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.
view the rest of the comments
Okay, tap the breaks. America is absolutely a nation of Catholic and Protestant migrants, with much of the lower half dominated by Spanish/French missionaries while the northeast was originally settled by English, French, German, and Scandinavian Protestants fleeing the 30 years war, the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars, and their attendant aftershocks.
De-Christianization in the US is a very new phenomenon, largely stemming from the economic expansion of the post WW2 era and the rapid circulation of professional workers during the Reagan Era. To say we "were never a Christian nation" you really need to explain where all these damned churches came from. Some of them are really old.
Yes, but we've been having religious revivals in this country straight back to before the original founding. A big part of our history involves different sects of religious diaspora migrating to the US as refugees fleeing this or that pogrom, from French Huguenots fleeing to Louisiana to West New York Mormons fleeing to Utah to Polish Jews fleeing to Brooklyn to Black Baptists fleeing to Harlem.
The "In God We Trust" thing was the comical low-hanging fruit passed by a 1950s Congress that wanted to conflate the broadly popular idea of Christian religious doctrine with the far more controversial idea of Market Capitalism.
Yeah, the people that came to build european colonies on this land were christian extremists, but that doesnt make America a christian nation... Especially since the very foundation of the nation, a staunch separation of church and state with no law establishing one religion over another, was one of the very beginning principles.
Its right there in the first amendment.
America is a land where religion should have no more presence but between a person and their god, as far as Jefferson was concerned at least, and I'm sure many other founders shared that sentiment.
Not anymore. But that's a product of the current generation divesting (or simply losing touch with) the religious communities of their elders. Go back 40 years and you could very credibly claim that America was a Christian Nation in every way that mattered. Billy Graham was a fixture in every White House. Religious fundamentalism was driving foreign and domestic policy. Individual elected delegates were de facto required to be members of large religious communities in order to take and hold office or mobilize large bodies of political activism.
The First Amendment has no teeth. Religious minorities in the US are routinely persecuted, by the state, both explicitly and implicitly for their membership and their beliefs. This hit the ceiling in the wake of 9/11, when any kind of Muslim religious affiliation was borderline criminal. Police wiretapping and surveillance and extrajudicial punishment of Muslim individuals and groups (very obvious breaches of the 4th and 5th and 8th amendments) was routine. People were deported entirely on the grounds of their religious affiliation. States passed laws outright banning the practice of Sharia custom and culture. And that's just in the last few decades.
You can find all sorts of crazy prohibitions, sanctions, and outright persecution of religious minorities, from the hounding of Mormons across the American Midwest to the denial of legal asylum to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.
Okay, sure, that's a beautiful ideal. But it isn't the reality on the ground. Certainly not in a country where clery post the names and addresses of abortion providers, encourage their congregants to kill them, and then suffer no meaningful legal culpability.
The separation between church and state, in practice, is a fig leaf that serves more to protect religious institution from taxation and regulation than to keep religious beliefs from affecting public policy or election results. If anything, it has created a kind of paradox in which religious leaders have more influence over politics than lay congregants.
The United States of America, the nation standing above all others as being most desperately in need of being put out of the collective misery of all the people of the Earth. I wish I had something positive to say about it however I have that odd compunction against lying.
Well fuck the United States, it is a shithole of a country (despite hoarding a good chunk of the worlds money and power).
Turtle Island though? That place is dope.
If you've never felt the need to lie, you've lived a blessed existence.
It’s a common theme. Why lie? Why live in denial blaming demons for urges when if you face reality you live a much happier existence.
Cause your parents will throw you out of the house if they know your true feelings toward people of the same gender or what's in that vape pen.
Cause your teachers will fail you if you express your real political views or historical understanding on a term paper. Or your future prospective employer won't hire you, if they know you've got union sympathies.
Cause the ER won't treat you if they know you're pregnant, in a state that has made it politically dangerous to care for someone having a miscarriage.
Cause your migrant status means always lying about your real nationality.
Cause you live in a Christian Nation and your financial, social, and physical well-being are predicated on people believing you aren't some kind of baby-eating Satanist for holding heretical beliefs.
When the truth is an excuse to do violence against people, lies are a commonplace means of self-defense.
Your entire rebuttal is right wing fantasy. Not everyone has religious parents they live with, let alone have the need to lie to constantly. You may perceive this country as religious, but it is not, by law. Law and money run things in this country. Not sky Fairies.
Not a right-wing fantasy. Its what happens when you live in a right-wing community.
When the law and the money believe in the sky fairies, they will enact the Sky Fairy Will in some truly brutal fashion.
This would require the sky fairy to be real. Your culture is on its way to the landfill. All you have are two bit con artist snake oil salesmen like Kenneth Copeland, filling their pockets. Morons. Scum. The death rattle of a bygone era, relegated to the dustbin of history. You should stop fighting progress, they’ll be the ones your children will grow to love.
Kill in the name of God and your victim will be just as dead as if you killed for secular reasons.
Thinkers have been making this claim since the first Enlightenment, back in 1685. But people are as prone to reading messages in their tea leaves now as they were a millennium ago. I don't see any evidence to conclude that modern day Satanic Panics are less likely than they were under Reagan. And given the number of TV ghost hunters and TikTok psychics and QAnon Shamen I see popping up in my social media feeds, we're no less likely to kick off another Salem style witch hunt than we were 300 years ago.
My guy, I need to see some progress before I worry about fighting it.
Christians are only 3% in Norway, soon to be worldwide
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway
They're still over 60% of the population of the United States. They get some illegal special treatment here. There's some push back but it's always an uphill battle. The country is no less a pit than Saudi, the preferred imaginary despot is just v2.0 instead of v3.0.
35% at most, even then , only maybe 5% actually MAGA yeehawdists
Where are you getting these numbers from? I'm seeing 70% from Pew Research and 69% from Gallup being some kind of Christian. As for the Christian Fascism in the country I'm seeing 30% from NPR would still support our wannabe dictator even if convicted of crimes.
Brutal violence , like good Christian folk. Cowards can’t even have a conversation without trying to threaten people.
Edit: typical Conservative, threatening people to intimidate them, then erasing it. Cowards
I think you've lost the thread. They are explaining why you are privileged not to have to lie by giving examples of situations that would compel many people to lie.
Would you say that you've been in any of those situations?
The whole lying bit itself was a "lost the thread" moment because it was in response to someone saying that they couldn't say something nice about USA without lying. Which has nothing to do with lying to protect yourself or your position. Turning an offhand "I don't like lying" into a lecture about privilege isn't going to win any allies.
Lost the thread to a theist on an atheist instance. Lol sure. Atheist are not as incredibly dumb as theists and have a bit more logical thought than that.
Now I think you're a loser because you've lost the thread and misinterpreted what I said to mean you're losing.
I am not a theist and I see that you're just not paying attention to what you're responding to. Almost like Christians to preach while closing your eyes and ears.
When you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger. Go ahead IDGAF
Nope, felt the need to occasionally. I just don't it frivolously.
Nation of christians and christian nation are two very different things, despite using the same words. America has historically been populated by a Christian majority, but from its foundation America has existed with separation of church and state as one of its core principles
A nation of Christians will form a legal and social system with decidedly Christian characteristics.
Its foundation has been one of a detente between Catholics and Protestants, in an era when Europeans were slaughtering one another over this schism. But come on. You can't possibly have missed that every President from George Washington to Dwight D. Eisenhower came from the prevailing Protestant majority? Or that a host of our legal tenants emerged from Biblical precepts and taboos?
So what if there's no officially designated National Pope. How many politicians made their start campaigning from the pulpit? How many turned to their congregations to fund raise and canvas for votes? How many are literally clergymen? Mitt Romney is an ordained Mormon Bishop, ffs. You can't just ignore that.
No, they won’t form anything. The Law will smack them in their seditious treasonous faces.
When the cops are overwhelmingly Trump supporters, I'm not holding my breath.
Cops who have to follow the what? Is it follow the law ? Or follow their bible? Choke on it as you spit out.
In a Christian Nation, the Bible trumps secular laws. And we've got a majority on the SCOTUS that seem content to whittle away secular authority in favor of religious impulse.
Citation needed. This is not a Christian nation.
Which version of the Bible exactly? So many translations and editions I can’t keep track. Just like the house speaker joke, they’re all fighting for control and stabbing each other in the back. It’s a really good thing you people aren’t better educated.
The Mormon One, given the current direction of American politics.
It must be an easy life to be so simple minded.