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.
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Inadvisable
- Self promotion or upvote farming.
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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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Isn't the idea of rights that they are endowed upon or imbued into each individual by some supernatural authority, like a god? I mean, aren't rights metaphysical, in that they are not context dependent, and exist even outside of time and space itself? Like, the idea of inherent individual rights is that you can remove a person from any given time and place, move that individual to any other time and place, and their "rights" would follow with them, not unlike a soul.
This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase "God given rights" but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.
Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn't about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.
Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it's on the books doesn't mean it's in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.
There is an idea of an international code of human rights... But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.
Seems like liberalism is falling out of favor these days.
Rights are what we agree to as a society.
The things you're describing aren't real.
Well, I didn't construct this description out of thin air. It's based on how the concept of individual rights has been explained to me by various people over the years.
Give an example. That'd help
So, you've been listening to stupid people.
Well, you weren't around. In the future, I'll be sure to consult you first.
It's a type of social contract. In the traditionalist culture, being non-secular, they ascribed it to "God", but, as you know, there is no God, so it was actually up to real people belonging to religious institutions, the clergy. Since the Enlightenment, people have tried to replace God with Nature; this has often been a bad joke with terrible consequences, but eventually secular paradigms took over and tried to reason the contracts into shape, to make them more consistent. There's a lot of philosophy about this and I can't summarize it as easily. But what you're seeing today with Trump and the traditionalists, this anti-secularism, is a desire to return to the pre-Enlightenment state with its contracts and monarchy and aristocracy determined by "God":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being
unfortunately, those are dignities, not rights. rights are a legal contract between you and your governing body. rights are granted. dignities are the things that are intrinsically connected to your personhood, your humanity, or both.
So if your governing body decides you don't have rights, then you don't have those rights.
Edit: it seems like rights are only available to people who have enough power, money, and/or influence over the state to persuade the state to grant them the rights they desire.
That is generally how rights work, yes. But not how rights for people who believe in a humanist moral outlook think should work.
precisely. when we talk about who runs the government and how they should operate it, we are generally (i can't speak for everyone) trying to navigate getting the rights the government grants us to align as perfectly as possible with the dignities we possess
unfortunately, yes. this understanding of what rights and dignities are is what fully converted me to anarchism/communism in college. since the government values greed over all other human forces, our rights will always be more restricted than our dignities. our only hope as common people with net worths south of 1 billion dollars is to resist every chance we get.