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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.
There is no "spooky action at a distance." We know quantum mechanics does not contain anything that violates the speed of light limit because this is a requirement for special relativity, and quantum mechanics is mathematically compatible with special relativity. The unification of the two theories is known as quantum field theory. There is a proof called the No-communication Theory that shows that there is nothing you could ever do to a particle in an entangled pair that would alter the state of the particle it is entangled with. There is no actual "nonlocal" (faster-than-light) effects between them.
Claims that there is some sort of nonlocal effects either come from bizarre philosophical arguments where you (for some reason) claim that the wave function represents a literal physical entity floating out there in an infinitely dimensional space whereby the observer effect causes it to "collapse" like a house of cards into a single particle (this is just pure fantasy, nothing in the mathematics of the theory demands you believe this), or it comes from people misunderstanding Bell's theorem and believing it proves the universe has nonlocal effects, when Bell's theorem only shows that if you add hidden variables to quantum mechanics then you must introduce nonlocal effects. Since quantum mechanics is not a hidden variable theory, there is no need for nonlocal effects.
The wave function can be used to pick a value from a list of probability amplitudes, and this list of probability amplitudes is called the state vector. The state vector has a probability amplitude for each possible outcome, and each probability amplitude is related to the likelihood of a particular possible outcome occurring. Quantum mechanics assumes nature behaves fundamentally randomly, so the best you can do is make statistical predictions in terms of probabilities.
There doesn't need to be a "deeper" explanation. It's like the kid who always asks "why." There can't always be an answer to the question. Eventually you just have to shrug your shoulders and say, "it is what it is." Otherwise, you get an infinite regress. You have to stop somewhere, and it makes sense to me to stop at our most fundamental scientific theories. Sure, "there could be a lot of things going on," there could be a clown hiding your cupboards, I could be the King of England talking to you right now. Vaguely speculating on how something "could" be possible does not actually, in and of itself, make it reasonable to believe it in it.
Of course, it is always possible all our theories are wrong and get overturned in a major way, but actually believing it is wrong would require an enormous amount of evidence. I stick to interpreting the natural world based on what our best scientific theories for the time tell us. Even if it turns out to be wrong, such as with Newtonian mechanics, well, Newton still had a much more accurate understanding of nature than someone who bases their understanding of nature off of nothing. The fact our theories could potentially be proven wrong is not a good reason to believe in total unjustified nonsense. Whatever you believe in should be well-substantiated by the evidence.
The fact our theories could potentially be wrong, I do not think this is good justification for resorting to pure utilitarianism either, as if we should refuse to ever interpret the natural world because any interpretation has the potential to change one day. Pure utilitarians just treat scientific theories as merely predictive tools, but do not say anything about nature. I prefer to just say we should embrace the change. My understanding of nature is dependent upon our best scientific theories for the time. If, in a thousand years, there is a breakthrough that changes this, I would have still had a better understanding of nature than someone who based their beliefs off of something different than the natural sciences. If that breakthrough happens tomorrow, well, I'd be happy to change my mind. It's not an issue.