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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Back in the late 80s/early 90s when computers started making it into the homes of the average person, there was a thing going around where they assigned numbers to the letters in the word computer, did some stupid math, and came up with the number of the beast. Computers were the beast.
There's also some bullshit about the W being the number 6 in Hebrew so that means www is the number of the beast and therefore the Internet is the beast.
Right now those same folks are worried that AI is the beast of revelation but I'm not plugged in enough to understand it at the moment.
They really think all numbers are magical and all the bad guys hide their secret codes in plain view so good people can decode them. They also think god is out here hiding secrets in plain view for them to decode.
I mentioned it higher up, but 666 comes from the latin pronouniation of Nero Ceasar, which translated into hebrew is 666. The slightly-earlier greek version used 616, because contemporary authors knew that Nero was in fact The Beast. The reason for the change is that, when speaking in greek, his name was pronounced "neron" ceasar... the original translators that put it into latin knew that and used the 'Nero Ceasar' for gematria. To maintain the meaning.
Other parallels include the neronic persecution of christians lasting 42 months (which is the length given for The Beast's persecution,) the seven heads of the beast represent the 7 hills that Rome was built on, Ireneaus (bishop of lyons, author of 'Against Heresies) was alive around 130 to 202 ce and linked the beast to Nero; being much closer to the historical context, his understanding is illuminating. Similarly, Hyppolytus lived 170 to 235 ce, and was an early scholar of christian eschatology making the same connections.
Simply put, the author of revelation used the prophetic style to speak in a sort of culturally-coded language to relate what nero was and had been doing at a time when talking about it was very dangerous. In modern context, it would be like if someone used prophetic language to describe an "Orange Turd" who was a false prophet and persecuting said illegal imigrants. if it was laced with double-meanings that only illegal immigrants would know, then it would likely be overlooked.
basically the christains around the time of nero would have all recognized what the author was trying to say; cultural context is important, and it wasn't about some future eschatology that could happen thousands of years in the future. it was about current (or recent,) events.
The modern christian eschatology is what happens when you divorce texts from the cultural context in which they were written.