Atheist Refugee Relief

Unfortunately, religion is a reason for many people to leave their homeland and apply for asylum in Germany. When it comes to religious persecution, most people think of religious minorities threatened by the majority in their countries. In the current refugee crisis, these are mainly Jesids and Christians fleeing from predominantly Islamic countries.
But one group is often completely ignored in the media: the atheists. In many religions (e. g. in Islam) apostasy is considered a punishable offence. And even those who do not belong to any religious community from birth are unfortunately all too often persecuted as “infidels”.

Open apostasy is only the tip of the iceberg. In strictly religious societies, self-determination rights are curtailed in many ways. Thus, religious-critical expressions can lead to social ostracism, even if they do not contain any commitment to atheism.

Drastic invasions of privacy are commonplace in many Islamic countries. Although Western criticism of archaic practices such as forced marriage and forced circumcision is often fought off in a culturally relativistic manner with reference to the supposed “equivalence of all cultures”, it is regularly overlooked that there is massive resistance within the various societies to religious virtue terrorism.