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
Provide rules that require religious tolerance, while still allowing respectful criticisms of said religions.
Basically just avoiding the edge lord/ hate speech stuff.
Over at /r/nihilism we always had a similar issue.
Any posts that are critical of religion should be fact based and impartial as possible. Sources should be required.
As an example:
Posting a rant about how how you don't like Islam: [deleted]
Posting a link to a news article about the statistical rate of s**ual harassment in the catholic church: "A+"
(Just examples)
All that being said, I think we should more focus on how to live our lives positively and effectively. A lot of people perseve atheists as having no motivations/ being unreliable. I think we should try to overcome that image by focusing on progressing our own "beliefs", and spreading our message: "Life is what you make it."
We should also strive to be a safe place for recent refugees of different religious backgrounds. Not only should we be a place of open discussion and critical thinking, but a place of support and recovery. That's more my opinion, though.
I would love to see posts like:
"Tips on staying positive after recently losing your faith"
"Rebuilding a social network after cutting ties with toxic family"
"How to come out to your religious family as atheist"
"I recently came out as atheist and my family disowned me, what should I do?"
"What are some good movies you'd suggest for an atheist?"
"Here is some art I made as a social commentary on religion"
"Making eye contact during prayer"
Etc...
Seconded.
I personally have adopted an "as long as it's not hurting anyone" view of religions for individuals and smaller local groups, but I recognize that there's a lot of factual hurtfulness that goes on systemically. That inherently will try and make this community devolve into intolerance, so there's a tricky balance of moderating intolerance and welcoming open conversations that I don't have the answer to.
One thing to keep in mind is that some people are anti religion due to experience. There are a lot of religions that ARE hurting someone by fly under the radar.
For example, I always see people say Lutherans are chill. Look up LCMS, it's a literal cult. I grew up in it. There is a lot of abuse prevalent in it, ie teaching you how to hit your kid "correctly".
But then people who speak up about it are labeled as "intolerant" or "edgelords" because "but everyone else told me Lutherans don't hurt anybody!"
And even beyond that, there can always be specific churches within religions or denominations that are seen as "okay" that are abusing their power to hurt others. I am not going to go out and attack religious people or anything, but I'm also not about to be neutral on the subject when I know it opens up a world of potential abuse.
I am very against requiring religious tolerance, abuse victims require a place at the table.
That's a very good point that people's personal abuses play a key role in the intolerance of religion.
It's a very blurry line between enabling detriment via tolerance, and disabling an inclusive discussion environment via intolerance. And, I'm not sure where that line could be well defined.
If this Atheist community would be prone to being more tolerant, perhaps there could be forums specifically for ex members of different beliefs. For example, I know there was an Ex-Mormon community on Reddit.
I mean, if you have to ban discussion of abuse and send abuse victims somewhere else to be "tolerant" then maybe.... You shouldn't be tolerant?
I think you may be misunderstanding. I'm not saying we should ban discussions of abuse in a misguided effort of tolerance (or at all). I'm saying that we should be careful of overgeneralizations, and that if people would like a space to overgeneralize, it should be on other communities.
Where does not tolerating religiously motivated hatred and intolerance fit into that framework?
I would classify that as harmfulness that should not be tolerated. However only at an appropriate level of generalization.
Articles about an individual going extremist should be met with disappointment in the individual, and disappointment in a system that would foster that extremism. But to call the whole religion a group of extremists would be too far.
When religion is used to strip away civil rights, I don't think those actions deserve tolerance. Those actions are supported by large populations who were indoctrinated by their regional religion with mythologies that promise a happy afterlife if the members follow their leaders. Efforts to limit education and crticial thinking are used to avoid followers from realising the grift for what it is.
I realise the above is a generalisation, but they are real concerns of mine. At what point is tolerance just complacence?
I used to be one of those toxic circlejerkers on r/ as a newly-deconverted teen with no life, now as a more mature adult I’ve also adopted that more nuanced stance- a major reason why I left that sub a long time ago
What is the point of censoring the word sexual?