I’ll start! There was a lot of absolutist rhetoric there that said things along the lines of “All Christians are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people!” I think a little nuance is in order, no?
I’ve never liked r/atheism because it just felt like it was mostly populated by teenaged edgelords that treated atheism like a subculture they were into at the moment. Pizza-cutter atheists, all edge and no point.
Everyone else was butthurt and chronically angry. I’d like to see more activism, more community building, more maturity. Less butthurt.Provide rules that require religious tolerance, while still allowing respectful criticisms of said religions.
Basically just avoiding the edge lord/ hate speech stuff.
Over at /r/nihilism we always had a similar issue.
Any posts that are critical of religion should be fact based and impartial as possible. Sources should be required.
As an example:
Posting a rant about how how you don’t like Islam: [deleted]
Posting a link to a news article about the statistical rate of s**ual harassment in the catholic church: “A+”
(Just examples)
All that being said, I think we should more focus on how to live our lives positively and effectively. A lot of people perseve atheists as having no motivations/ being unreliable. I think we should try to overcome that image by focusing on progressing our own “beliefs”, and spreading our message: “Life is what you make it.”
We should also strive to be a safe place for recent refugees of different religious backgrounds. Not only should we be a place of open discussion and critical thinking, but a place of support and recovery. That’s more my opinion, though.
I would love to see posts like:
“Tips on staying positive after recently losing your faith”
“Rebuilding a social network after cutting ties with toxic family”
“How to come out to your religious family as atheist”
“I recently came out as atheist and my family disowned me, what should I do?”
“What are some good movies you’d suggest for an atheist?”
“Here is some art I made as a social commentary on religion”
“Making eye contact during prayer”
Etc…
Seconded.
I personally have adopted an “as long as it’s not hurting anyone” view of religions for individuals and smaller local groups, but I recognize that there’s a lot of factual hurtfulness that goes on systemically. That inherently will try and make this community devolve into intolerance, so there’s a tricky balance of moderating intolerance and welcoming open conversations that I don’t have the answer to.
One thing to keep in mind is that some people are anti religion due to experience. There are a lot of religions that ARE hurting someone by fly under the radar.
For example, I always see people say Lutherans are chill. Look up LCMS, it’s a literal cult. I grew up in it. There is a lot of abuse prevalent in it, ie teaching you how to hit your kid “correctly”.
But then people who speak up about it are labeled as “intolerant” or “edgelords” because “but everyone else told me Lutherans don’t hurt anybody!”
And even beyond that, there can always be specific churches within religions or denominations that are seen as “okay” that are abusing their power to hurt others. I am not going to go out and attack religious people or anything, but I’m also not about to be neutral on the subject when I know it opens up a world of potential abuse.
I am very against requiring religious tolerance, abuse victims require a place at the table.
That’s a very good point that people’s personal abuses play a key role in the intolerance of religion.
It’s a very blurry line between enabling detriment via tolerance, and disabling an inclusive discussion environment via intolerance. And, I’m not sure where that line could be well defined.
If this Atheist community would be prone to being more tolerant, perhaps there could be forums specifically for ex members of different beliefs. For example, I know there was an Ex-Mormon community on Reddit.
I mean, if you have to ban discussion of abuse and send abuse victims somewhere else to be “tolerant” then maybe… You shouldn’t be tolerant?
I think you may be misunderstanding. I’m not saying we should ban discussions of abuse in a misguided effort of tolerance (or at all). I’m saying that we should be careful of overgeneralizations, and that if people would like a space to overgeneralize, it should be on other communities.
Honestly, and I might struggle a bit to explicate this, but I don’t necessarily think that places like r/atheism are without value. I am an atheist, but I’m not “interested” in atheism – one day in adulthood I realized I don’t even think about religion at all anymore. Unless there’s some zealot freak on the news, I forget religion or religious people exists day-to-day, and my general course in life does not bring me into contact with religious people anymore. This is a luxury not shared by all, of course. I was an angry atheist who liked to use words like Christofascism and smirk about the sky daddy. Later in life I went to a Richard Dawkins rally to hear Tim Minchin play and it didn’t have the same resonance for me because my lack of religion was a given.
But when I was in high school? When there was actual social pressure for religion coming down on me? The hostility I took from religious people was remarkable. It could have ruined me. I was angry, then, and at that time in my life I had to be rude and mean and hostile and throw back every insult and strawman I could get to get that freedom from religion. The smirking, fedora atheist with a bad attitude is annoying, and a community of them is not the type of place I want to spend time, but I think it’s so important that they have that community to develop that anger and language when it’s a weapon they need to fight.
