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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Alright, so what? What good does treating them petulantly do? If you cannot treat them in a way where they feel understood and cared for they don't change. If you treat someone poorly or like you are superior they are more likely to double down on their belief and spit in your face. Unless your aim is to bash their faces in and straight up use force you have to see the human in them to get started reversing the programing because a lot of religions preach that unbelievers are evil and the first step in any questioning of the whole is to show that no... You aren't evil. You are moral and kind actually.
What's the end goal of disrespect? To be rude to them for fun?
They're prone to do that anyway.
Why do you say "I have to", like is my obligation and my work to deprogram religious nuts?
You don't have to. Only if you want to try and stop them from being religious nuts that's where you start.
It's not your job to interact with them so don't. If they are actively causing you pain where you are you have a right to defend yourself to get them to stop but like any violence there is a line where you cross from self defence to just taking out your anger and trauma on someone else to make yourself feel better. People who do that make the job harder for those of us who want to stop religious trauma from perpetuating.
Respecting religious belief is part of the healing process of religious trauma. It doesn't mean subscribing to belief in religion. It means seeing the actual human beings inside the system that hurt you.
Not if I'm moderating an atheist site and they come to provoke me and to flaunt their ignorance. Whey they come to my place, they will eat shit if they don't behave.
If "the actual human beings" are indoctrinated beyond any chance of redemption, who says I need to keep trying?
Honestly, you probably shouldn't try. You seem like you are in a bad place at present to attempt to do so. If you do attempt your first motive should not be to change someone else but to do so for yourself.
Harboring an active grudge can be embittering. The brain is plastic. You can over many iterations of leaving the emotion and stimuli connection unchecked can reinforce it and strengthen the connection beyond what logic can undo. It can be unhealthy. A lot of traumatized atheists, or those who continually allow themselves to reinforce that religious people are inferior humans in a meaningful way, can be quite harmful in pluralistic spaces because they become blinded to the line between religious people existing and religious oppression in the exact same way a lot of religious people do. When you allow that to happen it means that religion is still controlling you. If it can hammer your emotional buttons whenever it's present and make you feel attacked just for being around it that is power that owns you. The further down that path you travel the harder it is to undo.
The ability to gain distance and a level of neutrality is actual freedom. It makes dealing with religion feel less personal and gives more space to react in a wider range of ways. The righteousness of perceiving yourself as justified in an overreaction is seductive. You want to bite back harder than you were bit...But every time you do you lose a little bit more of your objectivity. There is a freedom in letting go.
The freedom you're advocating is the freedom to continue letting religious people to cause damage without obstacles and without feeling complicit about it.
No. It's the freedom to engage with them without acting like you're an abused dog reacting at every man in a hat.
I am trans. My advocacy has involved engaging with people who hate that I exist and who are primed to think that I am mentally ill, a logistical problem or that I am a moral threat. I have minor religious trauma myself though I know a lot of my fellows who suffer aggregious mental health problems because of religious trauma due to their parents. Some queer people still believe in that Christian God and detangling that trauma takes a lot of gentle work. I have been learning how to engage debate and advocate with religious people on different levels to de-escalate the harm being done as a matter of long term survival plans. Every person requires different tactics. Being scornful or rough can be used as a goad in the tool kit because some people need to be approached in ways they recognize as authoritative but more often then not it's the tool likeliest to lose ground rather than gain it.
Recognizing the values they have is the first step to getting them to recognize you which is the first step to them re-evaluating what they believe. They have to feel understood and seen before there is a chance they will offer that to you. And sometimes they will snap as a fear response to their veiws being changed but will feel bad for that response later when they don't have their back up against the wall. It's a process and some of that processing happens when you aren't around. If you leave on a note where their take away is "fuck that person is an asshole" they aren't going to spend that time reflecting on their own bad actions. They are going to reflect on yours.
They need to discard magical thinking and bad reasoning. The trauma, they can deal with their therapist.
See that's where we differ. I don't give a fuck whatever they believe. I care how they act on it. I care about mitigating the actual damage they do because I have battles that I care about more than attacking them on whether or not they subscribe to belief in supernatural stuff. If their beliefs are actually doing nothing but giving them comfort that's fine. Being right and being good sometimes require you to pick one or the other. Stripping people of the harmless things that give them comfort isn't exactly a bro move... And "Just stop believing" is an incredibly patronizing way to deal with people. It's just not how it works.
Not to mention if you want to stop someone from actively bad aspects of a religion trying to attack their belief directly is where the armor is thickest . They are trained to reject that out of hand. You can batter that shit all day and go no where. I attack the joints. I use whatever nessisary - I quote their scriptures and philosophies back at them, learn the historic timelines of the politics inside their movements, I approach them with kindness, I approach them using their own language because I don't have fucking time to give a shit whether they in their heart of hearts believe in their superstitions because I don't have time. All that really needs doing is they stop hurting us because all the rest doesn't actually mean anything. Like if they are kind and awesome folk who totally stay in their lane but they believe in Sky daddy or crystals ... Okay whatever. No skin off my nose.
People don't actually choose what they believe. They do weigh their evidence and values but at some level it's out of their control. Sometimes it's because somebody else pops it in your brain at a formative time and that's just part of your conception of the world or some other sense of personal evidence draws you to a conclusion. Did you choose to be an atheist or did you arrive at it independently ? Could you just CHOOSE to believe in Zeus or something as a matter of absolute choice? Probably not. Your beliefs formed because of your personal body of evidence drew you to to that conclusion. That's also how some religiois people arrive at their beliefs . This doesn't always cycle in one direction with religious people always becoming atheists. I know people who were atheists who stopped being atheists and started believing in something else. At some point a certain amount of humility is beneficial. The notion that yeah, we're not completely rational creatures and that other people are allowed to believe stuff that you personally don't agree... They just aren't entitled to cause harm because of it and that also includes you does make the world a better place. If your bar is that you cannot be happy or care about people unless they agree entirely with your stance about the supernatural you are essentially gunna be holding your breath until you turn blue. Like - you can...But having zero chill isn't exactly the most attractive social behaviour.
I despise people who decide how to act based on how much other people will like it.
I think we're done here.