Rebecca Watson On Reddit Atheist
Reddit and R/atheism can sometimes be a very dark place. Rebecca hits the mark with her new post. We must do better.
Before I joined Reddit, I never thought of myself as a masochist. The great thing about Reddit is that you can subscribe to particular subreddits that represent your interests – in my case, that might be skepticism, atheism, feminism, science, and pictures of baby animals – and ignore the subreddits that make you angry, like Men’s Rights, Beating Women, Space Dicks, and [Choose Prefix] Jailbait. The problem is that Reddit is infested with shitty, racist, sexist, bigoted people, to the point where it’s nearly guaranteed that some of those people will post in your special interest subreddit. The larger the subreddit, the better the chance that this will happen.*
And so it is with r/atheism. R/atheism is very large, and so it is jam packed with assholes. And yet! I continue to read it every day. I read it even though I usually learn nothing new from it and it only serves to create and foster inside me an intense hatred of my fellow atheists.
Two days ago, 15-year old Redditor Lunam posted a thread called “What My Super Religious Mother Got Me For Christmas“, in which she linked to a photo of herself holding Carl Sagan’s Demon-haunted World:
This should be a feel good story about how a young person got a great gift but, it turned nasty. I will not repost all of the nasty comments here but reddit/atheism is out of control. It can and has done so much good but this story and many like it are so sick. It makes me very sad.
Could you repost ANY of the nasty comments here? I didn’t find any. All I found were people apologizing for nasty comments that supposedly existed somewhere. They must have been buried deep or deleted or something.
@ Kyle,
“Could you repost ANY of the nasty comments here?”
uh… no. I don’t have them and i’m pretty sure I would not repost them if I did.