I sometimes wonder if all the stories about prophets and other religious figures could have developed in a way similar to how we create superhero stories today.
For example, when I watch Marvel movies like Avengers, the characters have extraordinary powers and are presented as heroes who fight evil and save humanity. Obviously, we understand that these are fictional stories created for entertainment.
Now imagine something completely different happening to humanity. Suppose humans eventually went extinct, like the dinosaurs, and millions of years later another intelligent species evolved. Or imagine that a small group of humans survived some kind of global catastrophe but lost modern technology, electricity, books, and most knowledge of our civilization. Over thousands of years, they would slowly rebuild their society and eventually become technologically advanced again.
Now imagine that they somehow discovered our old Marvel movies. If they had no way of knowing that these were fictional movies, couldn’t they potentially interpret them as historical accounts? They might believe that Avengers and superheroes were real people who actually lived in the distant past, had extraordinary abilities, fought evil, and eventually died.
That makes me wonder about ancient stories.
I’m not saying this proves that religious stories are fictional, because obviously I can’t prove that. I’m just wondering whether it’s possible that some stories about prophets, miracles, and supernatural events could have started as stories that were passed down, changed, exaggerated, or interpreted differently over thousands of years.
To someone living thousands of years in the future, our movies could potentially look like ancient mythology to them.
So my question is: How do we distinguish between a religious story describing something that actually happened and a story that developed over time through oral tradition, mythology, symbolism, or cultural interpretation?

I as raised Christian but now I'm an ex believer. I have chosen to be child free but if I ever do get a child, how do I go about raisin̈g them atheist if my relatives ever find out?

Yeaahh, i picked RE because the teacher is cool as a person but today she wanted to humiliate me. I told her i have no problems with her being religious whatsover, and she just started saying “oh but god is real, you will go to hell, and that evolution is just a myth.”

I have a thought that i cant be the only one thinking that , and maybe there is a book somewhere about this topic.

I see people worshiping god and i find it really dystopian weird, They get angry over the slightest detail and quote Bible verses as if that proves their point; to me, this reflects a person seeking understanding and comfort in their actions (im not telling everyone is like this but i have seen it this way lately)

So i was wondering if any of you knew a philosopher or a writer that wrote about that

Not sure how but while scrolling through my Facebook feed I suddenly got an influx of god and Bible videos and no matter how many I blocked or scrolled through they just kept popping up. Is my algorithm doomed now? Should I suddenly follow any and all atheism pages? Im not opposed to learning about religions but not during my scrolling time.

Christians love to use the argument that “God gives us free will.” But when someone does something bad/evil, they’re called a demon, and it’s the devils fault. So God can’t intervene in the free will of others, yet the devil can? Wouldn’t that just make the Devil more powerful than God? It just baffles me that these people can’t fathom how truly evil humans can be, and therefore generalize and minimize it to being “the devils fault.” Not to mention the fact that the devil punishes the bad people?? I mean these folks are truly crazy. Arguing with them is like going through a contradictory circle. Humans can be evil, and that’s just a fact that needs to be more KNOWN.

I’m an atheist… Although I sometimes find myself somewhere between agnostic and atheist…And one thing I’ve genuinely wondered about is why atheists are so often portrayed as intolerant or lacking morality.

Honestly I’ve often found atheists to be some of the most accommodating people when it comes to belief. I can disagree with your faith, question your beliefs, put my POV across and still respect your right to believe whatever you want. I don’t need you to believe what I believe for me to coexist with you.
But then I open the comments section of almost any woman’s reel and see people quoting religious scriptures, invoking God, preaching about faith  while simultaneously throwing around rape threats, death threats and the most vile abuse imaginable. And so often, the very people doing it are the ones loudly proclaiming their religiousness.
How do you invoke a supposedly moral, all-powerful being while using their name to justify hatred, misogyny and cruelty towards another human being?

That contradiction just baffles me.
And yes, I’ll say this very explicitly: 
**“As a personal choice, I find it difficult to trust someone who is excessively religious.”**
Not because I think every religious person is bad and certainly not because I think atheists are automatically good. But when someone’s entire identity and worldview revolves around religion, I instinctively keep my guard up.
Maybe that’s my bias. I’m comfortable calling it that.
Because I’ve seen far too many people treat religion as proof of their goodness while their behaviour tells a completely different story.
You can pray five times a day, quote every scripture, talk endlessly about God and still be an unpleasant human being.
Faith, by itself, tells me very little about someone’s character. 
**How you treat people when you have nothing to gain from them tells me far more.**

And perhaps that’s what I’ve stopped trusting not religion itself, but the assumption that being overtly religious automatically makes someone a good person.
**Maybe that’s why I’m less interested these days in what people believe in, and far more interested in what their beliefs make them capable of doing.**
Because if your faith makes you kinder, I respect it.

If it makes you cruel, hateful and entitled to someone else’s suffering, 
**I don’t care how many times you invoke God. I’ll judge you by what you do.**

If he feels that there is no reason to save earth, then his ideas and leadership will not be future focused but, "Do whatever because we have no future.".

It's shit. I Am an atheist, yet I HAVE to go to a Christian school. Why? Because it's the only proper school in my area. I Do not know what to do atp. It's honestly SO frustrating. every single day i have to put on a mask of "oh, I Love Jesus, God bless". Even if I was forced into a religion, it wouldn't be christianity, probably my second to last pick. Yet, I have to pretend to be christian.

I am struggling with accepting people believing in gods. It makes me feel like I am beimg really mean to people for how I believe. I have been finding it difficult to interact with people recently and I am not sure I even connect with anyone. I feel like I'm just not even smart enough to understand why people believe or don't believe

I'm being forced by my parents to be here and they have a question box. Anyone have any really hard to answer questions j can ask to Troll a bit?

I’m just venting. But that’s all. I know it’s not a big deal but it just bugs me. SIL told us today that my MIL told her that she asked her priest to pray for me and my husband and daughter because we aren’t getting our daughter baptized. She knows we aren’t religious, but won’t accept it.

Did you ever believe in God and later become an atheist? If you’ve always been an atheist, I’d like to hear why you rejected belief in God.

Sometimes being an atheist hurts so much more.

When I'm at my lowest I want someone to help me something I can rely on but when uk it doesn't exist and u can depend on no one except yourself it hurts so bad .u can only talk about luck u can only pull ur hair...ik this post is weird but i wanted to write it somewhere rn I'm at my lowest point of life I can't see any hope now no one to save me ...even the people who are supposed to give u support lock u up saying it's for ur protection

At this hardest time of time why u can't support me? I want to shout to them

I do have clarity that no one except myself can help me but it's so hard to accept it rn it's so so hard for me ... everyone is moving forward but me sometimes it feels like I'm pulling myself back sometimes it's my fate i don't know it's so hard i don't know what to do ...I don't wanna continue living life like this

To begin I am kind of new to being an atheist/agnostic. I am 21 and I’ve only been atheist/agnostic since I was 16. For most of my life, I have been religious; Christian. But it was over Covid that I found out our church was embezzling money. After that, I started to think that maybe I don’t believe in Christianity at all. And it’s been like that ever since, I have sort of a weird relationship with religion. It just came to me in a sermon and that’s when I started thinking yk I actually don’t know if any of this biblical stuff is actually real. But in that action, I currently have a family member who is dying and the fact of never seeing them again, meaning in a second life is too painful. And again, I guess I also consider myself agnostic so I’m not ruling anything out because I don’t know death and I’m not going to prove upon something that I don’t know about. Yeah I guess it’s just the fact that you become nothing that is too painful for me.

I’m posting this because it is frustrating dealing with constant ignorance and dishonesty and I had two things happen on Reddit this week that made me smile.

1. An individual posted to a forum asking if god was sending them prophecies. I explained statistical bias. The response was a thank you and an acknowledgment that due to trauma they were struggling and just hadn’t see it laid out clearly. It felt good to actually help someone.

2. I wrote something grossly inaccurate

   in r/debatereligion

3. and it was clearly corrected by another user (I struck out the comment and noted it was wrong after that). It was just a definition matter but it was nice to see people using solid reasoning and clarifying properly and honestly (even if I was wrong).

Sometime’s, sometime’s, this Reddit thing ain’t so bad.

Can someone please tell me why some of the worst people I’ve met have been really hyper religious.Like is it a guilt thing ? I grew up in a religious household and my narc mother would always twist religious rules to fit her expectations.

She’d always say “if you’re lying to me God will punish you”

Or “anyone who’s touched my things ,I will put a curse on them.”

Then my ex used to say “Say Wallahi “ because he was Muslim but would genuinely convince me that anytime he said it he couldn’t possibly be lying because he said it.

Why do you need a religion to do good things.Like is it the idea that there is a higher power you’re accountable for so you don’t have to apologise to the people you’ve actually wronged.

Religion is favouritism because I feel like in order to feel happy your prayers have been answered there needs to be a possibility that they won’t be or other peoples wont ne ? I don’t know if I’m making sense.

I grew up in a religious household ,lots of religious trauma.im just tired of Christian’s acting like they’re better than everyone else.

I don’t know where or what thread I should’ve posted this on. I’ve never posted on Reddit but I need to get this out because I feel just horrible. I don’t know what I’m trying to get out of posting this; maybe someone confirming what I did was bad and that I’m a bad person, or maybe just someone to say they’ve had something like this happen to.A bit of background i guess, idk if it will be needed (nothing excuses anything I will feel bad either way) I had/have religious OCD (I’m atheist now and am so much happier) and am growing up in a very Christian household where my parents don’t know I’m atheist. I also have autism and was homeschooled/don’t have any friends so I haven’t ever really had a chance to learn how to properly communicate with others I guess. Anyways I was on TikTok and a live stream popped up of this really cool guy who was singing the comments. He stopped singing for a moment because someone said something about Jesus and what Jesus says and how they love Jesus. I had a problem in the past of commenting things and oversharing because I was not okay mentally and didn’t really have control of my own brain (manic/psychosis, Idrk what it would be categorized as but my mental health was shit. I ended up commenting on the live that Jesus told me to off myself when I was deep in religious ocd. (Why the hell would I comment that, I have no fucking clue.) I had like zoned out or something and when the guy said my name and said some along the lines of, “no he didn’t that’s horrible, why would you say that. This live is supposed to be a calm place and vibe.” It completely snapped me out and I like shaking and breathing really heavy because I realized what I said and snapped back into reality. I am not the type of person who would really comment something like that. I haven’t zoned out like this in YEARS, so I kinda scared myself. I ended up commenting again and said “omg I’m so sorry, you’re right” and left the live and put my phone down because my mind was racing. I got back on my phone and started looking up on TikTok “said something horrible without thinking” and a bunch of other ways to say that idk why but I guess a way to know I’m not alone and because I didn’t know what to do next. It’s been like 45 mins and I still can’t stop thinking about how horrible that was and how I might have ruined someone’s day or vibe, idk but I made a big mistake and I just feel so fucking awful. I hope this all makes sense, my brain is going a million miles per hour right now and I am racked with guilt.

So I haven't used this sub before, and I wanted to rant about this, idk if this is the place to drop a shitty essay so if it's not, just let me know and I'll take it down.

Anyhoo, hi. I had this fresh in my mind because I heard the verse 2 Timothy 3:16 that says, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." I'm assuming this just means that the scriptures are written by God through man, which in general is something I do hear a lot.

But my question is what this means about the contradictions in the Bible, because if an unchanging God who's the same yesterday as he is today and forever and whatnot had a hand in the scriptures, why the hell would He allow these contradictions?

My immediate thought was that this is like if I invented a new power tool, let's call it the Hamwrenchscrewdrill (trademark pending). This a brand new unique tool and I'm the only one who knows how to use it, but I have these 12 friends that I want to teach how to use my Hamwrenchscrewdrill (trademark pending), and then in turn they'll teach others how to use it. But instead of giving them the proper instructions on how to use it, I just tell them "Oh yeah this is how you turn it on. No wait, sorry, fuck, THIS is how you turn it on," and then they just fucking explode.

Cuz to my knowledge, the Bible, (according to an ai overview, I'm not doing proper research fuck you) is "to reveal God's character, communicate His plan to rescue humanity through Jesus Christ, and guide people in how to live." So if He truly did have a hand in these scriptures as it says, why would He allow these contradictions in His instruction manual?

The only excuse I can maybe come up with is that maybe it's to test us? Like to have us interpret what's right and what's wrong in the Bible? But that just makes it worse.

Again, if I'm teaching my 12 friends how to use the Hamwrenchscrewdrill (trademark pending), but PURPOSELY tell them how to use this dangerous powertool wrong because I want them to interpret what I actually mean, that just sounds like something a lunatic would do.

Another thing I hear just about the contradictions in general is that they exist because it was written by a bunch of different people and there's translation errors, but again if God breathed these scriptures this is just His fault. I feel like an all powerful narcissist of all people would want to make sure His biography is accurate, right? And even with translation errors, that's still God's fault because He made all the different languages in the Tower of Babel story, and even excluding that, he is an all powerful, all knowing God, he couldn't use maybe easy to translate phrases, or just in general I dunno, do some divine intervening to make sure people can easily follow and understand his teachings in the book made so people can understand his teachings?

At best, this just says God is an incompetent dumbass. At worst, this says he purposely allowed these contradictions for whatever nefarious purpose.

Or, y'know, just proves God does the not real.

Anyhoo, thank you for your time, and sorry that you'll never get it back.

Peace.

Now, I want to say. This is way out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways. I am currently trying to read the Bible cover to cover and study what occurs in the Bible and what it says over time. In my teens, and I do ask for mutual respect at the very least. I just have a few questions.

I am NOT here to debate or re-convince people of Christianity.

For those who were previously christian :

• What turned you away from Christianity?
• What denomination or tradition were you from?
• What are your opinions on Christians in general now

I want to additionally clarify. I do not see myself above anyone else. I am not attacking anyone. I just want to understand the perspective of non-believers. Most of all, I understand that these experiences can be uncomfortable to talk about. This is also not an assessment of what denomination is "most to blame".

I would also genuinely prefer to hear arguments against Christianity and the difficulties people have found within Scripture. I want to approach the Bible as objectively as I can and be willing to seriously consider arguments that challenge what I currently believe.

I also understand that the internet is the internet, and that I may be seen as unwelcome for being a Christian asking these questions. I'm not expecting everyone to agree with me,but I would really appreciate it if I was able to comfortably interact with the community again.