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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Seems like liberalism is falling out of favor these days.
Well yes... Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We've had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.
But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it's a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it's day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.
Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it's evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.
Yes, liberalism has an important historical significance. It also has a specific historical context. Unfortunately, many academics and intellectuals came to see it as a permanent, natural state; as the only paradigm that should, or even can, exist.
I think many people of today underestimate how popular the idea of "the end of history" was after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The idea that liberal "democracy" and capitalism represented the last and only sociopolitical/socioeconomic system humanity would ever need - that it was the culmination of all human history - was adopted by nearly every elite member of society. History was over, there was no alternative, and we shouldn't try to develop humanity any further. Not only was any significant change unnecessary and undesirable, it was harmful and destructive. Human civilization had to stay in a permanent state of arrested development essentially forever.
This thinking was not restricted to just a vocal minority, it was the consensus, and with Marxism-Leninism defeated, there was no ideological opposition. Liberalism (neoliberalism, liberal democracy, capitalism) was the unquestioned champion and there were no more challengers.
But history had not ended, and no paradigm, however dominant, can remain in place permanently. Change is inevitable, humanity and civilization continue to evolve, and as new historical and material conditions emerge, so too will new ideas, just as liberalism did in its time and place.
Humanity is facing incredible challenges, and I'm not sure liberalism has all the tools necessary to adequately address all of them. Maybe no one ideology does. Maybe we need to take a post modern approach and look at all the different ideas and philosophies as tools in a tool box, and simply use whichever one we think might work best to address a specific problem. Then again, maybe humans don't work that way, maybe the patchwork approach of "just do whatever works" is incompatible with a natural human desire to have a grand, unified, overarching ideological paradigm in place.
Regardless, I think liberalism's ideological hegemony is rapidly falling apart. I fear it will be replaced by something worse, and by "worse" I mean even less sufficient for addressing the many challenges facing humanity today. I think that's happening because liberalism became so entrenched, so rigid and so immovable. I just hope it's not too late to come up with something better.