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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Yeap, a lot of slavery in America was perpetuated and validated by religious beliefs. Plantation owners believed that black people were cursed by the mark of ham, and thus were entitled by an act of God to enslave people.
Also, the Bible literally says: "but I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence" 1 Timothy 2:12
So according to Christian dogma, SHE wouldn't be allowed to speak up against men, even if they are breaking some other rules, or try to teach the theatre world anything.
But it's a fair bet saying she's never opened a bible in her life, seeing she can't be bothered to even check out what the story is about when applying for roles.
Edit I realised this might read quite neutral, so I'm adding a fuck monotheism here just to make my view on the matter clear
Eh, fuck all religions, not just monotheism. Religions are the worst, the amount of gods doesn't matter much. They're abusive and a detriment to society and progress.
"Religion" is a every wide term though.
Dogma makes religions bad, but not all religions have dogma. Also when does faith become religion?
I get your point and I don't mind saying fuck all religions, but historically, polytheistic societies were more tolerant and usually pretty progressive. Much less (if any) dogma.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_monotheism#Violence_in_monotheism
Whenever there is a belief in something supernatural, it will be abused, it will end badly, because we're already talking about people believing things without any proof. Sooner or later, a leader will pop up and it's it's rather easy to make these people do your bidding by inventing new wonders or dogma or whatever works for said leader(s)
People need to grow up. Yeah, maybe there is a mighty system operator that manages our simulation, or maybe I'm a Boltzmann brain or whatever. Thinking about it, these two ideas are more plausible than any religion out there, yet we don't have the great Boltzmann church.
Science is finding out reality, maybe we should focus more on that
Idk, I think that's a pretty hard claim to make. One that's mainly dependent on the fact that the majority of written history happened after the advent of monotheism, especially in the west.
If we examine the body of evidence of polytheistic cultures outside western influence, things get a bit more complicated. Especially considering that terms like progressive and tolerant are subjective concepts entrenched in the eurocentric cross-examination of cultures.
In ancient Mesopotamia, people were more able to accept the concept of dualism and polytheism, however they were also much more likely to participate in the destruction of entire cultures to capture the idol of a rival god. How do you weigh that with the modern understanding of concepts like progressiveness or tolerance?
You're literally making my point for me.
"RIVAL" god.
That's the proto-version of dogmatic monotheism. That's the origin of the first commandment. That's THE reason monotheism is so unaccepting and violent.
I'm not going to write a several page essay detailing why this is so. Do you know why Jesus was accepted as a deity to the Roman and Greek pantheons at the time, instead of being seen as a rival god? How the same thing happened later in the North of Europe as well with norse polytheism?
Polytheism by its very nature has more explanatory power, as not every explanation is "God works in mysterious ways" as one god is considered omnipotent and infallible, whereasin polytheism gods are often more humane, fickle, and fallible, despite being very powerful.
Not really. Do you kill everything different from you? Then you're not too tolerant. "Progressive" is also not too subjective. Before the Christianisation of the Nordics, for instance, "Viking" rape laws were far more progressive than their so-called "civilized" European counterparts. On the continent, women were considered property and so rape was a property crime -- there was no "victim," but the father or husband, whose property had been damaged.
That's not really subjective of a take, is it? To think that an attitude of "women are people" is more progressive than "women are things"?
Or do you consider that a subjective thing..?
I beg to differ. I think you're making some assumptions about the innate qualities of polytheistic societies.
Just because deities within certain polytheistic religions were rivals, doesn't imply the advent of monotheism. Most polytheistic religions had sects or cults that conflicted with other sects within the same pantheon.
Okay, then explain the Mongol empire? They were polytheistic, and more liberal with religious freedoms than nearly any other empire in history..... Does their use of violence negate their tolerance?
We can look at branches of the Mongolian empire 200 years later that would transition from polytheism to monotheistic islamist. Did they become more violent after the transition? Nope, they assimilated into the culture and became the local government for generations.
We have no written record of any laws of the Viking. We have second hand information from the perspective of Christian priest, but I'd hardly claim that gives us any information about the actual practice and context of "Viking rape laws".
For all we know these laws could have been based on the same proprietary motivation of monotheistic societies who recorded it. And if you are interpreting secondary sources as your primary sources, then we must assume their other observations of the same culture to be true. That the Viking culture was based on the rape and pillage of Christianity, not exactly a progressive perspective.....
First of all, that argument is entirely dependent on assuming that Viking in Viking culture women were thought of as equals.....which is doubtful. Just because they aren't labeled as property, doesn't mean they weren't second class citizens. More than likely Viking cultures just didn't have the same cultural understanding of property as their monotheistic counterparts.
Secondly, yes with added context that statement is entirely subjective. If a society treats their own women as people, but is perfectly fine with raping and enslaving women in other cultures, are they truly progressive? Or do they just understand that what's good for the cow is good for the farmer?
I do find it funny that one of my primary complaints with this historical interpretation is that it is too dependent on a eurocentric representation of history, and your rebuttals have only been composed of European examples.
Fuck blind faith.
Agreed. I have faith in science, I have faith in people, I have faith in real things.
Religious philosophy is fine. Not everything needs to be crammed into the framework of hard sciences. And the social aspects of religious organizing are no more good or bad than the individuals who take part in it.
You can just as easily find religiously motivated abolitionists as slavers. You can just as easily find religiously motivated homeless shelters as pedophile priests. The spiritualist language used to describe our social bonds is no less legitimate than some Evo-Devo prattle about brain chemicals, at least from the perspective of setting useful policy.
You can just as easily find abusive and detrimental habits in business economics and the hard sciences. Rationalization of a perverse or destructive behavior often follows the decision to embark on it. And you don't need religious beliefs to rationalize bad behaviors.
So just keep the philosophy and ignore any supernatural stories.
You'll never sell any comic books with that attitude
apt comment for a being dubbed UnderpantsWeevil
Yeah, no. How many wars were fought over atheism? None. How many over religions? Too many to count.
The average Catholic is a fine person, I'm sure, but the Catholic church is a horror show. How many people have suffered because of that organization? More than I could count. How many wars has it started? More than I'd like to know.
Want to try a different religion? Any religion? Any cult? Scientology, maybe? No? How about Jim Jones temple of what was it called again?
Individual spiritualism then? In on itself harmless, maybe, but it's still pure nonsense in the level of believing in unicorns and Santa Claus, and it still will end in either groups starting to form, that makes cults that either die out or become organised religion. And in its entire trajectory, it WILL cause suffering and abuse.
Yes, abuse is possible in any organization, but no organization will allow and tolerate abuse as religious organizations do. Give us your money, old grandpa with cancer, god will cure your cancer and return you your money double, I swear! Climate change isn't real, god would not allow it! All our thousands, millions of followers should just continue to pollute the hell out of this world because God will fix it, people! Hurricanes are caused by gay wickedness and women won't get pregnant from rape, god will stop that unless they like it.
I see no positive point in any religion or spirituality that could not be made without it.
So yes, fuck all religions, they're a detriment to the growth of humanity.
But what about the charities then? Charities don't require religion, you can do one perfectly fine without the other, and that ignores that charities only exist due to governments not fixing issues.
The entire Cold War was a protracted struggle between hard right Christian fascists and Communist Rationalists.
Look up the history of the John Birch Society. The entire movement is based on the Chinese Maoist treatment of Western Evangelicals.
Goes even beyond that. Christianity - specifically, the New Testament verses that extolled the virtue of earthly toil on behalf of a secular lord in exchange for heavenly reward - was leveraged to convince the slaves themselves that their lot in life was justified. And for a great long period of time, it was successful. Even after the Confederacy's back was broken, mobilizing a population that had been wiped into submission for centuries was legitimately difficult. The Freedman's Bureau had a herculean effort put at its feet - to engage, re-educate, and empower millions of newly emancipated black men and women after a lifetime of debasement and degradation.
When you get into why Reconstruction failed, a big part of it was like looking at a spouse in an abusive relationship trying to get out from under a hyper-domineering partner and scaling that sociological problem up to the scale of whole cities and states.
I mean that, but also Andrew Johnson was a horrible person and even a worse president
Did you mean to say ham?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham
Yep. God cursed Noah's son Ham and his descendent to eternal slavery. All for the devastating crime of Ham witnessing Noah sleep in the nude.
Cure of Ham