When I started doing research about best anti-religion documentaries of all time, I couldn’t begin the article without finding the answer to the question: What is anti-religion?
In order to understand anti-religion, first, we must know the definition of religion. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, religion could be explained as a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith, and also as the service and worship of God or the supernatural, to name few. So, logically we could conclude that anti-religion is everything opposite. A person who is anti-religious usually means that he or she is against all religions. However, if a Jew wants to negate the validity of, for example, Muslim faith, then they could say they are anti-religious towards Islam. Another two concepts that are connected to anti-religion, which could further help us in understanding it better, are heresy and apostasy. Heresy is adherence to a religious opinion contrary to church dogma, whereas apostasy is an act of refusing to believe, follow or obey a religious faith. The main difference is that heresy is disagreeing with church rules but not denouncing from the set of beliefs, whereas apostasy is more linked to anti-religion because it renounces religion as such.
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While I was browsing the internet, I noticed many questions about whether there is a connection between atheism and anti-religion, are they the same thing and if not what are the differences? Well, let’s try to answer one by one.
Atheism is a philosophical position characterized by disbelief in the existence of God or any Gods. Atheists acknowledge scientific proofs as the basis of their beliefs. Moreover, they consider religion as a primitive way of thinking that will be omitted in the end. As a result of the complexity of atheism as a concept, there are many kinds of it. There are agnostic atheists, humanists, antitheists and many more. Some of them could be even found friendly to religion. In order to answer the last question from above and make things clearer, I would just briefly compare atheism with anti-religion. If one person is anti-religious, it doesn’t exclude that they have faith, it just means they are opposed to the practice of religion. In contrast, atheists don’t analyze if the religion is good or bad, they just don’t believe in the existence of higher power, including God.
While there are statistics which show that 84% of the people in the world are religious, there is no data on how many people are anti-religious. Nevertheless, there are many books, movies and documentaries that, by analyzing their contents, could be seen as anti-religious. Most of them are mainly connected to science, as it is based on reason, theory and experiments, while religion relies on untested beliefs. If you want to find out more about this topic and broaden your knowledge, there is no better way than to watch some of the documentaries. They are one of the best ways to learn about different issues that you are interested in but don’t really have enough time to read about. However, they are not always easy to find on the Internet. It is difficult to track the ones that you can download, but luckily most of them you can stream online. Also, on various sites you can watch them for free. Out of many we suggest Top Documentaries Films, Fandor and Documentary Addict. Of course, if you don’t find them there you can always check YouTube or Vimeo.
In order to ease this process of searching best anti-religion documentaries of all time, we made the list of 10 best anti-religion documentaries ever made. However, if you are interested in religious and atheist documentaries as well, you should definitely read our previous article of 11 Best Religious/Atheist Documentaries on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. The following list was gathered by collecting the most frequently recommended anti-religion documentaries, from the sources such as Reddit, Rational Responders and The Thinking Atheist. In addition, we checked each one of them on IMDB and ranked them according to their ratings. Just to emphasize that we took only documentaries rated from 6.9 and above, as movies above that rate are qualified among good ones. Also, we are mentioning which anti-religion documentaries could be found on Netflix. The list goes from the worst to the best rating. Let’s start with our list of best anti-religion documentaries of all time!
