Oh look, typical carnist cliché is getting offended because someone criticized the weird shit you do.

I didn’t see anyone else pointing out how bizarre it is to fetishize bee puke.

And people hate vegans because most people want to believe they’re at least “pretty good people”, and the very presence of a vegan challenges that belief. If you’re offended, maybe it’s time to look in the mirror.

What’s unhinged is people who think they have the right to confine, torture, exploit, rape, murder, and devour the flesh and/or secretions of other animals just because they’re different.

Yeah I get that bugs are easy to dismiss because they’re tiny, often obnoxious and treated like a nuisance, and less intelligent than other animals. But we’re still talking about living beings who have their own subjective experience of life, individuality, and their own agenda. Like all animals they came into this life with us, not for us.

Commodifying living beings is unhinged. And even ignoring the moral side of things, having a preference for bee vomit is unhinged.

The point is that virtually anything is a better alternative to honey.

ITT: a bunch of stolen bee vomit fetishists. Why pay so much money for something weird, gross, and every bit as unhealthy as sugar and corn syrup? Maple syrup (while also unhealthy) tastes way better. And date sugar, whole blended dates, or molasses are healthier alternatives.

If you believe that your religion is the only valid one, and that the others need to go away, then you are as bad as an evangelical. Anti-theists are just the hypocritical mirror image of evangelicals.

Maybe if atheists didn’t abrasively proselytize so much, and denigrate every other faith, they’d feel more comfortable being in the open with their religion.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not trying to convert you, atheism is fine and has a lot going for it. So give the persecution complex a rest. Having to share a world where other people are granted their own rights, does not necessarily infringe on your rights. You think your freedom is infringed because people get days off on theist holidays? That’s like when straight people complain about gay marriage. Don’t like gay marriage? Nobody is forcing straight people to be gay. Don’t like theist holidays? Then don’t celebrate them.

And you say yourself that if God themself came down, you would still not belief in God? That’s like when a Christian says that no amount of evidence contradicting the Bible can shake their faith in the Bible. The whole idea with atheism is to be skeptical and evidence-based. And yet here you are with a faith so strong it cannot be shaken by anything.

Antitheists are as hypocritical and cognitively dissonant as carnists. Believe whatever you want, but here’s a reality check: there are as many religions as there are people. The world has always had a diversity of belief, and always will. You will always have to share this planet with theists. Any program that seeks the eradication of all but one religion will always be a hugely destructive and traumatic failure, because humans are always looking to disagree with each other and explore new possibilities. And yes, at a certain point atheism becomes a religion, particularly when it becomes dogmatic and institutionalized. You’re not special. You in particular have demonstrated a religiosity that is only comparable to the staunchest Christians.

You’re sounding rather manic here. Relax, the evangelicals are not coming to get you.

I personally would prefer it if we could shake off the last vestiges of christocentrism in our culture - the predominance of their national holidays, their stranglehold on government and taking away women’s and lgbtq rights, and even the documenting of history based on bc and ad.

But your assertion is illogical because religion is incidental to bigotry, sometimes used as a vehicle for it, but not inherent to it. For example I once worked as an intern for a summer camp owned and operated by a Lutheran church. It was run by a pastor and her wife, and much of their operations were specifically meant for sheltering and supporting lgbtq+ youth. They never once made any attempt to convert me, and only ever made me feel welcomed and accepted for who I was.

One of the core problems with most branches of Christianity, historically, and into today is the idea of religious exclusivism. They hold that the only valid belief is their belief, and everything else is false and must be done away with. This idea that only Christianity was valid is what allowed them to feel justified in the eradication of pagans in ancient Rome, forced conversions in Europe, and the genocides and cultural erasure of indigenous people on Turtle Island.

So for you and other antitheists to say that only atheism is correct and valid, is just another form of religious exclusivism. Clearly you are already calling for the cultural erasure of all these other competing beliefs, just as the Christians in antiquity did. And likewise, state-atheism already has a history of oppression under Mao and Lenin. Are you a tankie too?

As a sidenote, it would be more accurate to say agnosticism, or even agnostic-atheism are nonbeliefs or nonreligions. But the more proselytizing and dogmatic Atheism gets, the more religiony it gets. So yes you are religious, and yes you are hypocritically guilty of the same bigoted religious exclusivism that your oh-so-hated Christian brothers are. You want to be better than them? Then don’t be like them. Support a religiously plural world, a world where we can explore belief freely and still respect each other despite, or even because of, differences of worship.

Or, like, we could maybe recognize that humankind has always had diversity of beliefs, and just go ahead and respect that fact within reason.

That’s the problem with anti-theists pretending their beliefs aren’t a religion. By acting like it’s something different, you think it gives you permission to call for taking away other’s rights. I respect atheism, but people like you can keep your bigoted hypocritical fundamentalist Atheism to yourselves.

By all means your beliefs are fine, and you have every right to express them. What fundamentalists and evangelicals are doing to attack our rights is awful and I look forward to every ounce of power that we can take away from them — hopefully permanently. Church and state should be separate, and the state’s goal should be supporting diversity of belief and practice within a secular framework.

Here’s one of the problems I’m having right now though: there is so much hatred and stigma directed toward non-atheists as a whole these days, particularly in online spaces, that there’s been a sort of soft-censorship going on. In many public spaces, a theist can’t openly talk about their beliefs without immediately being mocked, stereotyped, and stigmatized into silence by antitheists. It’s roughly on par with the people who claim that anyone lgbtq+ can do what they want as long as they keep it out of public.

People should not have to seek isolated pocket communities just to be able to express their ontology.

As I said previously I’m not interested in debating religion in itself, but I guess I could give my two cents anyway. If you don’t believe in any deitys, that’s totally fine. It’s completely valid to have those beliefs.

Or on the other hand if you do believe in a higher power, or powers, then it becomes a question of what ontology you believe in. Somewhat similar to what I mentioned previously, I lean more toward a panentheistic framework, with somewhat of a gnostic leaning. By gnostic I mean to say that I do not accept the idea of omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence. In that model, “God” is everything, though I believe there’s room for polytheism within that framework - that there are potentially countless beings, corporeal and incorporeal.

In my view there’s no disparity to reconcile, because everything in life works the way it works and we have no way to know if it could be otherwise. Maybe there are just fundamental constraints on what a physical reality can be? Maybe some beings are malevolent to humans, others benevolence, and sometimes one group has more success than the other?

So I would agree that the deity of the Abrahamic religions is a cruel one. I have my criticisms of their ways, many criticisms. But I don’t use those criticisms to attack theistic belief as a whole, because I know there are a wide diversity of beliefs out there with fundamentally different ways of viewing and relating with life.

There are already some good rebuttals to your comment here, but I’m going to add another. The entire language of your argument is geared toward the theistic religions. You claim God did nothing to help you overcome your addiction. As an aside I could argue, from the theistic perspective that God did help you overcome your addiction, and you’re just not aware of it. But more to the point I can point out how, in the pantheistic model of theology the universe and everything in it is God, and therefore you are God who got a part of themself clean without the help of a concept of God, in order to claim that God doesn’t deserve to claim credit for getting them self clean.

Please ignore those arguments in themselves, I’m not trying to debate religion. I pointed that out to highlight that what you positioned as an argument against religion as a whole doesn’t even make sense, and is completely irrelevant, to one subset of religions. If you have grievances with the theistic, maybe even more specifically the monotheistic religions, then why not take those grievances up with who they belong?

And also ignoring that atheism is a religion.

And speaking of LGBTQ, I once worked at a summer camp that was run by a Christian church. The pastor and her wife had programs in place for the purpose of protecting and helping LGBTQ youth. Justice and injustice can come from theists and atheists alike.