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Atheism
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Statement of Purpose
- This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
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Connect with Atheists
- Matrix: #atheism:envs.net
Help and Support Links
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
- The Secular Therapy Project
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- Black Nonbelievers
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- Atheist Alliance International
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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
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Orgs, Blogs, Zines
- Center for Inquiry
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- 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a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.
You can really go down a pretty deep rabbit hole here.
Strictly speaking, atheism is the lack of a belief in a god or gods. A-without, theism-belief in god(s)
There are religions out there that don't have a figure you can easily identify as a god, certain types of Buddhism for example, and so you wouldn't necessarily be wrong in calling followers of those religions "atheists"
But that's of course somewhat at odds with how we normally use the term atheism, and them prevent confusion we'd normally refer to these as "non-theistic religions" instead of "atheistic religions"
You can also get into the weeds about what even counts as a god, for example, certain types of taoism/daoism don't really have any particular god-like figures, but they do have the tao/dao (roughly translating to "path" sort of a natural order the the universe that you should try to be in sync with.) Is the dao a god? It's certainly not a personal god, something you can pray to and expect to get an answer back from, or that can/will intervene in the universe, it just sort of is and you're either on the path or you're not. You could certainly argue that it is a god, if an impersonal one, but it's definitely not what most people would think of as a god.
You can also have religions that don't really have anything they'd identify as a "god" but might have other lesser supernatural entities, things like spirits, demons, angels, ghosts, fairies, djinn, etc.
There's also UFO religions, where aliens are the primary figures and often a lot of their supernatural abilities might be explained away as just very advanced science is centuries beyond our own capabilities.
Going the other direction, you could theoretically have someone who believes that there is some sort of god out there, but makes no attempt to pray to them, worship them, doesn't take part in any sort of ritual or culture having to do with that belief, and pretty much just acknowledges that the god exists but that its existence has no particular impact on that person's life or the universe in general. You could very well call that person a non-religious theist. Many deists would fall into this sort of category.
Something I wish got a little more attention in these sorts of discussions is ignosticism/igtheism/theological noncognitivism, which is the camp I put myself into when I'm feeling really nitpicky, and I like to sum up as:
Theism: I believe that there is a god or gods
Atheism: I do not believe that there are any gods
Agnosticism: I'm not sure if there is a god, and maybe we can't ever know for sure
Ignosticism: What the fuck do you people even mean by "god." No one has come up with a clear definition yet so this argument is pointless.