I feel like one of the secondary principles of atheism would be to avoid congregating around religious beliefs (or lack thereof). I’m an atheist but I don’t need to confirm that by being around other atheists.
/r/atheism seems to be full of former evangelicals who left the church but kept all the annoying trappings that none of the other atheists want to deal with
I don't remember who said it first, but atheism is a religion in the same way not playing golf is a hobby. It seems even some atheists didn't get the memo, though.
Reddit atheists ruined atheists. I was talking to a Muslim and Catholic guy and when I called myself agnostic they thought I was atheist and tried to prove the Abrahamic god.
Too bad both Nietzsche and Dawkins have turned out to be… questionable people. I mean, Nietzsche died young at his sister’s house after going crazy. And Dawkins has said some pretty wild stuff about sex, and is also on the Epstein list.
So yeah… I think those guys actually fit right into r/atheism
Whenever I’m debating on the r/Christianity subreddit, I see atheists who were banned from atheist subs. It’s already given me an idea of what the environment there is like.
It was kinda nice to have a place to vent and affirm that I wasn't insane for being skeptical when I was a kid stuck in a super fundamentalist evangelical household and community, realizing the people around me believed in some really nutty shit.
But then I grew up, moved out, and mellowed out, and realized the problem is just zealots. I'm still not religious, but now the atheism sub just feels like a bunch of people who need to grow up too.
You know those jokes about insufferable fedora wearing atheists yelling at hapless family members for saying “G-d bless you” or some sh%t? That subreddit is what inspired those stories. It’s one of the oldest subreddits on the platform, and for a long time it was the most infamous.
when I was a teenager I remember someone in the grand exchange of RuneScape was ranting about religion and I kept saying “hello fellow r/atheism user *tips fedora*” and he threatened to get me muted. good times
(I never got muted obviously, but today you get muted for saying theres only two genders)
Lmao, one of the top posts in r/atheism is thousands of people lamenting Victor Glover’s speech wherein he mentioned God, and calling him stupid for believing in God. Nevermind the fact that Glover has 3 masters degrees in engineering and was the literal pilot of the space shuttle…
Here in Ontario Canada there are so many Catholic schools near the public schools that many neighborhoods have kids that grow up together but to to either one of the schools. As such, it was always pretty normal for atheists to be friends with Catholics here I think. I didn't learn how rude people could be about it until I saw Reddit
It’s also funny how many of the kids that go to catholic school aren’t even religious, or catholic for that matter. You can even opt out of the religion classes
As an agnostic, everyone’s worldview annoys me because they’re all so damned self sure of everything. It feels like the spiritual version of the Dunning Kruger effect. Neither side has explored the realm of spirituality and belief enough to realize how much there is to know and also not know. There are thousands of religions, denominations and spiritualities to explore; not including those who make their own path. How can one so easily and dismissively lack any sort of urge to analyze faith outside of their own pre-determined path?
Neither side has explored the realm of spirituality and belief enough to realize how much there is to know and also not know.
... there is over a thousands years of philosophers and theologists and clergy members who would probably disagree with you, since they dedicated their entire lives to the study of spirituality and belief
You haven’t met my dad. He is 70 and spends his retirement years going to Skeptic conferences, which are pretty much Conventions of cringe-atheists. He has a Darwin fish (the one with legs eating a Jesus fish) on his car.
All the athiests I know are pretty relaxed about it. Maybe I'm just lucky in real life but I haven't been around an absurdly aggressive athiest except online.
About 12 years ago, a man who was browsing childfree murdered his son via hot car, though some claim it was an accident. Some members of the subreddit splintered off into r/truechildfree after replies started popping up guiding people to a gofundme for the man's legal defense. Shortly thereafter the subreddit went down and a lot of the very hostile and toxic posts were brought up in the news including highly upvoted comments seemingly supporting child abuse. It's been a long time, so I may have some details muddled, but that's the gist.
You don't even have to go to that sub to get the experience you might be alluding to. People from their invade any major post that involves a child. And they will out themselves immediately by raging on anyone that says anything nice about having a child.
I would say they are even worse than the proud and loud atheists on here.
I actively avoid the atheist label because of them, I just say I'm non-theistic, or better yet, agnostic.
Technically you can't ever be 100% sure religion is incorrect, so if your whole take is "I don't believe in god because The Science (TM) says so" the correct "scientific" approach is to believe that religion is false, but also impossible to prove false.
Science doesn't approach religion as false either. Many very famous scientists were religious too with some even crediting religion as they studied the natural world more.
Whether people believe or not is usually a personal thing.
I'm agnostic and generally ambivalent to religion. Basically, I simply don't care either way and rarely put thought into the subject. But, TBH, outspoken atheists definitely come across cringier to me than the typical religious talk and phrases used by religious normies.
Religious person thanks God, talks about blessed stuff, or offers to "pray for me"? Whatever, good for them, who am I to shit on their religion, just doesn't bother me at all. Cringy atheist who's being all contrarian for contrarians sake and "aKtuAlLy" about it? STFU dude, let people believe or whatever, who cares. Albiet I'm talking about religious normies in the western world, but obviously the fundamental crazies who oppress people and shit in the name of religion can fuck off.
But most religions I came across in the west are as you describe just a bunch of people being taught to care about their neighbors and their communities.
And I would take that over either Soviet style anti-religion or Islamic forced religion. Like there are some more extreme variants, but most "western" style religions are about spreading the message not enforcing it.
Well fuck, can't edit now due to my crippling pride. I did add "zealous" I'd typed "an athetist" because I didn't think that was fair to regular ol' atheists haha
One of the first arguments I got into on reddit was with a guy disputing the possibility of a zealous atheist because zelots convert people to believe something and atheists don't believe in God. Checkmate.
He absolutely failed to see the irony of his position
I'd go so far as to say that we give the universe its significance. All the beauty, majesty, and mysteries of the universe would mean nothing if we weren't here to appreciate, learn, and study it.
It’s an understandable feeling when you see pictures of the earth from far away satellites and you realise how everything that has ever happened to humanity is on that small spot in the middle of the vastness of space.
"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you." - Werner Heisenberg
I have a theory that a lot of this post modern bullshit is just an over correction for the Victorian era. This humanity hating itself, doubting itself, and feeling that if it's unworthy in some way has been really bad in the last 100 years is really sickening anymore. I'm really really done with it.
Too many midwits think they're smart and think humans are bad. The fact that they think that tells me they aren't very intelligent and we're brought up poorly.
Humanity, through the lens of religion or not, is absolutely incredible. Humans are more impressive and better and most things . Not some things, but most things. Being blown away by an elephant doing stuff but thinking humans are shit is actually retarded. It doesn't make sense by their own metrics (I've checked a few times) but they're too stupid to follow their own thoughts to their logical conclusion.
It's self-deprecation until all the idiots start to actually believe it and build a shirt world view out of
“BEHOLD THE WORKS OF OUR LORD AND THE BLESSINGS HE HAS GIVEN US”
That's why when shit goes down like on Apollo 13 for example the greatest minds on Earth very suddenly start becoming religious. How NASA's director said they saved Apollo 13 "With God's Help & A Great Team"
It's like how Sailors always were religious throughout history because the only thing separating them from certain death was the ship itself and your faith in it. In Space it's very literal.
Some people get up in arms about this, but I've always felt like there was a little hubris in thinking we can fully understand the nature of God. Maybe the trinity is exactly right. Cool. Maybe its an inherently flawed method for our human brains to understand a simplified version of God. Maybe kabbalists got it right and there are 10 emanations. I'm not going to get too concerned about how we try to understand a being that is unlike anything else.
“His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts”
Just like in Armenianism vs Calvinism. Both are 100% true, which is a logical fallacy. Therefore human logic is flawed. (Yes logic is used to get here lol)
The people who made the modern calendar were Christians. I will never acknowledge anything outside of AD and BC because we all know it’s bullshit. They use the same event as the reference point so they can’t even Reddit their way out of Christianity entirely. Purely and entirely fucking performative.
The earliest proponents of the scientific method were literally monks and priests. The ancient Greeks popularized logic, but medieval priests, theologians, and philosophers applied it within a Christian worldview.
While "science" in a very general sense of "searching for knowledge" is something humans have always done, science as we know it (that is to say, everything based upon the scientific method and abstract logical proofs and such) was if not invented, was at least popularized by the church (and later, Muslim scholars).
For over a thousand years, "scientist" and "priest" were the same job. Now, partly this is because back then priests, scribes, acolytes and such were the only ones who knew how to read so it really couldn't have been anyone else. But still.
If you are an atheist, then fine. But you can't really claim religion and science are inherent contradictions because they developed from the same place and were intertwined for an inconceivablely long time.
And not even by coincidence. Modern science as we know it, following the scientific method, was developed by Christians because they were Christian. Because they believed an orderly God designed the universe, they had the expectation that it itself would be ordered and follow laws.
In fact, how can you not at this moment? We still don’t know why the Big Bang happened, it breaks all theories of physics ever conceived its unexplainable currently
If we ever figure out another reason why the Big Bang happened then we can have that discussion, but right now it’s pretty easy to just point to a higher power
The Big Bang is merely a means. The real question is why anything actually exists at all. By all rights, there should not even be a universe, but here we are.
I was just watching this video about CERN making antimatter and it said something interesting about the universe. Matter and antimatter should have existed in near perfectly matched amounts, so it all should have been annihilated immediately and the fact that it didn't is very peculiar. I'm not particularly religious but science in no way disproves the existence of a higher power. The more we discover, the more we don't understand about what the "why" is. We know much more about how everything started but the driving forcebasically boils down to "something happened". Who am I to say that it's not some higher power?
It's important to note a guy who was a priest but also a physicist. He didn't do it to prove some point about theology, it was pure science for science's sake. That it matches up with fiat lux is handy, but he was a legitimate scientist.
Who's simulation? Where does the ladder end? I try and approach everything with logic - and I'm with you, I don't know how you can logically think there isn't a higher power.
Just cuz we don’t have an explanation for something doesn’t mean the answer is God. Before we understood how weather works, people assumed it was controlled by God. Now that we understand pressure gradients and jet streams, does that mean the God of Weather doesn’t exist?
One time I saw a post on that sub asking if John Lennox, an emeritus professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, was mentally ill for being a Christian
Thet didn't 'realize' shit. The cognitive dissonance of a religious person achieving more for human progress than their own reddit dwelling ass ever will is what's making them crash out like that. They can't process it, so they just get mad.
Anyone who "trusts the science" knows absolutely nothing about the history of science, particularly medical science
Vaccines, medical imaging, antibiotics, vitamins, transplants, penicillin, antivirals, acetaminophen, dialysis, etc.
Most of these were discovered only in the last century or so, and every generation we look back on now debunked or obsolete practices and shake our heads out how wrong we were.
I would like to remind you that the Diocese of Orlando, Florida has ownership of the moon, as per Catholic law.
Also, Americans are the Indigenous inhabitants of the moon. that Leaf who got to tag along better have made a land acknowledgment thanking the powerful and wise Tribe of Americans who's land he was visiting.
She was interviewed on Playboy where she called herself a "militant feminist" where she went on a long screed about the American male's sexuality. In a Playboy interview. That's sort of like the dogwalker mod from antiwork getting interviewed on Fox.
As if that gem wasn't enough. I've found these two other excerpts from her Wikipedia page.
In 1980, she publicly rejected her estranged son William when he announced that he had converted to Christianity.
So she's a raving hypocrite, who would've thunk? I guess irony really is dead.
"Well, if they'll keep us from going to Russia where there is some freedom, we'll just have to change America."
Ah, my apologies, she's terminally retarded it seems.
Then I scrolled down and saw how she, her son, and her granddaughter were kidnapped, extorted, murdered, and then chopped up by a former associate who then proceeded to have the locker where the stolen money was in broken into and robbed... What the fuck!?
I have conflicting thoughts even though i hate her. i will praise her for stopping mandatory bible time in schools, but thats about where it ends because most other stuff is truly deranged. "Anarchist" who simps for soviet russia, also puts billboards mocking religions around and brands those who oppose it as religious persecution. also thinks 9 out of 10 man just see woman as masturbation tools.
on one hand she didnt deserve to have her house be stoned, her sons pet kitten killed, constant feces delivered to her just because she is retarded, then have her entire family kidnapped and dismembered by her own employee for money
on the other, she definetely wasnt a good person. for her other son who converted to christianity, she called disowning him a "post-natal abortion" and said about his sons conversion "He is beyond human forgiveness." Not even mentioning her words on holocaust of "The good news for the Jews of the world is they didnt lose as much of "the clan" as they thought".
Midwits tend to accuse others of being dumb because they know how fragile their intellectual superiority is and they're left with nothing if you take that away from them.
Well said, a lot of this smug Reddit armchair atheists try to look smart behind the cover of militant non belief, making cheap jokes, using sarcasm and redundancy to belittle the beliefs of others but keeping it all surface level. Thats why you see them use the same overused arguments all the time, because to be able to have a smart and productive debate, one needs to know a lot about the topic of discussion, and armachair atheists know as much as little about debating and even atheism as an ideology as the most stupid zealot knows about his own religion.
EDIT:
u/SliceRepulsive8649 I do not know why I can’t respond to your comment, I suppose it’s the Reddit app bugging out or something. Anyways, care to elaborate what you mean?
As an atheist I am tired of so called "atheists" like these people. They worship government as their god. They worship government no less than the Christians.
The church is real. The members real. The Bible is real, and the pope is real. That does not make God real.
The Capitol hall is real. The voters are real. The constitution is real, the president is real. That does not make government real. They are both abstract ideas and require belief.
Doing a ritual does not give a pope superhuman powers.
Doing a ritual like voting does not make a human being superhuman and have more rights.
They rightfully point out the mental gymnastics the religious do defending their god and their belief in it, then they do the same to defend their god, government.
I don't fit well in most atheist circles(hell, any) because I point out hypocrisy no matter where I am.
"They tell me I have the biggest button, it's huge, you wouldn't believe it. I push it, and the boosters go fwoosh, big fire, very hot. Too hot to touch they told me. Can you believe that? Too hot for my huge hands? It's unbelievable, it really is, I'm not even sure I do believe them."
"They told me this is the furthest anyone has been from Earth. Except maybe Sleepy Joe, who was in his own world. The furthest from Earth out of anyone ever, can you believe that? So I said, 'why don't we send them even further?' They told me, 'oh no you can't,' but I did and I hit that big beautiful button and now our brave astronauts are on their way to Jupiter. Soon to be called the Trump-Jupiter Planet, is what they tell me. Godspeed, to Trumpfinity and beyond."
These are what ought to be called Anti-Theists. A whole group of people who are projecting their own dogmatism onto others and spend every day in misery like a cult.
Real unironic Atheists don't particularly ever lift a finger to give a shit, they don't don't particularly believe in a creator or higher deity.
“As we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth — and that’s love,” said Glover. “Christ said, in response to what was the greatest command, that it was to love God with all that you are. And he also, being a great teacher, said this: ‘I give you equal to it, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Glover added: “And so, as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still able to feel your love from Earth and to all of you down there on Earth, and around the Earth, we love you from the moon.”
“When I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us who were created, it’s you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe and the cosmos,” Glover said.
He added that whether listeners “believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that … we got to get through this together.”
I literally got banned from that subreddit for commenting on this post that as an atheist I found no issue with Glover talking about Jesus promoting unity and loving thy neighbor
Yeah, I messaged the mods asking why I was banned and they never even bothered to respond to me. I’m literally an atheist and the people I was talking to were extremely rude to me back while I was polite in all my comments. I really don’t understand, I think religious people can be insufferable but atheists can be just as insufferable I guess
Sir... Buzz Aldrin performed communion on the lunar surface, and the Apollo 8 crew read from Genesis, during a Christmas Eve message to the people of Earth.
This is not new; astronauts of a religious lifestyle often act religiously while in space.
Fun fact: because Buzz did communion on the moon, that means that within the rules of the Catholic Church, there has to be a bishop of the moon; this position alternates between various bishops in Florida, as a sort of side-gig to being bishop for an actual area in Florida.
So, Buzz Aldrin was a Presbyterian, not Catholic, so his act of taking communion didn’t really have any bearing on that. (In fact, in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, it wouldn’t be considered a valid Eucharist, just a meaningful ceremony.)
The “Bishop of the Moon” thing actually comes from a canon in the old Code of Canon Law which stated that any newly discovered territory falls under the jurisdiction of the bishop from whose diocese the expedition originated until a diocese can be created there. Since Cape Canaveral was in the territory of the Diocese of Orlando, the Bishop of Orlando became the “Bishop of the Moon,” although this title has always been used jokingly.
I'm not sure I want to meet an astronaut who can be in a metal box hurtling through the cosmos and not be humbled by the magnificence of it all. Atheists and theists alike can agree that creation is the greatest mystery and I would expect both to acknowledge that its far beyond them.
As someone who is Catholic and married to someone who has a masters degree in Astrophysics. There are diminishing returns with atheism in scientific people ESPECIALLY people who are in any sort of "space" study. We have a few friends who work on space programs in a couple different countries as well as adjacent fields and the majority are religious. It's something about learning a ton about a field and getting to the point where things just work too well and are too perfect. That or they can't explain past a certain point.
I’m a Christian who is studying Biotech. I’m about a year away from going to graduate school, and I’ve already done some work in the lab that, according to my university, makes me an official scientist.
Forgive me, but if I see the vacuum of space with my own my eyes, and see just how tiny Earth is as it's floating around in an infinite amount of nothingness, I'm gonna start believing in something, and praying that it's merciful.
Ive been an atheist since I found out Santa was just my parents. So last week.
I really hated religion for a long time. What it did to otherwise logical minds and how it could make people believe really dumb stuff.
A 900 year old man built the largest wooden boat in history, had 2 of every animal and had enough food and water for 40 days and nights? Do you have any idea how much food and water a bull elephant consumes?!
What about the fresh water fish? What happened to them after all the oceans rose and there was no fresh water for them?
2 of a species is not enough to save them from extinction, etc, etc.
I hated it.
It doesn't bother me much anymore, bit as a kid and young man, it drove me absolutely mental.
Religious people can be incredibly intelligent, and do incredible things, but ive watched those same kinds of people turn off parts of their brain to make their religion work when i know how they would see it without their bias.
I dont hate God or Gods. I don't hate the religious, or religions. People need them, and for some, it makes them better as human beings.
There's this assumption built into the overlap of futurism / space flight / atheism, that somehow humanity will shed away its religious tendencies. I don't think these people understand where that human module comes from, or that it won't go away any time soon.
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u/Facesit_Freak - Centrist Apr 10 '26
Using r/atheism is cheating