Atheism

I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.

I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.

I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.

I thought of him as a fiction.

Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.

2. The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

3. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

4. Child rape. War. Etc.

And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.

Being an “atheist,” at least according to popular culture, seems to require so much work. You have to complain to the school board about the Pledge of Allegiance, stamp over “In God We Trust” on all your paper money and convince Grandma not to go to church. You have to be PhD-from-Oxford smart, irritated by Christmas and shruggingly unmoved by Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That isn’t me — but those are the stereotypes.

And then there are the data. Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!

But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.

Their first atheist lesson was completely impromptu. Noah was 5, Jesse was 3, and we were sitting on the couch before bed reading from “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” a holdover from my childhood bookshelf. One of the boys asked what a “myth” was, and I told them it was a story about how the world works. People used to believe that these gods were in charge of what happened on Earth, and these stories helped explain things they didn’t understand, like winter or stars or thunder. “See” — I flipped ahead and found a picture — “Zeus has a thunderbolt.”

“They don’t believe them anymore?” No, I said. That’s why they call it “myth.” When people still believe it, they call it “religion.” Like the stories about God and Moses that we read at Passover or the ones about Jesus and Christmas.

The little pajama-clad bodies nodded, and on we read.

That was it — the big moment. It was probably also the easiest moment.

Before one son became preoccupied with death. Before the other son had to decide whether to be bar mitzvahed. Before my daughter looked up from her math homework one day to ask, “How do we know there’s no God?”

Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.

Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.

Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.

My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.

We need citizens like that.

Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.

Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.

We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.

Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.

Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”

So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell” that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.

Whatever the case, in 2022, Gallup found that 81 percent of Americans believe in God, the lowest percentage yet recorded. This year, when it gave respondents the option of saying they’re not sure, it found that only 74 percent believe in God, 14 percent weren’t sure, and 12 percent did not believe.

Not believing in God — that’s the very definition of atheism. But when people go around counting atheists, the number they come up with is far lower than that. The most recent number from Pew Research Center is 4 percent.

What’s with the gap? That’s anti-atheist stigma (and pro-belief bias) at work. Everybody’s keeping quiet, because everybody wants to be liked. Some researchers, recognizing this problem, developed a workaround.

In 2017, psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle tried to estimate the prevalence of atheism in the United States using a technique called “unmatched count”: They asked two groups of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers could then estimate the percentage of atheists without ever asking a direct question. They came up with around 26 percent.

If that’s true or even close, there are more atheists in the United States than Catholics.

Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.

“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,” “you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”

Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.

I used to say, when people asked me what atheists do believe, that it was simple: Atheists believe that God is a human invention.

But now, I think it’s more than that.

If you are an atheist — if you do not believe in a Supreme Being — you can be moral or not, mindful or not, clever or not, hopeful or not. Clearly, you can keep going to church. But, by definition, you cannot believe that God is in charge. You must give up the notion of God’s will, God’s purpose, God’s mysterious ways.

In some ways, this makes life easier. You don’t have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, what parts of this broken world are God’s plan, or what work is his to do and what is yours.

But you also don’t get to leave things up to God. Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.

No wonder we are “the most politically active group in American politics today,” according to political scientist Ryan Burge, interpreting data from the Cooperative Election Study.

That’s right: Atheists take more political action — donating to campaigns, protesting, attending meetings, working for politicians — than any other “religious” group. And we vote. In his study on this data, sociologist Evan Stewart noted that atheists were about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated respondents.

We also vote far more than most religiously unaffiliated people. That’s what distinguishes atheists from the “nones” — and what I didn’t realize at first.

Atheists haven’t just checked out of organized religion. (Indeed, we may not have.) We haven’t just rejected belief in God. (Though, obviously, that’s the starting point.) Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.

I want to be clear: There are clergy members and congregations all across this country working to do good, not waiting for God to answer their prayers or assuming that God meant for the globe to get hotter. You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.

Countless good people of faith do just that. But one thing they can’t do as well as atheists is push back against the outsize cultural and political power of religion itself.

That power is crushing some of our most vulnerable citizens. And I don’t mean my fellow atheists. Atheists, it’s true, are subject to discrimination and scapegoating; somehow we’re to blame for moral chaos, mass shootings and whatever the “trans cult” is. Yes, we are technically barred from serving as jurors in the state of Maryland or joining a Boy Scout troop anywhere, but we do not, as a group, suffer anything like the prejudice that, say, LGBTQ+ people face. It’s not even close.

Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?

Peel back the layers of abstinence-only or marriage-centered or anti-homosexual sex education and you find religion. “Don’t say gay” laws, laws denying trans kids medical care, school-library book bans and even efforts to suppress the teaching of inconvenient historical facts — motivated by religion.

And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.

In 45 states and D.C., parents can get religious exemptions from laws that require schoolchildren to be vaccinated. Seven states allow pharmacists to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions because of their religious beliefs. Every business with a federal contract has to comply with federal nondiscrimination rules — unless it’s a religious organization. Every employer that provides health insurance has to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate — unless it’s, say, a craft supply store with Christian owners.

Case by case, law by law, our country’s commitment to the first right enumerated in our Bill of Rights — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — is faltering. The Supreme Court has ruled that the citizens of Maine have to pay for parochial school, that a high school football coach should be free to lead a prayer on the 50-yard line, that a potential wedding website designer can reject potential same-sex clients. This past summer, Oklahoma approved the nation’s first publicly funded religious school. This fall, Texas began allowing schools to employ clergy members in place of guidance counselors.

You don’t have to be an atheist to worry about the structural integrity of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State.” You don’t have to be an atheist to think that religion should not shape public policy or that believers should have to follow the laws that everyone else does. You don’t have to be an atheist to see that Christian nationalists are using “religious liberty” to perpetuate much of the discrimination Americans suffer today.

But atheists can do one thing about the country’s drift into theocracy that our religious neighbors won’t: We can tell people we don’t believe in God. The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be — for both politicians and the general public — to usher religion back out of our laws.

Okay, but should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in “God” as the power of nature or something like that?

Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.

In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)

So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?

If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.

But if you go further: You’ll be doing something good for your country.

When I started raising my kids as atheists, I wasn’t particularly honest with the rest of the world. I wasn’t everybody’s mom, right? Plus, I had to get along with other people. Young parents need community, and I was afraid to risk alienating new parent friends by being honest about being — looks both ways, lowers voice — an atheist.

But, in addition to making me be honest inside our home, my children pushed me to start being honest on the outside. In part, I wanted to set an example for them, and in part, I wanted to help change the world they would face.

It shouldn’t be hard to say you don’t believe in God. It shouldn’t be shocking or shameful. I know that I’m moral and respectful and friendly. And the more I say to people that I’m an atheist — me, the mom who taught the kindergarten class about baking with yeast and brought the killer cupcakes to the bake sale — the more people will stop assuming that being an atheist means being … a serial killer.

And then? The more I say I’m an atheist, the more other people will feel comfortable calling themselves atheists. And the stigma will gradually dissolve.

Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are?

It would give everyone permission to be honest with their kids and their friends, to grapple with big questions without having to hold on to beliefs they never embraced.

And it would take away permission, too. Permission to pass laws (or grant exemptions to laws) based on the presumed desires of a fictional creation. Permission to be cruel to fellow human beings based on Bible verses. Permission to eschew political action in favor of “thoughts and prayers.”

I understand that, to many people, this might sound difficult or risky. It took me years to declare myself an atheist, and I was raised Reform Jewish, I live in the Northeast, I’m White, I work at home, and my family and friends are a liberal bunch. The stakes were low for me. For some, I fully concede, the stakes are too high.

If you think you’d lose your job or put your children at risk of harassment for declaring your atheism, you get a pass. If you would be risking physical harm, don’t speak out. If you’re an atheist running for school board somewhere that book bans are on the agenda, then feel free to keep it quiet, and God bless.

But for everyone else who doesn’t believe in God and hasn’t said so? Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest, and that your reticence encourages others to keep quiet. Consider that the longer everyone keeps quiet, the longer religion has political and cultural license to hurt people. Consider that the United States — to survive as a secular democracy — needs you now more than ever.

And the next time you find yourself tempted to pretend that you believe in God? Tell the truth instead.

When Marx wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, his intended analogy was to opium as a medical treatment for pain - something that would not cure the underlying disease, but that could ease suffering. He saw religion as a pacifying substitute for economic and political change. He did not fully flesh out the political harms we see in religion today, but did see it as both a useful tool for leaders and as an understandable balm for the people.

In that same line of thinking, can we say that nationalism is the methamphetamine of the people? It does not turn its users into passive people willing to accept their fate in hopes of a better world, but rather amps them up and redirects the energy that could be used for demanding change.

Like meth, nationalism offers a temporary escape. Like meth, it makes people feel exhilarated, aroused, paranoid, confused, and disinhibited. Like meth, it is cheap and easy to distribute, and it can be highly addictive.

I’m trying to see how far this analogy runs. In the US today, nationalism and religion have become fused and intertwined to the point that some religious leaders are bemoaning their communities following Trump and conservatism and thinking Jesus was a wimp. I think it was Bobo who said that if Jesus had an AR he wouldn’t have been crucified, but it goes beyond that. There’s an increasing objection to meekness and humility and an embrace of wealth and power and a violent rejection of the Other.

I suspect similar dynamics are prevalent in other nationalist movements, such as what we are seeing in India today. I’m wondering if the expansion of Marx’s analogy gives us any insight into what is happening or what can be done about it.

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy asserted on Sunday that Americans did not have Constitutional rights preventing religion from being imposed upon them.

During a Fox News Sunday discussion about recent baptisms of students at Auburn University, co-host Pete Hegseth reported that the Freedom From Religion group was behind a lawsuit against the university.

"It's not in the constitution!" Campos-Duffy interrupted.

"As Rachel points out, it's freedom of religion, not freedom from religion," Hegseth agreed. "So they're an anti-faith, anti-Christian group."

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says "that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise," according to the White House website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Z8-4XgFos

For the purposes of organizing and discussing the RE syllabus, humanists are deemed to be on a par with other religious representatives. However, it is not like the situation in Kent is the norm across the country. Out of the 151 SACREs, some 67 have humanists as members of group A. The ideal would be to have members sitting in every group. The argument often given behind decisions such as those made by Kent County Council is that humanism isn’t a religion. But, Humanists UK have stated regarding the court’s decision That the law requires far more clarity and that this decision has a larger scope:

However Bowen is clear that references to religion in the relevant legislation should be read in a way which would ‘read in’ words extending the scope of possible group A members to include humanists. Reading it in this way is required by the Human Rights Act 1998. The law has now been unambiguously clarified in this area.

Furthermore, the new Bowen judgment restates the Fox judgment, that humanism should be included and given ‘equal respect’ in RE syllabuses. In fact, it is even clearer on this point: those syllabuses failing to be inclusive will leave themselves open to legal challenge.

The news that Kent County Council will not be going to the Court of Appeal means that the name Bowen now joins Fox as a key element of case law upholding the equal respect that must be afforded to humanism in education. It also represents a further instance of the Human Rights Act being used to clarify that humanism should be ‘read in’ to references to religion in other legislation – in this case the Education Act 1996. There may well be further examples in public life where this would apply.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mansion experienced the impact of Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in the state as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday. The storm, continuing inland into Georgia and northern Florida, felled a 100-year-old oak tree that landed on the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, Fla., Casey DeSantis, Florida First Lady, said on Twitter. The storm is expected to bring considerable flooding and potential tornadoes to coastal northern Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina on its way to the northeast.

It’s discouraging to see some of my fellow conservatives attacking rising GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy for his Hindu faith. It is wrong and un-American. It violates the spirit, if not the law, of the Constitution. And it could backfire on Christians as our share of the US population dwindles.

It is also entirely counterproductive for those who claim to support traditional values and religious liberty. Ramaswamy is steadily climbing in Republican primary voter support, closing in on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in some polls and neck and neck with him in the betting markets. He is also one of the candidates best positioned to further major conservative Christian agenda items.

FTA:

The people who said the bible isn’t true aren’t being true to themselves. They think some parts are true. They are never going to say this to you. Just ask them that. And the rest is just metaphor.

There is another palpable difference between science and religion. What do you do when you make an assertion about the world that you know turns out to be false? In science it goes into the dustbin of discarded results like cold fusion or any number of falsified theories.

When a religious claim is falsified like creation or Adam and Eve, it simply turns into a metaphor. “We didn’t really mean it, folks. It wasn’t meant that way. It means something else completely.”

FTA:

In the long run, advocates of private school vouchers and charter schools may come to regret the Carson decision. By forcing states to choose between either having a single, unitary public school system, or having government-funded private and charter schools that teach religious views many citizens may find objectionable, Carson places secularly minded states in a difficult position. If those states don’t want to fund schools like St. Isidore, or other religious schools that may teach that LGBTQ people are immoral, Carson suggests that they must eliminate any programs funding private schools or publicly funded charter schools altogether.

Nevertheless, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority appears as unconcerned with this problem as it is with the problem of taxing secular citizens to pay for religious education.

The future of religion in the United States, in other words, is unlikely to involve police officers breaking into people’s homes to arrest them for skipping church. But it is likely to include far more government funding of religious activity, far more proselytizing by teachers, coaches, and other government officials who wield authority over children, and many more monuments to Christianity — all paid for by your taxes.

Quote from the article:

"It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak." And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis."

FTA:

Just because science has solved problems in the past we cannot be sure that it will always do this. What theists want to do using this idea is to counter the response “science will get to that one day” to the problems they suggest. When atheists make claims like “you can’t use fine-tuning against me because that’s god of the gaps.”, the theist can respond that this argument is “atheism of the gaps” – it’s a blind assertion that science will solve any problem to do with the unlikeliness of human existence.

The author is arguing that this is more of a strawman argument thrown at atheists because of the effectiveness of the "god of the gaps" fallacy in debates. If you make the assumption that science will eventually answer all questions and solve all problems, then you might be falling prey to a similar fallacy.

Just to be clear, I'm still an atheist. I did not suddenly become religious. However, I don't feel like moderating this community anymore and have not been present in it for a long time. It's no longer my style to be honest.

If someone who posts regularly here wants to take it over, let me know.

Community request rules apply: You need to have posted here previously (link one of your posts or comments if it's not on the front page), and first ask first serve. Comment below if you want to moderate so who asked first is public, don't DM me.

One of my co-workers mentioned some video he's watching and seems to be excited to be moving towards free thought. I was going to suggest some channels to watch on YouTube starting with qualiasoup and Theramintrees to help him learn and absorb critical thought.

Has anybody else got some good videos to watch on critical thinking and free thought? He is not particularly religious, but it seems open to learning not particularly atheist things, but starting with more open-minded videos.

I found this post on Reddit that was taken down and the account was banned for being antisemitic according to the mods.

Is this antisemitism or a criticism of the argument that Israel belongs to the Jews because apparently it is their ancestral home? And why or why not?

Post:

“What’s up with the people who say that the Jews are native to Israel?

Are the Jews native to anywhere? I thought that they were just a tribe of desert dwellers that were wreaking havoc in biblical times committing genocide after genocide in the name of their sky daddy until somewhere is history they ended up in Europe and parts of Africa.

Can someone shine light to where are the Jews even from?”

A common trope I see in atheist circles are people (often claiming to be atheists themselves, and I'm sure many genuinely are) going around chiding other atheists for being mean, rude, or otherwise disrespectful to believers. It's counterproductive! It doesn't work! It paints us in a bad light!

Often enough, these criticisms are an example of concern trolling, someone telling us what to do because they don't agree with what we're trying to do. Greta Christina correctly pointed out that when they do us, they're trying to get us to lay down the weapons we use to fight back against what's done to us. They're trying to get us to surrender our power.

Atheists are often caustic, sarcastic, and generally unpleasant with believers. I built up quite a reputation for snark in my days on reddit, and I have no doubt I'll continue that tradition on lemmy. Why is that? Because reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of morality. We give back what we get, and in places like the US atheists are not treated very well. So a lot of atheists will either hide or they'll fight back. Personally, I switch between them depending on my mood and circumstances. I also observe that for centuries, atheists did their best to stay quiet and get along without any reduction in the abuse they received. This quote comes from Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the founder of American Atheists:

I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.

And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

So what's the point in being a dick to believers? It can have more utility than people realize. Sometimes being a dick to dickish people helps contain them. Sometimes there's utility in tactical dickishness. This is a problem that needs to be attacked from multiple different angles, not just the one that you think best.

I think Daniel Dennett said it best:

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

A thousand reasons to object to religion? All you need is one. Greta lays out better than anyone else.

Max Brock, 21, spoke in biblical language in the voice of a gospel preacher as he assaulted his girlfriend at a hotel

A man assaulted his girlfriend by repeatedly dunking her head in a sink full of water at a hotel and spoke in the voice of a "gospel preacher" while believing she was possessed. He was restrained by hotel staff in reception after he smashed Perspex glass.

The National Secular Society has expressed concerns about a newly registered Christian charity which promoted a sermon on 'witch hunting'.

Mountain Of Fire And Miracles Ministries Belfast, which registered with the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland last month, shared details about a sermon on "five kinds of witches or familiar spirits" on its Facebook page in April (pictured).

The sermon, available on YouTube, was delivered by pastor Daniel Kolawole Olukoya, who founded Mountain of Fire And Miracles (MFM) Ministries in Nigeria.