Sharing my thoughts on religion, philosophy, and society; often as they relate to truth claims espoused by my former religion. https://xitter.cf/t.co/QQTVmtJPII
Canada
Joined January 2016
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It's been a long time coming. I have several new articles that were held to go out with my video. They have now been released. All of them. This video is my coming out message.
Peace and love to you all; whatever religion you may believe or not believe.
youtube.com/watch?v=4-jPHr0L…
I agree with Ali. And we're not the only ones.
The majority of ex-Muslims I've spoken to in Canada are also thrilled about Abdul El-Sayed's victory.
We don't conflate "the worst possible interpretation of Islam" with high-integrity individuals who happen to be Muslim.
I'm an atheist and I'm thrilled that Abdul El-Sayed won because I prefer a pro-secular, pro-choice, pro-science, pro-constitutional rights, pro-woman, pro-LGBTQ, pro-reason Muslim over Christian nationalist conservatives who want to roll back abortion rights, ban books, bring religion into state matters and classrooms, deny science, and demonize LGBTQ people and minorities.
xitter.cf/AndrewLSeidel/status/2…
An incredibly clear exposition on world affairs today that informs how Canada (and other nations) can protect their sovereignty. It's not about auto parts or dairy. It's about subordination.
There's something much larger and existential at play.
kevinboucher32.substack.com/…
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The Ahmadiyya Islamic double standard on miracles (literal vs. figurative). An interesting reddit post with a list for believers to compare. Food for thought.
reddit.com/r/islam_ahmadiyya…
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A poignant post by @rouchechouart on how the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community administration has a glaring credibility problem with the stupendous number of converts it claims, year after year.
reddit.com/r/islam_ahmadiyya…
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Alex O'Conner on his recent conversation in person with William Lane Craig. Alex shows himself here, to be the more genuine of the two, by actually engaging in a conversation, and not a debate.
youtube.com/watch?v=aJ3jUZsA…
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What Zionist military forces did as part of the Nakba was terrorism.
And yet they are rewarded for it with an apartheid state and the ability to kill civilians, including women and children, indiscriminately.
If the world doesn't want terrorism to be rewarded, it has to stop supporting Israel and advocate for the peace makers on the Palestinian side. Equal rights. Equal votes. No more apartheid. No more double standards.
This week: Oxford’s Free Speech Test & the Rituals of Ashura.
Check out @ExmuslimsOrg's Dissent Dispatch for weekly news.
Factual, and non-sensationalist.
createsend.com/t/j-F45C65289…
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I've had a few friends send me this news item, seeing 'Ahmadi' in the title.
FYI - the 'Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light' has nothing to do with the 'Ahmadiyya Muslim Community' (whose members are referred to as Ahmadi Muslims).
xitter.cf/Telegraph/status/20494…
🚨 BREAKING: Members of a religious sect have been arrested over allegations of sex offences, forced marriage and modern slavery.
More than 500 police officers from a number of forces took part in a raid on the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light headquarters in Crewe on Wednesday morning.
🔗: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04…
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The Old Testament is full of immorality (including a license of genocide). Here, Alex O'Connor relays just a glimpse of this.
Remember the 'God' who authored it is the SAME moral monster underpinning the apparent about face of the New Testament that underpins Christianity.
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Chuck Schumer has got to go.
Appealing to 2000+ year old mythological claims and divine real estate grants to reconcile modern geopolitics.
Religious appeals like this are poison for the peace and security of our global society and humanity.
“There’s no peace in the Middle East bc Palestinians refuse to believe in the Torah. The Torah says it’s our [Jews] land. And that’s why America must always stand with Israel.”
Wow. He just came right out and said it.
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Let me paraphrase for clarity. According to your understanding of Islam, if an Ahmadi Muslim woman married a Sunni Muslim or Shia Muslim man, that act is both "sinful" and "immoral".
I appreciate your clarity. And now others can evaluate Ahmadiyyat without the double speak.
In terms of ahmadi muslim faith and its commandments, answer would be yes if a woman married an outsider.
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This is damn good creative AI movie-trailer making. The choice of actors and the lines. Wow.
(I just wish us humans didn't resort to war so often to resolve disputes)
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Growing up a Muslim, I remember being taught that pre-Islamic Arabs buried their daughters alive.
It was used to pull at our heartstrings; to make Islam look civilized in comparison.
Increasingly, I see Islamic scholars digging into the research. It was a polemical myth.
Science is a methodology, not an alternate deity. The premise of your question is flawed. But the human concern underneath it is not. We do need a civilizational operating system that better addresses mental illness, anxiety, depression, isolation, and the crisis of meaning.
Part of religion’s historical power was not just accountability. It was also purpose, hope, belonging, consolation, and a way of locating oneself in a moral universe. That need is real. But asking people to return to debunked and often immoral theologies in order to recover those things is also flawed, because we cannot unsee the fallacy of religious truth-claims.
The solution requires a third path: a new civilizational contract not riddled with flawed theology, but one that can still provide meaning, community, moral seriousness, and forms of contemplative and transcendent experience, while also incorporating structural systems that many human-created religions did get right at times.
Science rejected God. Fine. That is science’s right, but I have a question for science. You have had 300 years and trillions of dollars at your disposal and the best minds on earth. And today, more than 1 billion people live with mental illness. Anxiety is the fastest growing epidemic & depression is the leading cause of disability. What is science doing with this?
Interesting hypothesis on religions and their prohibitions on the pig; funnelling demand to sources of protein that the wealthier classes controlled.
The Quran. Leviticus. The Jewish dietary laws. Certain Hindu texts. The Zoroastrian religious code.
Different traditions. Different geographies. Different centuries. All with some version of the same instruction: the pig is unclean, problematic, prohibited, or at minimum theologically uncomfortable.
The conventional explanation is hygiene. The hot climate. The disease risk. Trichinosis. The lack of refrigeration. This gets taught so frequently that it has achieved the status of obvious, which is usually a sign that you should look at it more carefully.
Here is the problem with the hygiene explanation.
The pig is not uniquely dangerous in a hot climate.
Shellfish are significantly more dangerous at ambient temperature than pork, and yet shellfish prohibitions are far less universal. The hygiene theory would predict that all dangerous-in-heat foods would be religiously prohibited in hot-climate traditions. They are not. The pig gets singled out with a consistency that the hygiene theory doesn't fully explain.
Here is what the pig has in common across all the contexts where it gets prohibited that no other animal shares:
The pig is the poor person's animal.
The pig eats scraps. Household waste, kitchen refuse, the inedible margins of everything else. It requires no grazing land. It requires no surplus grain. It can be kept in an urban courtyard, a village alley, behind the poorest household with nowhere to graze a cow and nothing to feed a sheep. It converts what everyone else throws away into high-quality fat and protein with an efficiency that no ruminant approaches.
The pig democratises meat.
A peasant family with no land, no capital, no access to grazing rights, can keep a pig. The pig costs nothing to maintain beyond attention and the scraps that would otherwise be lost. By autumn it is large and fat and represents a significant nutritional resource: lard, salt pork, preserved cuts, that will carry the family through the winter.
The cow and the sheep require land. They require feed. They require capital investment that only people with resources can make. They provide multiple commodities: milk, wool, traction, offspring, that increase in value with the scale of the herd. They are the animals of the wealthy and the pastoral powerful.
The pig provides none of those commodities except meat.
But it provides that meat to anyone.
A religious prohibition on pork removes the animal that the poor could keep and directs consumption toward the animals that the wealthy control. It reframes the most democratic food animal in the pre-industrial world as a moral transgression, and in doing so, it takes the nutritional resource that required no wealth to access and declares it off-limits.
The poor can no longer keep their pig and call it food. They keep their pig and call it sin.
The wealthy continue to keep their cattle.
The religious law and the class interest produce exactly the same outcome. Whether that is coincidence or design is a question I will leave you to answer for yourself.
But I will note that it happens a lot.
Excellent thread. I welcome Iran's theocratic leaders being toppled, but whether this results in regime change or just chaos, insurgency, and even more horrors for the Iranian people, is yet to be determined. /1