secular soliloquy

🫀 they/them 🫀 vent blog 🫀

[elikaruna]

“jesus died for you” well i didn’t ask him to do that and my therapist says i am not responsible for other peoples actions

[depsidase]

[intheholler]

[sad-pajama-party]

Me, when I was a teen in the church: hey I'm like really mentally ill and traumatized could I get some support maybe

The church: Darn, that sucks. Have you considered Not Feeling Bad? Yes? Well that sounds like a skill issue tbh maybe u should pray more idk haha go fuck urself I guess

[apostatement]

Something I really struggle with even TEN YEARS after leaving is that the end of the world isn’t actually coming. Not in the way they taught me.

There will be no second coming. The wars and rumors of wars have been happening since the beginning of civilization. The red sun doesn’t mean anything more than pollution and smoke in the sky. The signs are ubiquitous and common.

The world isn’t going to just end one day when Jesus comes again. It’s not going to just stop. For some reason that thought is always foreign to me even after all this time and work.

[self-molded-clay]

reminders for ex-fundies:

-you can trust yourself

-other people’s reactions to your body and appearance are not your fault

-real love is not draining or punishing

-you aren’t broken

-you are allowed to change your mind

-having sexual desires (or not wanting sex or romance at all!) does not make you sinful

-resting is good and necessary

-you weren’t naive or stupid for trusting what your authority figures told you

-your body is yours alone

-you are not inherently evil or bad

-disability and illnesses are not punishments from god

-you’re allowed to want and enjoy nice things

-you are capable of rational thought and good morals even without a “guidebook”

-your opinions and feelings matter

-you’ve got this!!

[intheholler]

[decomposingpoet]

Yeah yeah religious trauma and internalized homophobia suck but sometimes I get these moments of overwhelming joy at the fact that I am queer and proud I am not religious anymore I have a life ahead of me where I can celebrate pleasure and love and intellectual freedom without constraint like fuck yeah this is what I'm sticking around for!!!!!!!

[hulahoopsoupgroup]

the seven deadly sins are such bullshit fear tactics. if youve left the church, embrace them.

be proud of who you are. be happy when you look in the mirror and see how hot you are. yeah i see you flexing in the mirror after a workout. nice progress btw honey you look nice today.

dont worry about getting seconds, or thirds even, at dinner. dont worry about eating what society says is "too much" or "too little". eat until youre full. set aside what you cant finish for later so you dont waste food.

its okay to be greedy. its okay to want things for yourself. sometimes we see things that people have and we're like "dude i wish i had that." thats just human. envy and greed on that level are normal.

take a rest day. dont bother going to church this sunday. take a shower, read a book, drink some tea, eat some good food, pet a cat or dog. take care of yourself; its not lazy.

be angry with those who wronged you. punch a punching bag, write about how much you hate them, go work out aggressively and take care of your emotions in a way that doesnt hurt yourself or others. its okay to not forgive the people who hurt you. you arent doing anything wrong, babe.

embrace your sexuality (or, if it applies, asexuality, cause yall need love too). stop feeling shame for wanting pleasure. go read or watch something that turns you on. explore your body. ask your partner to try something new. if youre asexual, then fucking step on the people who say you need to have sexual attraction to be human. you dont. you dont need to be allosexual (or alloromantic) to "qualify as a human." we all experience life in different ways. find your way to experience it.

thought crime isnt real

do no harm but take no shit

[creature-wizard]

Reminder that if you're leaving Christianity to embark upon a new spiritual path, your new spirituality doesn't have to answer or even acknowledge Christianity at all. You don't owe Christianity any kind of justification; you can just say "nah I'm not into you" and leave it there.

[escaping-amish]

I love how he finds the words to describe the concepts that float around my head daily ❤️❤️❤️❤️ love him!

[creature-wizard]

If you're trying to unpack and heal from Christian religious trauma, a thing you really need to understand (if you don't already) is that you were probably misled about Judaism a lot. Christianity generally tries to paint itself as the self-evident successor of Judaism, and one of the ways it does this is by painting Judaism as Christianity Without Jesus.

In reality, Judaism is practiced very differently from Christianity, and Jews have a very different relationship to their Bible than Christians have to theirs. Just about everything you'll hear about Judaism from Christians is total hogwash - literally, it's Christian propaganda. Christianity as most of us know it was shaped by the Roman Empire's political agendas, and that's a huge reason why it's the way it is.

[urlocalllama]

if I could ask God anything and get the real, genuine answer, I'd ask him why He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He knew He was going to stop him. He knew that He'd never truly ask him to do it. He knew that if he went through with it then His promise would be frustrated.

The thing is... the story has led parents to think it's okay to sacrifice their children, metaphorically and sometimes literally, for a false sense of moral superiority. How many LGBT+ children have been sacrificed in the supposed name of Christianity? How many autistic children? How many orphaned children? How many abused children?

Maybe it was the right lesson for Abraham, especially about how it paralleled Christ's atonement. But it's not a story that has translated well into modern times.

[relatablemormonmoments]

do you want the Jewish answer? It was to challenge him to think critically about commandments from g-d (and translating to religion as an institution, rulings from religious leaders and scripture), and it's a challenge he failed. He was supposed to, theoretically, fight g-d and say "no, by no means am I going to do this. I don't care that you created everything, that is my child and my world, and I'm not going to do it just because you said so."

Instead, Abraham royally screws up, traumatises his son, and in doing so, loses his son, loses g-d's will and favor, and in the Tanakh we never really hear from Abraham again after this point, because he failed.

It's a story about someone blindly following in faith, and losing the most important things to them because they never stopped to think "Wait, did I hear this right? And if I did hear this right, am I so sure that this is something I want to follow?"

Isaac was Abraham's only son at the time, and the child he had fought so hard to have. Him following an order blindly without thinking of the consequences is not supposed to be a good thing (It just kind of benefits the feudal society that eventually embraced Christianity, which is why the understanding was changed in Christian worldviews.)

[lazarusemma]

It doesn't matter if American Christians in power are "doing it wrong" or if actually, Jesus said things that contradict their proclaimed values. What matters is that religious groups should not be in a position to legislate their religious beliefs such that it applies to people not beholden to that religion.

In other words, the argument that "Jesus would hate White Christian Nationalism because the Bible shows he was a radical etc etc" doesn't matter because you are meeting them on their terms. If the Bible did say that Jesus hated abortion/poor people/socialism, it still would not be acceptable for Christians to legislate on that basis.

And yet cultural Christianity has brought us to a point where we'd rather pin the problem on a new subset of Christianity whose issue is that they're misinterpreting original doctrine. Y'all have been saying, “Well, they're not Real Christians” for centuries. This is not a problem of a new sect's formation. This is an issue of separation of church & state. In political/legal contexts, it should not matter what the Bible says or doesn't say, or how anyone interprets it, because the Bible has no place in a courtroom. It's literally that simple.

[skaldish]

To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.

[skaldish]

1/3rd of Americans are Evangelical, and Evangelical Protestantism is a cult. We just don’t think of it as one because it’s so normalized. However, it follows the B.I.T.E. model of cult dynamics.

Evangelism teaches its followers to always maintain states of bliss and ecstasy for Jesus. What this does is condition the brain to always operate out of less-evolved parts; areas that are responsible for more primal emotions like euphoria, anger, and fear. Because of how we’ve evolved to survive, the brain will actually shut down our higher functioning—including critical thinking skills—in favor of these primal emotions, when they’re active.

Always feeling bliss = never questioning or feeling doubt. Evangelicals may actually fear the thoughts that do originate from their higher brain-parts because they think it’s the devil tempting them away from their religion. They’ll engage in self-indoctrination techniques to make this stop.

This creates a cognitive dissonance so great that many Americans have no separation between how they feel and what they believe. This is really bad because their minds have literally no defense against undue influence. They’ll vote for the dude who hyped them up enough. They’ll buy into the conspiracy theory that excites them the most. They’ll side with whatever gets the best reaction out of them, and getting a rise out of people is super easy to do.

Things like financial insecurity and low employment make this worse, too.

[skaldish]

And just to be clear, this kind of conditioning can happen to anyone, regardless of their intellectual capacity.

Cult conditioning has nothing to do with how smart or dumb people are. You can condition literally any brain with the right time and environment.

Counteracting undue influence is a skill, and like any skill, it needs to be taught.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Cult experts frequently point out that the smarter people are, the more susceptible they are to this once the initial hooks are in, and the harder they are to deprogram. This is because while this kind of conditioning does not rely on intelligence, the ability to rationalise does -- the smarter someone is, the better they can rationalise what they already believe, so if they’re committed to following their feelings, a smart person is much better at making it seem (to themselves as well as others) that they’re actually using logic and reason rather than making ad-hoc justifications after the fact.

Also, people who know (or believe) that they’re smarter than average tend to assume that this makes them harder to fool, conditon, or lie to. Which makes somebody much easier to fool, condition, or lie to.

[faint-petrichor-deactivated2026]

So I am from the US but now live in Argentina, and as The American(tm) I often get reasonably asked the question, "Why are Americans, you know, like that?"

The best and most immediate answer I could come up with, and the one I've stuck to, is telling people that America is a country defined by being a haven for cults and religious extremists since its inception. And people are always like "god that makes so much sense."

But you know, the wildest thing is if I tried to tell any given American this (which I have) chances are they'd be like, "No way, that's absurd." And I think the thing is, if you're an American and have lived most or all of your life in America, this is just your normal. But when you live somewhere that is less saturated with religious dogma, cults and anti-intellectualism, it's readily apparent.

[warningsine]

[manstrans]

other ex-christians going "all religion is bad" is insane because for me learning about other religions besides christianity was like learning that not all parents have kids just to control them. idk something about the fact that not every god is an asshole and not every parent is untrustworthy is reassuring in the same way