1. People who make useless, generic comments, like "religion is a cancer." It doesn't really add anything to the conversation, it's just upvote bait. Also, I want secular communities to be more thoughtful and articulate than that.
2. Overuse of phrases like "reason" and "free-thinking" in our group names. I'm a little torn on this one, because I think those words do generally apply here, and I want the atheist community to be associated with those things. But it sometimes comes off as the atheist version of how Christians bolt the words "family" and "values" onto everything they do.
3. Thinking Jesus wasn't real. The overwhelming consensus among experts is that Jesus was a real person. (Not walk-on-water Jesus, but some kind of religious leader did exist.) If you think it looks bad when an Evangelical argues with a biologist about evolution, then it also looks bad when an atheist argues with a historian about whether Jesus existed. Atheists who think Jesus wasn't real are often saying that because so many other things mentioned in the Bible aren't real; however, this is falling into the trap of treating the Bible as one consistent work, which it is not. In fact, we should be helping to counter that idea.

Honestly talking about atheism.

I went to a local atheist group in my area.

It made me realize how pointless it was to actually get together and talk about how we don't believe in something.

1. When people bring up Christianity they are sharing their experience as a way to show they also understand your frustration because we have similar problems with Christians in the U.S.

2. Fanatic religious people are actually kind of the same everywhere. They all think it's their way only. And if not, they will hope bad things happen to you, to teach you a lesson. And many actively engage in activities to harm others who don't conform.

This is the same all over the world.

It's true we don't have a lot of suicide bombers. But we do have extremist doing a lot of things that harm many people. They do so in ways that get less press attention.

3. Most religions are bad. Because they have the same end game. Control and subjugate. Which makes them bad.

Spirituality and community can be achieved without religious doctrine. Religion uses people's desire for these things to control them.

I honestly do not understand your complaints.

If you don't want to hear responses about American/Western atheist experiences, why post on this community ?

What do you want people to say to you ?

What kind of responses are you wanting ?

Have you asked yourself what you want people to say back. ?

I don't know what else , mostly Western atheists, are going to say.

Except

"Yeah Christian fundamentalist are really awful here in the U.S, UK, and Australia (English speaking countries). And make the country unsafe and fascist"

We do have all sorts of religions here in the U.S, but it's mostly the Christian evangelical /nationalist that are causing big problems.

And many atheists believe :

"Religion promotes adherence to made-up rules that people in power use to control and impoverish the general public".

I think that's a common opinion. It's sort of part of being an atheist.

If you have a favorable opinion of religion, then you probably are religious and thus not an atheist.

There's always a subset that have very clearly just replaced religion with atheism as their new faith. And they kept the arsehole pious framework too.

Romanticising Jesus.

You'd think Jesus had invented game theory the way some people talk about him!

He wasn't some kind of renegade politician with a practical and coherent vision for a more just society that he wanted to put into place. If he existed at all, he was just another poor shmuck dealing with untreated mental illness. Who knows what childhood trauma he was dealing with?

Nothing he said was particularly ground-breaking. People at Jesus's time and before already understood the concept of good neighborliness. When he said things like, "the meek shall inherit the earth", that was just the psychosis talking. He wasn't using clever metaphor, he was projecting and fantasizing out loud.

When I see people do this, eg comments like "if they actually followed Jesus's teachings" I think such people must still be in love with the "Children's bible stories" they were read as a kid, and are only upset at the church because the fantastical happy and conflict-free life of their young imaginations doesn't actually exist.

I just have one. People who want to talk about religion when its all just fairy tales. ok this is sarcasm to some degree. Fact is we should not really have much to talk about except we all have to live with the religious people in our area and we will tend to view things in how annoying it is for us day to day. Its kinda tough to think in terms of how someone explaining how annoying it is to have someone knock on their door and want to talk about the importance of vishnu.

I'm an atheist but I cringe in some comments I read:

People thinking that religious people are enslaved or brainwashed. For most people it's either cultural or a psychological reaction to events in life.

Most priests don't have a duty to brainwash others. They believe what they preach, but most believers are still free to ignore what is said. Atheists would know that if they spent some time with real people.

It feels like atheists have never had an interaction with people who believe in something.

At least for point #1, I think people are generally pointing to Christianity having a far larger blood trail than Islam, at least in modern days.

The genocidal and imperial actions of the US (including its support of Israel) are generally executed by Christian nationalists who believe all non-Christians are heretical heathens who must be destroyed.

They genuinely are an Apocalypse cult who think stuffing every last Jew into Jerusalem will initiate the Apocalypse and bring Jesus back. That is unironically the reason the US supports Israel.

Even ISIS's rise, like you brought up, can be traced back to Christian Nationalists. The war with and subsequent destabilization of Iraq that lead to ISIS rising was justified by those leading it on the right as a Christian crusade against violent Muslims.

If you have a chance to ever listen to Christian Nationalists talk about climate change, and they aren't denying it, they'll justify it to claim "that's the Apocalypse God promised us so we're doing things right".

Or if you listen to them about nuclear war, they unironically will tell you they want it, and a nuclear war is the Apocalypse that'll bring Jesus back, and then they'll admit that support of Israel is partially to meet that end.

So I believe it isn't generally people trying to dismiss your experience. I believe its people pointing to the biggest evil crowd, who are Christian Nationalists in the USA.

They singlehandedly exploded the anti-feminist movement in 2010, mostly because YouTube monetisation was more lucrative back then. I do not really blame them, it's a very "they know not what they do" situation, but it led to gamergate and eventually trump but a lot of things led to those. learning that you can't trust God went hand-in-hand with 'idiot women love astrology and crystals' and i don't think they predicted how much better their anti women stuff would do compared to the 2009 debating creationists content. Nonetheless I do crave accountability from new atheists, they need to stop rebelling from their Christian upbringing and instead either contextualise or uproot it.

Atheists now, they seem all right. Most of them my age seem pretty mature.

When atheists try to convince others that there is no god. Let people have their faith, as long as they let you have your lack thereof, and as long as they don't hurt anyone.

I'm an atheist, I do not believe in god. But scientifically speaking, we just don't know.

Science gives us models that allow us to describe the world. These models don't necessarily have to be correct, they need to be the simplest explanation of our observations. These models also only describe the 'what', not the 'why'.

So anyone claiming to stand on the side of science, while confidently exclaiming "There is no god" without any scientific evidence, is just an idiot. And mocking religion on top of that just makes you an asshole.

Yeah, no shit all religions are bad.

Are all religions bad? I'm not religious myself. I don't believe in any gods. But I think religion can sometimes inspire people to do good things (e.g. charity), although of course it can also inspire people to do bad things (war, honour killings, etc).

I think the current Pope has a better moral compass than a lot of non-religious people. For example, see these comments from the Pope earlier this year:

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain... They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found... The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants