Atheism
Community Guide
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Statement of Purpose
- This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
- Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
- If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.
Acceptable
- Honest questions or conversations.
- Discussions on parenting or advice.
- Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
- Atheist memes. We can have fun!
- News headlines relevant to atheism.
Unacceptable
Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.
- Anything against site rules.
- Illegal and/or NSFW material.
- Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
- Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
- Personal attacks or flaming.
Inadvisable
- Self promotion or upvote farming.
- Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.
Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.
Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.
~ /c/nostupidquestions
If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!
Connect with Atheists
- Matrix: #atheism:envs.net
Help and Support Links
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
- The Secular Therapy Project
- Secular Students Alliance
- Black Nonbelievers
- The Clergy Project
- Atheist Alliance International
- Sunday Assembly
- Atheist Ireland
- Atheism UK
- Atheists United
Streaming Media
This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.
- Atheist Debates - Matt Dillahunty
- Rationality Rules
- Friendly Atheist
- Making Sense with Sam Harris
- Cosmic Skeptic
- Genetically Modified Skeptic
- Street Epistemology
- Armored Skeptic
- NonStampCollector
Orgs, Blogs, Zines
- Center for Inquiry
- American Atheists
- Humanists International
- Atheist Republic
- The Brights
- The Angry Atheist
- History for Atheists
- Rationalist International
- Atheist Revolution
- Debunking Christianity
- Godless Mom
- Atheist Freethinkers
Mainstream
Bibliography
Start here...
...proceed here.
- God is Not Great (Hitchens)
- The God Delusion (Dawkins)
- The End of Faith (Harris)
- Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell)
- Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris)
Proselytize Religion
From Reddit
As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.
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Any "genuine" follower of christ would do exactly what Jesus did: lie to get their way.
Please stop pretending there is value in superstition.
Just because I don't believe in sky fairies, doesn't mean I can't reason within the internal logic of the fantasy universe of people who do believe in certain sky fairies.
Why should I excluded myself from navigating the internal logic of certain fantasy sets of rules (like religion) whilst being willing do do so for different fantasy sets of rules (like books)? That's just giving one set of fantasies more importance than another set of fantasies.
Guiding yourself by strict opposition to an external something is still using it as a reference, thus treating it as important.
Would you have tried to gate-keep me like that if I was making comments about the point of view of a character in the Lord Of The Rings universe?!
Please consider the stark difference your false equivalence is attempting to obscure:
Is anyone pretending that Lord of the Rings is nonfiction? No, but adults in positions of power who should know better allow cowardice and vanity to guide them away from reality and we are all suffering for it.
That's still you choosing to acting relative to the values of other people per-opposition to it, not a making of a rational case for people to refrain from understanding that self-contained set of more or less internally consistent rules.
In fact, you're making the opposite case: if there are people whose actions anchored on that self-contained set of more or less internally consistent rules majorly impact others, that's even more reason to try and understand the rules of their fantasy and be capable of making arguments within then so as to maybe sway some such cosplayers from creating problems for other people by misusing the rules of their fantasy to rationalize negativee actions outside their fantasy universe.
The rational/irrational boundary is not in the being able to understand and operate with a set of self-contained rules in a fantasy setting or not, it's in believing or not that said fantasy setting matches objective reality as we perceive it.
I guess you haven't read the bible. It is not remotely consistent with itself or with our reality.
Why can't we treat the root cause instead of symptoms? There is no god, no magic, grow up and focus on reality, kids are dying every day because adults want to pretend magic is real.
Right. Rationally, christ is not real. The bible is fiction, but people are pretending it's not. Why? Because the bible itself repeatedly claims it is not fiction, that the only path to salvation is reading and understanding incomprehensible fables. This does not happen with Lord of the Rings. People necessarily cherry-pick because the bible disagrees with itself. They follow Jesus's example of "make shit up when it suits me".
Ahem:
I made a comparison with Lord Of The Rings exactly because it's a roughly consistent thing but if you dig into the details it's full of inconsistencies, just like all "sacred books" out there.
As for the rest, you clearly have your own magical thinking going on there:
If the problem is that people are doing bad things anchored on their fantasy "logic", then one would expect that you want that to not happen anymore.
Yet all you defend is to not engage with at or near their level or even understand their universe, a restrictive framework that can only accommodate as solutions for the above mentioned problem of them doing bad things one of two options: ignore them or somehow have them jump the full distance from the hole they're in to the level of rationality.
The first option solves nothing, the second option is incredibly unlikely to succeed (one could say it probably requires magic to work).
So either you're not even trying to solve the problem even in the smallest of ways (in which case, I'm afraid you don't have a moral standpoint to preach to others that they should not try to understand religion) or you're relying on approaches that won't work without magic (hence "magical thinking").
Me, I'm willing to come up with a ladder for them to, step by step, rise out of that pit or, at least some way to combat the manipulation of them to do bad things by people who understand that world.
To engage with them whilst they're down there, be it to help out those I can or to reduce how much such people are manipulated into doing harm to others, I have to understand the logic-like rules they're operating under and how other people are manipulating them using those all of which requires at least some understanding of that stuff.
You keep making the same false equivalence. Where is the "fiction" label for the bible? People pretend it is true.
My parents abused me because they believe in the bible, god, and christ. I know what I'm talking about, I was raised in it.
Every human being should be well aware that the abrahamic faiths are intolerable death cults. It is selfish to pretend that magic is real.
I missed the part where Jesus lied. Which part was that?
Reminder: there is no god, there is no magic. Everything he said about being god's son, god's promises and punishments, our inherent sinfulness and more, all lies.
Here's a specific one from the bible, there are more:
Number of people who were standing there and have not tasted death by now: 0
Number of times Jesus returned to Earth with angels: 0