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.
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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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Except I'm not drawing it exclusively from one verse.
I'm drawing that conclusion from an understanding of both his nature, and literally that of every other charlatan.
He was faking miracles in order to grift people out of their hard-earned money. Further more, it's quite clear by the same accounts in the gospels that Jesus did not in fact have any beef with rich people, per se, and often enjoyed the benefits wealth brought. (i.e. by staying in their homes.)
There's no reason to imagine Jesus was any better than any other faith-healing grifter.
And lets be perfectly clear here, those gospels also say he said he'd return and do the whole messiah thing, the final judgement, all that, before all of the disciples would have died. that clearly has not happened.
Those gospels were all written well after his death. They're probably about as accurate as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
Mythicism doesn’t paint any better of a picture of whoever came up with the “teachings”.
Either way, whoever started it was scamming people. (I would suggest Paul was from the get go, too, even if Jesus was real.)
That said, if Jesus was real and he claimed to be a messiah, then he would have been expected to do miracles to prove it. So if the most basic part of his claim is true, he’d have had to do a little sumth’n sumth’n
Ah, I can see how you'd interpret the situation that way, if you suppose fake miracles were involved. I'm not convinced there were any miracles, real or fake, rather than such things being added to the account later by charlatans to lend legitimacy to their claims.
Anyone claiming to be the messiah would have had to do miracles. It was basically how a messiah would validate his claims and not get, you know, stoned and left in a ditch somewhere. (and getting people to follow him as he massed an army to make a go at the whole World Domination thing.) the only reason we really know about him at all is because he annoyed the romans enough they got involved. (and that was less about jesus and more that the romans didn't like locals doing their own executions. leaving bodies in ditches is very untidy, and in any case, executions were subject to roman approval, even if Herod could have ordered it.)
In point of fact, the roman occupation and oppression made such messages very very attractive to people. Which, uh. made them very easy to scam. which made grifters pretending to be the messiah and scamming them rather common. Simon bar Giora, John of Giscala, Menehem ben Judas all come to mind.
Just like people claiming Trump is the antichrist is compelling to certain segments today.
None of what Jesus is recorded as teaching is even all that new. People have been saying that people should be basically decent. But what that meant to Jesus was something rather different than what it means to us. We read far too much of our modern understanding of things into the gospels. Jesus literally had more to say about paying taxes to oppressors than he did about slavery- and yet, slavery was such a common institution that he would have seen it daily.
He would have seen slaves on a near-daily, especially after going into Jerusalem; yet never once dd he say anything about it. never once did he go to a slave market and start flipping tables.
Suffice it to say, that if there was a historical Jesus, he was an ironage charlatan who was saying what people wanted to hear, in order get money from them. And you'll notice, they kept moving around? yeah. That's so the people that gave money and didn't get healed couldn't find them.
if there wasn't a historical Jesus... then whoever came up with all that shit is just as bad, and just as much charlatans. (and they too were faking miracles, supposedly.)
Every last word of that could be true and it still doesn't make any difference in how right or wrong the spiritual lessons are. Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, love your neighbor as you love yourself, worship in spirit and truth instead of following religious dogma, watch out for hypocrites and the predatory leaders of religious institutions, etc etc. Those are far more important to me than the nonsense religious sects quibble over like whether Christ actually did miracles, how a man or woman should keep their hair, baptism, and other superstitions.
You mean, charlatans, liars and cheats? Like. You know. Jesus?
Whether or not Jesus did any miracles (or indeed faked them) is actually the essential question here. Miracles are how he demonstrates he has divine authority- which directly translates into "moral" or "spiritual" authority. without the divine authority, he's just another dude, right? taking that a step further, and going beyond simply not doing them, but actually faking them... yeah. That's even worse.
But in any case, you need to actually look at what Jesus actually taught. He was a jewish fundamentalist, insisting on the supremacy of, and a strict adherence to the torah and the commands of prophets. and there is a lot- and I mean a truly astonishing amount- of horrific shit in there.
Let me explain this another way. I'm sure we could find a few times Hitler said a few nice things. Do you worship Hitler? of course not. Hitler was a fucking monster. Or Stalin? Mao? Trump? All of them have almost certainly said a few things that are "nice"... but mostly they're just monsters. (with a critical difference that all of them were actually world leaders rather than presumed wannabes.)
Just because Jesus seems to have said some things that sound nice and stuff, doesn't make him a moral or spiritual authority any more than it would any one else. and it certainly doesn't make him someone or something to be worshiped.
Big yikes. It's clear you have a huge chip on your shoulder about all this. You're insisting on your own interpretation because it gives you justification to look down on believers no matter how reasonable their faith. Because of that dependency you're unlikely to accept any other viewpoint, so I'm going to put this "conversation" out of its misery. Toodle-oo.