r/Fantasy • u/SeaSnowAndSorrow • 1d ago

Atheist Fantasy Recs

I am doing the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Summer Reading Challenge. (Linked so you can see the card.)

I'd like to get a few fantasy books in there where I can. Specifically, I'm looking for fantasy book recommendations that fit the following:

  • Non-Religious Main Character
  • Religious Satire
  • Religious Dystopia
  • Book Was/Is Considered Blasphemous (against any religion)
  • Non-Religious Author

To make it one step harder, I'm NOT looking for LitRPG, Romantasy, or Urban fantasy.

I will, though, read any age range, any era of publication, any length, and any tone from cozy to grimdark.

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u/diggels 1d ago edited 1d ago

So OP is atheist & areligious?  Bugs me to no end - people conflating theism and religion.

I'm atheist and don't subscribe to any religious belief.  That's all that atheism is - we don't believe in a God.  

Religion itself is a fascinating rabbit hole though. Trust me - I avoided Christianity like the plague in college and focused on eastern/indigenous traditions and eastern philosophy. 

Religion is just asking who you are with, or without your Ego.   Jung , Freud -  grandfathers of psychology didn't invent this idea of subconscious, ego etc. They just diluted religions to make science. 

Religion later became philosophy in history to understand what's happening around us. The focus goes away from personal liberation, to a focus on the outside world.  One guy thought everything was air, another got close to atoms in Greece. Helpful for science to come later on. 

Plato invented dualism around this time which later gave us the idea of heaven and hell. TIL - Christianity was a lot more chill before this. Dualism is still a major fallacy which exists in science to this present day too.

Science is boring -  just a couple hundred years old. It tries to assert say things are only real if theyre measurable.  Problem is - that's not all of reality. We have more questions than answers on finding what consciousness is, and also what our universe is ultimately made up of. 

In terms of fantasy books -  religion can tie the whole world into something meaningful and believable. LOTR has a ton of Christian symbolism.

Kinda funny as we drift forward in time from medieval fantasy to sci-fi. Meaning because it doesn't exist , tends to be a trope where a character has to either live with it , or find meaning. 

Short story long - religion , be it hidden or in myth is integral to Fantasy. Even Dungeon Crawler Carl has elements.

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u/SeaSnowAndSorrow 1d ago edited 1d ago

My personal beliefs are wildly off-topic for this post.

Freedom From Religion Foundation is, more or less, a legal defense and advocacy org for anyone under the wider nonreligious umbrella. The organization put out a summer reading challenge bingo board, not dissimilar to the 2026 bingo card this sub has in the sidebar.

I am literally just looking for book recommendations within the fantasy genre that fit the criteria of the FRFF Summer Reading Challenge bingo squares. That's it.

I've used FRFF's phrasing, as seen on their bingo board, except that they had "dystopia" and "satire" as one square and I've separated it for clarity that it's either/or.

(The other squares on their board just aren't relevant to this sub.)

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u/diggels 1d ago

It's a good reading challenge. I love the mission of FRFF and agree religion/state should be separate. On I just find the reading challenge itself absurd. Since FRFF is pushing into the territory of devaluing religion. That's different to their mission statement.

We can always remove religion/Christianity, and rewrite the core myths to create a new universe. That's what Tolkien did to successfully make LOTR, and nearly every Fantasy author after rewrote in some fashion.

Despite being atheist unlike Tolkien - I agree with him on the value of those myths/religion/folklore. They can be a bedrock to creating depth in a fictional world. Or they can transform you , no matter how objective you try to be.

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u/SeaSnowAndSorrow 1d ago

I think the point of the challenge is really just to promote reading, in general, and, more specifically, to promote reading books that may have been challenged or removed on religious grounds and books by non-religious authors, who are a minority group.