After I Deconverted: I Was Deeply Ambivalent; What Was I to Make of Sex, Love, Alcohol, Bisexuality, Abortion, 9/11, Religious Violence, Marxism, or the Yankees?

This is a long installment of my ongoing series covering my journey before, during, and after my deconversion from Christianity. Since I think it is interesting how all the ambivalences, contradictions, anxieties, and displacements that I was experiencing parallel and inform each other, I am deciding to post it all as one episode in the series, rather than break each easily isolatable vignette into its own post. For the busy or the short attention spanned, I have made it easier to read in multiple sittings or to skim by breaking it into subsections according to themes.

Support Hamza Kashgari However You Can

Maryam Namazie has been on top of the story of Hamza Kashgari, a 23 year old Saudi journalist whose life is on the line after he tweeted the following on Mohammad’s birthday: “On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to [...]

ZJ Defends “Everybody Draws Muhammad Day”

Your Thoughts?

Mus’ab Hassan Yousuf, Son of Hamas Leader in the West Bank: The God of Islam Suffers from Split Personality; Muhammad – a False Prophet

A brave atheist friend born, raised, and still living in Morroco, who has himself received death threats from his local mosque, wants me to pass this on: There are two ways to deal with the ugly teachings espoused by Mohammed: (1) Gloss over Mohammed’s violent, authoritarian, anti-progressive, and intolerant views and try to persuade Muslims [...]

Egyptian Cleric Mazen Al-Sarsawi Gives Brutal Advice For Treatment of Wives

Forced marriage, marital rape, tying the hair of two wives together and beating them, etc.  Simply stomach-turning misogynistic stuff, broadcast on Al-Nas TV in Egypt, January 7, 2010. (via Atheist Media Blog) Your Thoughts?

Pat Condell’s Case Against The Catholic Church

After a tasteless joke early on, he’s justly scathing and deserves to be heard: Christians are too blithe when they distinguish the evils perpetuated by Christian institutions from those same institutions’ claims to moral and spiritual authority as founded by God or, at least, to their being the church of God at all. How in [...]

A Challenge To Christians To Unqualifiedly Condemn Genocide

Christians who defend the Old Testament genocides are guilty of either relativistic authoritarianism (anything can be okay as long as God wills it and His will has simply changed from the Old Testament days to the New Testament one) or, possibly worse, theoretical agreement with all the normal justifications of genocide as long as God [...]

The Belief In God Doesn’t Cause Violence, Only Particular Beliefs About God Do

In discussing the response to Nidal Malik Hasan, Alonzo Fyfe draws the distinctions just right when he accuses atheists who leap from the act of one kind of theist to associate theism in general with violence as an instance of “The Bigot’s Fallacy”: Many of the people who embrace the Bigot’s Fallacy in this case [...]

Iraq Has Become The “Worst Place On Earth For Homosexuals”

Disgusting, deperssing, demoralizing, horrifying, enraging: Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims. “It is the easiest way to find those people who [...]

The Bible On What’s To Be Done With Non-Virgin Brides

via 13Suppose a man marries a woman, but after going in to her, he dislikes her 14and makes up charges against her, slandering her by saying, “I married this woman; but when I lay with her, I did not find evidence of her virginity.” 15The father of the young woman and her mother shall then submit the [...]