As a Nicaraguan-born girl growing up in Miami, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week. Her father was a pastor, and their fundamentalist evangelical faith taught that a woman’s role was to serve her husband.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez saw how essential women were in keeping the pews filled and the church running. Ultimately, dismayed by the subservient role of women and the church’s harsh restrictions on girls, she would leave her faith – and her husband – in her late 20s.
“Women are less inclined to be involved with churches that don’t want us speaking up, that don’t want us to be smart,” said Mojica Rodríguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity. “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
Though the Nashville-based author and activist is now 39, her experience reflects a growing and, for churches, a potentially worrisome trend of young women eschewing religion. Their pace of departure has overtaken men, recent studies show, reversing patterns of previous generations.
That doesn’t sound like, “becoming less religious” to me.
The first time I read the whole bible was when I was doubting god as a teenager after half my family died and my extremely religious aunt kept going on about how they’re in a better place and I’d feel better if I went to church more.
Read the whole thing cover to cover in about a week.
It pretty much cemented my atheism.
Just because you research something or even invest time and money into getting a proper education on something, doesn’t mean you support it.
Know your enemy.
Facts!
Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious : The Two-Way
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious
I’m a raging atheist because I study religion. Makes sense to me.
Atheists would be the best people to study religion as there’s no bias (unless they’re anti-theist as well.)
I couldn’t think of anything that would make anyone less religious that taking that masters course.
I mean, how many pictures of yahweh with his horns and giant, novelty sized cock would someone need to look at before they realise that hes just a middle Eastern Zeus?
Even the part about popping down every now and then to pork a mortal under questionable circumstances, who births a popular demigod…
Studying something doesn’t mean you believe it or like it. I’ve read the Bible, Koran, and a lot of the Sikh holy scriptures. It did nothing but make me less religious.
Demystification tends to do that.
I’ve read a quote that says something like “Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life. Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.”
I had a Baptist minister tell me that he refused to get his masters. It involved learning to read source material. He said all of his friends that did became less religious, and he was afraid it would happen to him.
Nothing makes a good atheist better than actually reading the Bible in its entirety instead of just cherry picking it.