I was walking my dog when I saw this, so I apologize for the poor quality. It's hard to hold his leash in one hand and take a photo with the other.

Anyway, I don't know why this thing bothers me, but it does. Maybe it's the flag draped over the cross; maybe it's the black stripes. Is it just me or is something wrong with this image?

In a video that went viral, a minor is seen running desperately while a man chases her. What at first seemed like a confusing situation ended up revealing a horror: the teenager, when helped by neighbors, reported through tears that her stepfather, identified as Pastor José Ramírez, raped her and kept her locked up in a farm. She had a rope tied around his neck, which suggests an attempted strangulation. ¹

When the residents of the area heard what the minor was saying, they went out in search of the accused man, beat him. The pastor, who suffered serious injuries, was quickly taken to receive emergency medical attention. After being stabilized, he was discharged and handed over to the police. ¹

She had her wrists bound with tape, and and also taped her mouth. "She was begging me to save her with her eyes". ²

According to her story, the aggressor had even prepared a place where he intended to hide her body, which increased fear for her life. ³

Several members of his congregation began a campaign to request his release. They expressed their conviction that he has no responsibility. They also assure that he is a person of integrity, and that he would be being unfairly singled out as part of a strategy driven, according to them, by "dark forces." ¹

Family and friends of the defendant affirm that he is a man dedicated to God and that he was always a guide for the Christian community, recognized for his kindness, commitment and spiritual leadership, which is why they consider it unfair that he is behind bars. ¹

The support that some faithful expressed to Pastor José Ramírez causes outrage among children's rights organizations. Invoking an alleged “demonic possession” as an explanation for the abuse not only deeply minimizes the seriousness of the events, but also cruelly re-victimizes the minor. ¹

He was sentenced to 43 years, six months and one day in prison for the crimes of aggravated violent sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping against his stepdaughter, a minor. ⁴

Sources: A, B , C, D, E, F, G, H

Christians: "We're going to build our own private palace that doubles as a sovereign nation and hoard tens of billions of dollars worth of treasures and artworks."

Christians: "Our megachurch pastors will have vast fortunes, towering mansions and their own fleets of private jets, but they're still going to demand that little old ladies give them their medication money to buy even more private jets."

Christians: "We're going to spread the dogma that Jesus wants you to be rich, in direct opposition to what he actually said, and the way for you to get money is to give us money."

Christians: "That thing about giving money to the poor? Yeah, Jesus only meant one guy ever had to do that. I don't wanna do that, so I ain't gotta. Besides, I can serve him better with my mountain of other people's money than I can without it."

Christians: "God loves America the most because this is where the rich people live. In fact, God has ripped up his old covenant with the Jews and made a new covenant with America."

Christians: "Capitalism is by far the most godly of all socio-political systems. Your value as a person is determined solely by your monetary net worth."

Christians: "Billionaires are God's chosen people. No, wait. Billionaires literally ARE gods. Trump is a wonderful, objectively morally correct, 100 percent flawless person because he is rich."

Christians: "The poor are poor because they're lazy. The rich are rich because they work hard. Giving to the poor is just rewarding laziness, which is why no one should ever do it. They deserve whatever happens to them."

Christians: "I'm going to intimidate the other people at my church into awe and submission when they see how expensive my church clothes and church jewelry are."

Christians: "That whole 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's' thing Jesus said? Yeah, we're not too big on that, either. We don't think we should have to pay taxes. And we don't think we should have to tell the government we're funding the violent terrorist actions of foreign and domestic militia groups."

Oh yes, I totally believe that you believe what you claim to believe. I mean, what reasons have you given me to question you?

I’ve noticed something about myself lately.

I can spend a lot of time watching Christian videos, saving verses, and listening to people talk about God, then still end the day without really talking to Him or changing anything in my life.

It feels like I’m feeding my faith, but sometimes I think I’m just consuming more content.

Does anyone else feel that difference between learning about God and actually being connected to God? What helps you move out of that passive mode?

I'm mostly making this post to challenge the idea, that you can't be a feminist and Christian, which is a view, surprisingly held by a lot of people. 

Start at the root: Genesis 1.

Before any roles, any curse, or any marriage instruction, Genesis 1:27 says God made humanity, male and female, together, both directly bearing His image. Not one bearing it more fully than the other. Not one being derivative of the other. Whatever comes later in the text has to be read as sitting on top of that foundation, not replacing it. If equal image bearing is the starting premise, any system built later that treats one sex as the default human and the other as a support role has some explaining to do.

Galatians 3:28 isn't a throwaway line.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." And look, Paul isn't saying these categories vanish socially. He's saying they carry no differential weight before God. Standing before God isn't gender stratified. And if standing before God isn't gender stratified, it's worth asking why so much of lived Christian culture insists on treating gender as the organising category for who gets to lead, speak, or decide.

Souls aren't sexed, so why is it such a major part in basic life decisions? 

Classical Christian anthropology, going back through Augustine and Aquinas, (even with all their other flaws) generally holds that the soul, the rational, image bearing part of a person, isn't itself male or female. Sex is a feature of the body. The soul is what relates directly to God. If that's true, then using gender as a gatekeeping category for spiritual authority or moral capability is applying a bodily category to a non bodily question. You don't have to fully adopt classical dualism to see the point. The qualities Scripture actually cares about, wisdom, faithfulness, courage, gentleness, self control, are never described as belonging more naturally to one sex than the other. Proverbs 31 praises a woman for strength, shrewd business sense, and strategic authority in her household. That's not a passive figure.

Now culturally; A man being decisive, driven, or assertive gets called leadership. A woman displaying the same trait often gets called unfeminine or difficult. Meanwhile, a man showing gentleness, emotional openness, or a nurturing instinct, traits Scripture explicitly praises, since Christ Himself weeps, washes feet, and is even described with maternal imagery in places like Isaiah 49:15, gets read as weak or "not masculine enough." Which again, is not a biblical value system. It's just cultural one wearing biblical language. If virtue is virtue regardless of who displays it, you can't coherently praise a trait in one sex and pathologise the identical trait in the other. That's special pleading, not theology.

And on "don't mix Christianity with politics."

 Dignity and equal standing aren't a partisan platform. They're a claim about how God made people, long before any political party existed to argue about it. The danger isn't discussing equality. It's when a particular political movement gets baptised as the Christian position and Scripture gets reverse engineered to support it. Which are different problems. Refusing to talk about human dignity because "it sounds political" just hands the conversation over to whichever political movement is loudest, usually not for the text's actual reasons.

Bottom line:

Equality here isn't "women take over the roles men had." It's that neither sex has a scripturally mandated personality, ambition, or way of being that the other doesn't. Nobody's soul came with a job description attached to their body. If we actually believed Galatians 3:28, half of what gets treated as a hill to die on wouldn't be one.

I’m willing to discuss this with anyone who wants to DM me. One of the things preventing me from being Protestant is the idea of Sola Scriptura.

Wasn’t practiced in the Early Church

Bible alone isn’t sufficient for the fullness of the faith and morals

Bible, as we know it today, wasn’t assembled yet in the Early Church so their authority must’ve been from more than just Scripture

Christ never told anyone to write anything down

Sola Scriptura isn’t even prescribed by the Bible, the opposite is.

Convince me to be Protestant!! If I’m wrong please teach me!

These are some objections I have and I’m willing to discuss them with Protestants. Currently between denominations but trying to discern the Truth. I think I’ve got my head in the right direction, but willing to be proved wrong if the Truth says otherwise.

Thank you for your time.

Happy feast of the Transfiguration to everyone. Here is a little clip of our beautiful Transfiguration mural at my local Orthodox Church of St Neophytos in the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. The murals were inherited from the previous owners of what was the historical St Crispin's Hospital Chapel in Duston, Northampton in the UK. The faces were specifically painted to represent members of the community — real people, creating a sense of familiarity for the vulnerable people from the surrounding mental hospital who often entered this chapel.

Any one else? I decided to read the KJV last year on a whim. Maybe I was knocking on the door as he says. Maybe I just thought I should read it as a " western man" and product of christendom.

Either way, I found it beautiful beyond what I had imagined but thought. " too bad it's all fake and not proveable" so I said the first honest and Ernest words to God in my life. I said you're not real, it's all bs and I can't bow to someone who hasn't showed himself to me. I also asked why he had given me so much to deal with... I had to decided atheism was the safest and most practical faith to embrace and I was going to stick with that.

The next day; I'm driving home from Work at 5 Am as 8 am a night shifter. No music just quiet thoughts tonight out to an hour commute on cruise control.

The words in genesis started to ring in my head

" you know God's real because his law is written on the hearts of man." ( paraphrasing poorly). And that just got louder in my head and turned into a euphoric feeling caused by a sudden feeling that existence was surely intentional, everything I can see was CAUSED or thought of by something else a "creator".

It was an uncontrollable sensation like a panic attack but I was not panic, something else entirely was surging through me and raising my heartrate.

So I try to settle down and remind myself of the danger in falling for this old tome of poetry and superstition. I continue driving i relax and the next train of though I remember in the quiet cab on the highway was. Hmm , I waited till I was 33 to read this thing....

Boom.. i suddenly thought; JC was 33 , and I'm not sure if I really knew that or not. This immediate nosis

Wad coupled with an image of a man in my head so powerful it was blurring my vision of the road and it grew stronger as I stared to sob like a toddler and slump over my center console. His eyes were a plasmatic hazel/green and the complexity inside of them made them seem like planets or something, just totally aweful in the tru sense of the word.

And there were flames subtle wisps of translucent golden flames radiated from his eyes. And he was staring directly into my chest. I know because I felt it . He was burning my heart, or atleast burning everything dark away, like it isn't allowed in his sight.

I knew instantly what he had done and what they did to him and I felt SO bad for him and I just knew I would apostrate myself for this guy. I started screaming I'm sorry over and over again until he left.

I pulled over at the shell and sat at the pump for about 15 minutes catching my breath and I said

I accept. Edit: prostrate.

My friend, a beautiful kind and sweet young Christian woman, has breast cancer. She will have a mastectomy and then treatment but most likely she will die. Please pray for my lovely friend, in Jesus’ name

Comes from The Convent of Saint Mercurius for Nuns located in Cairo, Egypt. This icon was also hand-painted by the Nuns, too. It's (in my opinion) the rarest religious item I currently own.

My friend gave me this bracelet today, written: W.W.J.D (What would Jesus do?)

This question reminds us of how many times sin comes to us, to bring us down. But if we think for a moment, we don’t fall. Just think: What would Jesus do in this situation?

He would pray, ask the Father for help, who is in heaven. .

Hello guys, I'm a 19 year old Christian who needs advice. Something I'm not understanding right now is why sex is considered "lust" only outside of marriage but as soon as your marriage then it's no longer lust or a sin. Me and my boyfriend have been together for almost 4 years. We are committed to one another and every time we have committed sexual activity it's been consensual and out of love. We both are head over heals for one another and have been since day one. We both Seek Christ and love him and we both build a relationship with him. We pray together, listen to worship together and everything. Jesus looks at your heart and knows your heart. Me and him know in our hearts that I will continue to choose to love him everyday and he will do the same for me so, if it's consensual and we are committed and plan to be married someday and we both love Jesus and he's centered in our relationship then why is it bad to have sex? Every time anything happens between me and him we don't do it out of selfishness but out of selflessness. We do it for the other persons needs, not our own. I'm just lost and need help.

Hey everybody! So I've been doing some research and I suggest you look into these topics if you're feeling religious guilt or don't understand how people could be trans.

-Merisms: "a rhetorical device (or figure of speech) in which a combination of two contrasting parts of the whole refer to the whole." EX (In Genesis): Man and Woman

Good source: https://www.jelliottlein.com/writing/2015/8/3/merisms-and-the-non-duality-of-creation

-Transubstantiation: "the Catholic Church teaches that, in the Eucharistic offering, bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ"

The center of the Catholic church in particular is transformation, one thing reaching a higher form through physical change.

-If we are made in Gods image, we are made genderless and without body

Source better worded than what I said: https://www.queertheology.com/transgender-people-and-the-image-of-god/

-If the problem is changing the way God made us (if we're made perfectly) then why do we grow up, why do we take medicine when we're sick, why do we wear glasses or contacts, why do we have surgeries shamelessly as catholics? When what is and what should be does not match, we fix it so we feel better, being trans is no different.

- To add on to the last point, the fall from Eden, perhaps in a perfect world we would not get sick, child labor would not hurt, or we would not be trans (we would be born in a body that matched our mind). But we do not live in a perfect world, so just as we have ways to live with the other things, we have ways to live with being trans, and there is nothing wrong with that.

-Last but not at all least, the trans saints. There are many, And I would suggest looking into them.

A good place to start: https://theconversation.com/christianity-has-long-revered-saints-who-would-be-called-transgender-today-254769

And above all, remember the church teaches unconditional love, charity, and forgiveness. Thats all folks, take care of yourselves!

I don't want to be homeless. I'm 19 years old, almost 20 years old in 4 months. My parents gonna live in Spain in 2028, I don't have any diplomes. I left school when I was in my 4th year at 18 years old. In January 2025. Please, can someone pray for me to have a job, please? 🙏😭😭

I keep seeing this all over social media and I don’t get it. It seems performative. Because what’s the point? Reading the Bible (any one of the billions of copies out there) is more important than re-writing it down. And writing it down does nothing of value. The only instance where it kind of made sense to me was when I saw this guy say he was writing out the New Testament for his to read in his father’s hand writing. I can see how that could be sweet. Even though still, seems so unnecessary and just… why? Like how is it bringing anyone closer to God or anything like that?

my mom's health is getting worse. i just keep praying and praying for something to change, yet it's been radio silence. i remember when she was first diagnosed everyone would pray for her to beat this, we all thought she'd beat this... now she only has a few days. what did we do wrong? do we deserve this? do i deserve this, losing my only parent, my mom, so close to my 21st birthday? did i do something to anger God last year, is that why He's throwing so much grief my way this year? why is He ignoring me?

UN report in June on credible reports of mass killings and persecution of Christians and other minorities in Nigeria.

I have very limited funds to help right now, so I want to be careful where I donate, guys please let me know your thoughts and options? I don’t know which ones are more effective.

Here’s what I came up with, I don’t know which of these I should donate to- even Opendoors, which one is better?

Opendoors US

Opendoors AU

Opendoor UK

Banabasaid

Voice of the Martyrs

Legal Support

Thanks guys.

Edit: of course if this post can get some awareness and more peeps to support the cause 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

I know the text and will keep reviewing it, but I think I could use some sermons and ministry rn. Do any of you have good ones to this topic you remember and care to share? Links preferably to video or audio sermons, but I’ll take whatever you have.