Feeling Empowered And Actually Having Power Are Two Very Different Things. Women Are Usually Offered

*dips my balls in the holy water font*

France did a review on the pornography industry and revealed that 90% out of millions of videos watched contained violence against women and misogyny.

Check it out

"Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky

...

Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too"

--- Excerpt from Imagine by John Lennon

Hopefully this isn’t something that happens outside of the internet, but i wanna say that no matter how much you’ve been hurt by religion or religious people, do NOT sexualize women who practice modesty for religious purposes, even if it’s out of spite. I saw this going around online and their excuses are always related to their religious trauma regarding purity culture.

I know they have a grudge and many of us do, but sexualizing them only causes harm and does absolutely nothing to criticize religion. I’ve seen (mostly male) atheists who would edit photos of modest religious women (including hijabis and nuns) to put them in clothing that they would never be comfortable in. The sexualization is misogyny disguised as criticism of religion.

Socializing with non-apostates is odd. Like they're just chilling and meanwhile your internal monologue is like

I need to tell you immediately it'll never come up please ask more questions it doesn't matter you think I'm a freak you don't even care I need you to understand it's impossible to explain I was raised in a cult I'm literally so normal.

people on tumblr: OMG Christianity is SOOO bad, all of this sexism and homophobia, it's so evil, DNI Christians! also people on tumblr: if you suggest that women and lgbtq+ people are horrifically oppressed under any other religion and their tools of control are not empowering, you hate POC and especially lgbtq+ or femme POC (to be clear, I agree with you)

I'll start off by saying: I get where people are coming from. When you're part of a minority religious group, you already deal with enough bigotry, misunderstandings, and stereotypes. Even legitimate criticism can feel like just one more person piling on unfairly, and it's perfectly understandable to get defensive about it.

But I'm fucking over it. If you still act like Christianity is the only bad religion, or the only religion that's ever been used to hurt or control people, you are either astonishingly ignorant, or you are intentionally throwing victims of religious oppression under the bus in order to save face.

If you are capable of understanding that Christianity is used as a tool to control and abuse people, you are capable of understanding that other religions are used in identical ways. I don't think there's a religion on Earth that hasn't been used to justify abuse, bigotry, genocide, and all manner of atrocities. You don't get to say that just because you face illegitimate criticism means that nobody is allowed to make legitimate criticisms, and you don't get to act like being the victim of bigotry means that nobody is using your religion to perpetrate bigotry on others.

And as per my last post, it's incredibly damaging to victims of religious oppression to tell them that they're lying or exaggerating about their abuse because "X religion doesn't believe in that", or that it doesn't count because "well a REAL member of X would never act like that", or that they should stop talking about it because "well of course the way you were treated was wrong, but think about how you're making the rest of us look!" It's not okay when Christians do it, it's not okay when anyone else does it. We need to be supporting ALL victims of religious abuse.