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.