I liked faces of atheism. I grew up in a Catholic community and school, and to be honest I'd not ever even been exposed to atheism until college. I didn't know that real people could be atheists. I didn't know big black guys could be atheist. Or old mousey men. Or even young people like me. All the young people I had ever met before college, had all been Catholic and Christian. I went to a few youth groups from other churches, but everyone I had met had been Christian (or at least they had been putting on a Christian front to everyone, as I later found out about from a few of my friends). I know what the apologists on Reddit want me to think an atheist is. They want me to think it is a whiny oily teenager who is angry about Pokémon cards. But the fact is that a lot of us don't actually know any atheists in person, or we are not used to associating "atheism" with "humans", in the same way we are with Christianity. Faces of atheism challenged our assumptions about what an atheist is, it showed us real people. This is cancerous to the apologist goal of painting "out" atheists as lunatic teenagers. It should be no surprise to see some vocal segments of Reddit post venomous and scathing opinions about faces of atheism, because when we stop being anonymous screen names and start humanising ourselves as a community, then the apologists cannot dictate what Reddit thinks the average member is. We can start taking control of the content again, instead of constantly being dragged down by the apologist types, who seem to spend 100 percent of their endeavour to smear r/atheism and the atheism movement, and working hard to keep control of the dialogue regarding atheism on Reddit (think how Rush Limbaugh controls what their viewers think about the rest of America with his 24/7 smear campaigns). So Faces of Atheism has my vote. I would actually love to see what our fellow members look like and read about why they are here, to humanise us instead of demonise us. That would be nice.
Subreddit
Post Details
- Posted
- 11 years ago
- Reddit URL
- View post on reddit.com
- External URL
- reddit.com/r/magicskyfai...