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.
view the rest of the comments
Jesus likely existed. It's easier to imagine the steps from an influential cleric to messiah-myth than an early church conspiracy to weave a savior whole cloth.
There is little evidence, but that's exactly what you'd expect from a 2,000 year old narrative. What we know about emperors of the time is scant and largely mythical. If an accurate record of the life of an impoverished Rabbi from 1st Century were available, that'd be miraculous in itself.
Plus there is the textual argument that u/BrotherL0v3 makes.
Third option: no historical character but no conspiracy either. Just a bunch of folkloric stories evolving across few generations, before there was even a church to speak of.
They all start from a simple common ground, as simple as "what if the messiah already came?". That idea spawns a bunch of stories, highly divergent from each other. The stories with no narrative appeal get forgotten; some survive, and people telling those stories add small details to them and "update" a few details. Eventually what used to be just "the messiah already came" becomes "the messiah already came, his name was Yehoshua ben Yoseph, he multiplied fish and bread, the Romans killed him, he said «LOL JK» in the third day. All accordingly to Yahweh's plan".
Eventually one of those stories catches the attention of a few Greek writers, and Christianity is born.
Some of those stories don't make much sense to be developed that way. For example, the Gospels go to great lengths to attach Jesus to King David, and part of that is a conveluted census story to get him to be born in Bethlehem. If you want your Messiah to be from Bethlehem, then why not just make him be from Bethlehem?
Conversely, if he was a real person from the poduck village known as Nazareth, then it makes more sense. They still want to make the King David connection, so they invent this census story so he can be born in the "right" place.
Then there's the problem that he died in a manner reserved for the dregs of society. What kind of god does that? This is a really big deal to people of the time. They care a lot about having a decent burial, and crucifixion victims are left to have their bodies picked at by carrion animals and then tossed into a mass pit grave. No one at the time would have come up with this fate for their revered figure.
So again, they're dealing with a real person with widely known facts about his life, and it's really inconvenient for spreading their message. So they cram this Nicodemus guy in the story as a rich benifactor. He has some political pull to take Jesus body down and put it in a brand new fancy tomb. He has little else to do in the story, and isn't mentioned in Acts or by Paul or anywhere else. He only gets mentioned by John, which is the latest gospel.
So likely Nicodemus gets inserted in there to deal with the manner that Jesus died, but the story of his death wouldn't have been a method they'd make up in the first place.
@frezik @lvxferre
How can he be descended from king David AND be the product of a virgin birth from God?
I mean, I wouldn't expect consistency here. In fact, a lot of the argument in favor of a historical Jesus is that the story doesn't make much sense unless they were trying to work around inconvenient facts about an actual person. Kinda like how L Ron Hubbard has a story about how he saved a young woman from a satanic cult (in actuality, he stole Jack Parsons' girlfriend and life savings).
If you want an apologist answer, then it's that both Mary and Joseph were descended from David. Several generations removed, mind you. They weren't closely related as far as we know.
Matthew and Luke both give alternate genealogies, and apologists say that one is for Mary and the other for Joseph. Which one is which isn't clear. These are usually the same people saying that you can't read between the lines of the Bible; you must take the words as they are. And yet, you can't reconcile those two genealogies without somehow assuming something that isn't in the text.
@frezik
The bible itself is the best evidence against the truth of the bible & the existence of God. 🤔