept of a mixed marriage in the case of people who believe, salvation = belief, and those who don't believe are damned, is crazy. not to imply all religious believe salvation = belief.
All religions are stupid and full of hatred
Spoken like someone who hasn't checked.
And is himself apparently full of hatred.