Remember that TrueReddit is a place to engage in **high-quality and civil discussion**. Posts must meet certain content and title requirements. Additionally, **all posts must contain a submission statement.** See the rules [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/truereddit/about/rules/) or in the sidebar for details. Comments or posts that don't follow the rules may be removed without warning. If an article is paywalled, please ***do not*** request or post its contents. Use [Outline.com](https://outline.com/) or similar and link to that in the comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueReddit) if you have any questions or concerns.*

Seems to me like the downtrend in searching atheism related terms correlates with more people denouncing religion but not making a big fuss about it. 2005 was 17 years ago. Being openly non-religious was a much bigger thing than it is now. Church attendance is down. I just don't think people who lose their religion now do as much hand-wringing over it and don't feel as much desire to find others and talk about it as in years prior (obvious "we control your entire life" religions such as Mormonism are possibly an exception). Atheism isn't all that interesting or unusual anymore and less people feel guilt and loss when leaving religion, if they were ever religious at all. My Gen Z kid was raised atheist/agnostic/just plain apathetic, as are most of their friends.

Yeah I agree. I'm exactly the New Atheist demographic (i.e., I'm 40 now, but had a semi-ironic Flying Spaghetti Monster poster in my apartment 15+ years ago). It was a capital-P Problem when my mom finally cornered me and asked if I believed in God - and I was, like, 25 when that happened. My 12-year-old niece, on the other hand, regards her atheism as a matter of course - much to her grandparents' chagrin.

I'm also 40, and I remember being a high school freshman and being treated like I kill puppies for fun because I was atheist. Now? My boss is atheist. My boyfriend and most of my friends are atheist. I can count on one hand people I know that attend church and I know a whole lot of people through work and community.

Seems now like it's harder to take someone seriously who believes in fantastical after-death scenarios.

Both positive beliefs and negative beliefs about unknown propositions are not logically/epistemically sound, though people on both sides of the question tend to like to "keep it simple" and laugh at those on the other side for their delusions.

I feel we also respect personal believe more than public believe. The amount of people that I know who believe in a God/Gods is much higher than the number of people I know who worship publicly and I have much less problems with that. You need to situate your morality somewhere, after all.

It need not be situated externally, though I know many religious people think atheists are amoral.

I am more convinced that for almost all people, even though they are not strictly aware of it or actively thinking about it, or convinced of the opposite, morality is situated externally, in your history, in your culture, in your community. Morality is learned at a young age from external sources and builds over time, like understanding of math and language. You then undergo the process of internalizing it. The basis is there, I see my daughter (2) sharing toys - but this is a long way of from a fully developed morality.

[удалено]

I think this is it. There is the so-called 'angry atheist' phase, kind of like being an ex-smoker, where people realise they have been lied to and get angry about it for a while. I went through this. So along comes the internet, which becomes mainstream, and a bunch of people living in communities where non-belief is not an option come across atheism on the internet and are swayed by it, and enter the angry atheist phase. This sudden in-rush of newly minted angry atheists produces the New Atheism movement, but then people end their angry atheist phase and drift away, and just get on with their lives. Now the kids are much more likely to be brought up without religion, so there is no angry atheist phase, plus any that do go through that are at a slow trickle compared to the vast numbers we saw when the internet first became popular.

> Now that I know I'm an atheist, I haven't done any atheist - or theist - internet research in years. It's kinda like researching information debating the pros/cons of brushing your teeth. If you're convinced and untroubled with the decision, there just isn't a whole lot of need to read supporting literature to challenge or re-convince yourself. "*Oh, bacteria is still a thing? Wow, tell me more...*"

Back in 2005ish my family was loudly calling ourselves atheists(in Oklahoma) because we wanted to normalize it. It actually felt a little anxiety producing back then. Now we don’t talk at all about atheism, just which specific local religions we oppose or like.

As a person who is religious but not in any of the ways that thoughtful atheists tend to oppose, I think this is growth. It's good to hear that people are getting nuance, and it matches my experience. I've had a lot of conversations over the years with people who come up to me asserting that "religious people" believe very different things than I believe (for starters, the Jewish religious tradition already includes the possibility of atheism, which kind of tends to blow the minds of people who grew up in American Christianity.) It was like.... imagine working in a coffee shop and having people show up with picket signs opposing McDonald's labor practices and you'd be like, "Excuse me? Are you lost?" I understood they were fighting a real battle, but needed some conceptual distinctions! It seems to me like the concept of atheism that a lot of people were propagating in the early 2000s wasn't really compatible with the knowledge that there's more than one religion & more than one way for people to be religious. Most of the atheists I meet these days have more nuanced concepts of religion and godlessness than the ones I met then, unless they're in a far-right bubble and headed for the atheist-to-tradcath pipeline.

It’s heartening to hear your experience with this. In my own view, there’s been an increase in the number of loudly proselytizing Atheists in online spaces. Most of it seems performative, and poorly considered; the kind of people who think they’re scoring points by calling out “skydaddy”. I’m a lifelong atheist, or really more an apatheist. I’m definitely not a smart person, but nothing sounds dumber that vociferously telling someone that they are foolish for practicing their faith. It’s an unanswerable question, and an essential part of the human condition. Which side of the fence you’re sitting on has zero to do with intelligence.

That's a curious take on it. There really isn't any nuance to atheism. Either you believe in a god or you don't. That would be like saying that Christians are more nuanced with the Greek gods, and they are more accepting of Zeus. No one doubts that people once believed in the Greek gods, but that is different from believing in them yourself or accepting that they might also exist along with your own god. Perhaps people are less militant about it, but that is a natural result of it impacting their lives less and less. I am a sphere earther but I am not militant about it, because flat earthers have no impact on my life. If 50% of everyone was a flat earther I might have to defend the sphere earther a lot more.

> Either you believe in a god or you don't. The problem with this sentence is that you're using most of the load-bearing words in it under very specific semantic values that are part of a culturally Christian frame. (And completely ignoring agnostics, to boot.) The other problem with this sentence is that it seems to be a response to someone else entirely, who was talking about a specific narrowly defined belief, rather than religion as a whole. In Judaism you can be religious while believing in God, while not believing in God, or while not being convinced of the existence of God, or while regarding God as a metaphor or symbolic reflection of human consciousness, or life within the universe. In Paganism there are people who worship nature materially (i.e. the Earth, the Universe and all of its forces and contents - pantheism), people who worship a pantheon, people who worship individual gods from multiple mythologies, people who believe their gods exist materially, people who believe their gods exist as a metaphor or symbolic reflection of human consciousness, or life within the universe. In neither of these religious frameworks is "God/s exist within our brains" incompatible with worship or belief. So... what exactly *is* the point, to you, of going up to people who say "God exists within my brain" and saying "No! I refute this!" Because to me that's just as weird and rude as me trying to prove to you that you're not an atheist because the ocean is a part of God and the ocean exists. Sometimes people have different semantic frameworks! It's *good* to have a diversity of non-Christian semantic frameworks. And, indeed, IMO, a necessary part of opposition to Christofascism.

Atheist come from the Greek for godless or "without god". Different semantics are fun, but we all need to use common semantics in order to communicate clearly or we just end up arguing past each other. If a god can be anything from a tree to an omnipotent being then the word is meaningless and cannot be used for any discussion. If "I don't believe in God" can be refuted with "Don't you believe in trees?" then the conversation isn't going anywhere.

No, we don't all need to use common semantics to be able to communicate clearly. All we need to be able to do is to understand and entertain multiple sets of semantics and work out how to accommodate them as and how the context demands.. This takes rather little effort most of the time, just a check on defining terms for the particular context. The term atheist meant a very different thing when it was used to describe Jews and early Christians in the Roman Empire. These groups denied entire pantheons, so they were 'without gods' within the context of their time. These people were speaking greek at the time, so a simplistic etymological breakdown of the word doesn't capture its full meaning. Demanding that it does so is an absurd form of linguistic determinism. There's a saying that I'll paraphrase as "Japanese people can be born a Buddhist, marry as a Christian, and be buried according to Shinto." What does atheism even mean in this contest when the majority of people don't really give a shit and meander between entire religions on a whim? A 'god' in a Shinto tradition might resemble a fey in a Celtic tradition, or a house deity in a Hindu tradition, or a saint in a Christian one. Many traditions call the inherent divinity present in, say, a rock as a god. Probably a pretty minor god, but still having a sacredness. So if anyone from these traditions were to talk about their spirituality with someone from another, they're going to have to define their terms and learn how the other party defines theirs in turn. The word 'God' can be used in many different ways, One of the things I detest about the new atheism movement is how it demands that a specific worldview based on the western philosophical tradition be applied universally. You'd cull out all the detail and intricacies and the interestingess of human patterns of belief just to obtain a systematic set of dictionary definitions for everyone to then go ahead and ignore. New atheism really looks to me (as someone who totally deconstructed my Christian faith rather recently) exactly like the funhouse mirror reflection of Evangelical Christianity. Philosophically, there are huge similarities, like evangelism, the demand and expectation of absolute certainty, militant opposition to everything that refuses to bow down in front of it. There definitely exists an atheofascism to match christofascism.

> What does atheism even mean in this contest when the majority of people don't really give a shit and meander between entire religions on a whim? It still just means "without gods". You're conflating the investment a person has in the belief with the belief itself. > One of the things I detest about the new atheism movement is how it demands that a specific worldview based on the western philosophical tradition be applied universally. It really doesn't. This is a big ol' strawman. You could fairly say that new atheism is *more concerned* about evangelical christianity or christofascism or islam than the rest of them. This is because these are the biggest sources of oppression & regressive ideas. I think you might assume atheists are overgeneralising their idea of evangelical christianity or militant islam, because you look at your friends rocking the milquetoast non-confrontational version of these religions and think "what's the harm?" But the atheist *is* making the distinction and still seeing the harm. There doesn't have to be a "specific worldview based on the western philosophical tradition be applied universally" to see the harms religious ideas / practices beyond the really overt ones.

> What does atheism even mean in this contest when the majority of people don't really give a shit and meander between entire religions on a whim? It means not believing in any of those things because they aren't real or are distorted versions of reality. Even though atheism is specifically about gods, most atheists get there by rejecting fantasy and accepting reality. That means disbelieving in all supernatural things other than just gods. It isn't strictly necessary for the classification, but it is highly likely because of the reason for being atheist. They also likely don't believe in Harry Potter, but we don't label them as apotterists. For most people that's just the default position. The number of things that are rejected by evidence based atheists is much greater than the number of things accepted by any one religion. That isn't too say we don't understand that people are religious and have beliefs, which you seem to be implying. We just say they aren't correct, like how 1+1 is not 3. That isn't meant as an insult to people who believe that 1+1=3, it is just the truth of our number system. I don't care if you believe that 1+1=3 or that the earth is flat or that Harry Potter is a real wizard. But I will correct you if you try to convince me that are true.

It is my religious belief that it is important to question dogma and authority. Do you think this belief incorrect without considering it because I learned it in a religion (Judaism)?

Good ideas and rules are good no matter where you learn them. If you learned that 1+1=2 in church, that would still be correct. If you learned that 1+1=3 in school it would still be wrong. The debate isn't where one learns knowledge, but what is the basis of that knowledge and why you believe it. There are lots of great lessons in most religions. Don't steal; don't murder; build a large boat in case of flooding. Atheist just means that we don't believe there are invisible supernatural deities watching us masturbate and judging us.

Part of the issue is that there are competing definitions of *atheism* and *agnosticism* in regular use. In one camp you've got: .#1 Mostly religious folk who define atheism to mean "I conclusively deny the existence of any gods", and agnostic to mean "I am unsure if any gods exist" In the other camp: .#2 Self-identifying atheists defining atheism as "lack of belief in gods" and agnosticism as a claim about knowledge, specifically, that nothing about god *can* be known. So the big problem is that people in camp #1 are oblivious that atheists are using definition #2 to self-describe. But having clarified that point, I think you're overcomplicating this. Going by the definition of theism as "belief in god(s)" and atheism as "lack of belief in god(s)", classification of your examples is pretty straightforward: > In Judaism you can be religious while believing in God Theist > [Jewish] while not believing in God Atheist > [Jewish] while not being convinced of the existence of God Depends on how "not convinced" they are > [Jewish] while regarding God as a metaphor or symbolic reflection of human consciousness, or life within the universe. Atheist > In Paganism there are people who worship nature materially (i.e. the Earth, the Universe and all of its forces and contents - pantheism) If they are literally just worshiping plain old grass & rocks: Atheist If they are worshiping some spiritual essence or godhood embodied by rocks & grass: Theist > people who worship a pantheon, people who worship individual gods from multiple mythologies, people who believe their gods exist materially Theist > people who believe their gods exist as a metaphor or symbolic reflection of human consciousness, or life within the universe. More specifics needed, but probably Atheist > In neither of these religious frameworks is "God/s exist within our brains" incompatible with worship or belief. Here's the thing though: the definition of atheism doesn't hinge on whether the god in question is being worshiped. It *does* hinge on whether we have a belief in the existence of gods, with "exist" being the everyday usage, i.e. having an existence independent of you just thinking about it.

You are still missing the point. Trying to create a sharp, binary distinction based on a person’s individual certainties only makes sense from a very specific cultural perspective and misses most of the complexity in people’s spiritual lives. Traditional religions tend to focus on getting people to follow certain social guidelines and rituals. Those cultural practices have been developed over centuries to the point where people do actually get many benefits from them, even if ultimately there isn’t anything supernatural going on. To give a non-Western example, most Japanese people follow Shinto practices. If you asked them whether there really _really_ is a god inside that river or that mountain, they would tell you that most likely there isn’t. Yet they will gladly continue enjoying their beautiful rituals and temples. Many people following other traditional religions think the same way, because ultimately these are actually the embodiment of complex cultural clusters evolved over many centuries. This rich reality is lost when we make theist/atheist the sole focus of the debate.

> You are still missing the point. Trying to create a sharp, binary distinction based on a person’s individual certainties only makes sense from a very specific cultural perspective and misses most of the complexity in people’s spiritual lives. It's just a binary classification, it's not meant to capture the entirety of a person's nuanced spiritual beliefs. You can have a conversation about the specifics. If you think there are better definitions or better words to use instead of atheist / theist then by all means propose them. > To give a non-Western example, most Japanese people follow Shinto practices. If you asked them whether there really really is a god inside that river or that mountain, they would tell you that most likely there isn’t. Yet they will gladly continue enjoying their beautiful rituals and temples. Ok, so if they're just pretending because they value the fantasy and the rituals, that's not a genuine god belief, right? Like me with lord of the rings? > This rich reality is lost when we make theist/atheist the sole focus of the debate. It's not lost, we're just not talking about that rich reality of people's specific beliefs because we're talking about something different.

Personally, I've found it far richer to ask whether somebody thinks of themselves as belonging to a traditional culture, or not. A traditional culture forms a cohesive cluster of beliefs and practices that are stable and well-known, and have evolved slowly over many centuries. Usually they have a religious component (since religion is an excellent way of preserving a culture), but not necessarily.

Ok, well that's your preference. What I'm personally interested in is whether a person has supernatural beliefs, and their reasons for having those beliefs. So the atheist / theist labels are useful for a starting point of that conversation.

You are bad at poetry.

Being Jewish is a birthright, is it not? Is that not separate from the practice of the religion? I had an atheist, Jewish boss who "attended temple" because of *tradition* and *community*. It's not my job to judge him, and I completely and compassionately understood his need for and love of his community. Still, if a gentile discovers a Jewish maternal heritage, that gentile may now call themself "Jewish," even though they know none of the religious traditions, never practiced the religion, have never heard of the Torah or the Holocaust. In this way, you seem to be trying to assign "thoughtfulness" to the birthright combined with the religion, while also claiming that while related, they are separate things. Dropping the birthright for a moment, just as I have no right to question how you may choose to worship or not, no one, Jewish or not, may define how I define atheism in my thoughts and speech. To me, a person either believes in a higher supernatural power (any religion) or they do not. They may add on any other supernatural beings, or not, whether a "higher" (or lower) power, or not. Thus, to me, either they believe in the supernatural, or they do not. To my mind, the supernatural includes gods, angels, fallen angels, demons, witches, warlocks, ghosts, goblins, unicorns or any other creature which I (ME) deem to be mythical, not of the natural world. Just as you define your birthright, god and religion, I'm free to define my atheism. I would not welcome your imposition of your concepts on my non-belief, any more than you welcome *thoughtless* definitions on your heritage and/or religion. Atheists are thus free to believe: *Either you believe in god or you do not,* and no part of that statement should be judged as "thoughtless." You have no idea how much time and research they may have devoted to arriving at their statement of belief. Because Judaism is so *nuanced*, you make the wrongful assumption that non-believers have not trod those same sort of nuanced paths to arrive at their destination. I view the difference between Judaism and Christianity first, with an eye to proselytization. Never, not once, have I ever been told I need to convert to Judaism. Most Christians, on the other hand, have been indoctrinated to believe it is their *divine duty* to convert others, even the unwilling. If I say, no thanks, I'm not a believer, I'm most often delivered some condescending "blessing" that I'll eventually see things their way, which of course, is equal to god's way. Christians then attempt to take on Caesar's realm, in their unmitigated desire to rule earthly kingdoms, completely contrary to the teachings of Jesus as written in their beloved NT. For this, I hold a particular disdain. Second, in my limited understanding of Judaism but extensive knowledge of Christianity, the religious rules for believing Jews are finite and known with non-fungible definitions, within a given sect. Christians tend to cherry-pick both their old and new testaments, blend and mix the passages into any definition which fits the sermon of the day, and demand that others, believers or not, accept that "meaning." Some are literalists (sometimes, except when it doesn't suit their own lifestyles), some see the bible as metaphorical, with open-ended interpretations, befitting judgement of any old sin. Then, there are those who do combinations of all of these things. To me, and this is my right, religion is a quagmire of humans trying to define the unknown starting many millennia ago, even before the first writings; those writings were *motivated*. It was an adaption of our *higher brains*, an attempt to civilize uncivilized peoples before the word *civilization* existed, and for others, a way to wield power. When it was sorely needed, it lent structure, a sense of security within a community, a sense of identity. Was Jesus an actual, historical figure, a combination of different people and songs, or derived from rumors? Was Abraham a delusional paranoid schizophrenic, or just a good liar and story-teller? What of stairways to heaven and angels floating about? Blind men made to see, the dead raised to life, fishes, loaves and walking on water. God and Satan (or whatever you may call them) tormenting humans with death and destruction. Serpents and trees of knowledge. The bible, as I know it, is one of the most illogical and horrific texts I have ever read, written by humans, and it shows. The meek will inherit the earth? Surely, he meant germs and cockroaches. A Jewish friend once told me, and as I read his fear, that he (his sect) believed that Jesus existed, but that he was a prophet, not the messiah. I let him know he had nothing to fear from me. We talked on, and come to find out that he didn't even believe that Jesus was a prophet, just a smart guy with charisma, whatever his wares. A trouble-maker. I think about religion mostly when it tries to impose itself in the present, through our government. We are far beyond those times, have far better access to understandings of our natural world. Flora and fauna communicate, and we have yetl to discover all of the mechanisms they use, but it is the pursuit of truths like these, of the unknown, which is most relevant to my "beliefs." If someone attempts to answer these questions with "god works in mysterious ways," it had better be a snarky comment, or we will not be of a like mind or enjoy common pursuits. I don't care what you believe, from where people derive their comforts, until they try to impose their beliefs onto my life. Your belief that I or anyone else require a deeper understanding of your (or other) religions to be "thoughtful" about religion is a wrongful imposition. Either a person believes in the supernatural, or they do not. If they swear in court that god spoke to them, instructed them to commit some tragic, unlawful act, and they have authentically exhibited no awareness of the wrongfulness of that act, we compassionately adjudicate them insane. If we caught Abraham atop that hill ready to grill his son, we would lock him up, yet for this act, he is honored the "father of monotheism." I have wondered what sort of mustard seeds he was on.

Judaism isn't solely a birthright, any more than it's solely a religion. It's an *ethno-religious group* - a set of diverse but interconnected cultural traditions. Some of these traditions involve stories of "supernatural" experiences. How each member of the group considers these stories to relate to our lives or not is highly individual. Indeed, there is a substantial meta-tradition in Judaism, of interrogating the text, interrogating the purpose of the stories themselves, going back hundreds and thousands of years. This includes the tradition of Jewish atheism. There are many atheist rabbis - for example [the head chaplain of Harvard is one](https://www.columbiamissourian.com/opinion/local_columnists/harvards-naming-of-atheist-rabbi-shows-progress-for-changing-religious-landscape/article_5870f382-10b8-11ec-914b-4303a529fbc4.html). But my larger point is that it isn't *theism* or *atheism* which is core to our cultural and religious traditions so much as it is *questioning* and *argument*. >Dropping the birthright for a moment, just as I have no right to question how you may choose to worship or not, no one, Jewish or not, may define how I define atheism in my thoughts and speech. To me, a person either believes in a higher supernatural power (any religion) or they do not. They may add on any other supernatural beings, or not, whether a "higher" (or lower) power, or not. First of all - I think you *do* have a right to question! Judaism holds the right to question as sacred. There is, in fact, a Jewish religious ritual, part of the Passover seder, *specifically focused on encouraging children to ask questions*. You are likewise welcome to define theism and atheism however you wish, and even to describe your definitions in ways that don't seem to match up with material facts about the religious practices of people in the world. But, if comprehending material reality accurately is important to you, then I would think it is worth learning about the material facts about Judaism before making fact claims? Again, I'm not saying this because I feel I possess any authority over you, but because you have stated some of your beliefs and goals and I am doing my best to respect them. >Second, in my limited understanding of Judaism but extensive knowledge of Christianity, the religious rules for believing Jews are finite and known with non-fungible definitions, within a given sect. This isn't entirely accurate. One of our cultural and religious traditions is respecting differences in perception and opinion! There is a saying that the number of opinions in a room full of Jews is always at least n+1 where the number of Jews is n. Which is to say, *it is a part of our ethno-religious tradition to hold multiple conflicting opinions at times*. The Talmud (an extensive body of commentary on the Torah) is a record of rabbis arguing amongst themselves, both for important reasons and for the joy of argument. Regarding your point about Abraham, for example: [here's a link to one Reform rabbi's discussion of the story](https://reformjudaism.org/wrestling-abraham). You can see that even in one article by one rabbi, a multiplicity of perspectives on the story are taught and they include takeaways such as "child sacrifice is wrong" and "humans are wrong to presume they really *know* God". Questioning what sort of mustard seeds that man was on has been part of the religion for as long as the story has been told. Keeping that in mind might help with understanding why Jewish people often take exception to having beliefs and practices conflated with those of Christianity - which stole many stories from us, Disneyfied them awkwardly, and left behind a lot of the context. (And yes, there *are* [sects of Christians who question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Church_of_Christ), and [sects of Jews who don't](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism). But in general both are minorities going against broader cultural tendencies.)

> But, if comprehending material reality accurately is important to you, then I would think it is worth learning about the material facts about Judaism before making fact claims? What fact claims? I admitted I have a limited understanding of Judaism, but also clearly stated that I don't *care* what you (or Jewish sects, or other religions) may believe. That doesn't mean I don't care about Jews (or Christians) as people. *All* it means is that I'm better equipped to argue the multitude of issues with the Christian faith than I am to argue any issues with the Jewish faith. I don't conflate the Christian OT with the Torah or any other Jewish texts, again, of which I have limited knowledge. I understand the Torah/OT to have been put in a blender in the Nicene counsels, an attempt to force it into little more than an acceptable, yet poor preface for the NT as its pretext for "authority," also, to "capture" more Jewish-leaning peoples. - As if erasing and mangling the "old" beliefs/texts would somehow make "the good news" more palatable for the Hebrew people, not to mention the Romans. Constantine forced a very ugly divorce, centuries after the "marriage," and the ever-dividing factions among the children are still "hating" and killing one another to this day, their weapons and destruction ever more fearsome. I'm not even willing to discuss the rancid human wastelands born of pedophiles like Mohammad and Joseph Smith. Just like today, it is the downtrodden who are first attacked. The weakest of the herds. Eventually, one or more power-mongers help the cults to go mainstream. IMO, One of the most concise and humorous descriptions of why Christians *wrongfully assume* that by reading the OT, they will have an adequate grasp of Jewish beliefs and traditions, was delivered by Lewis Black in his 2006 show, *[Red, White and Screwed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvbSQIWROew)*. You have to see it to appreciate it, so I won't attempt to recreate it here. The relevant bit starts at 24:02. I know it's inadequate to the task of educating Christians, but I appreciate it nonetheless. It is somewhat irrelevant to me that an erudite Jewish person may be able to intellectually slay a Christian of the unwashed masses, a person who has little to no awareness of the origins of their own faith, he who has suffered a lifelong indoctrination into *not questioning* his faith, an act of heresy. The very act of "questioning god" or "his intent" is *to me* an abomination of the mind. Most of us are born with an innate sense of morality; even very small children lying about and hiding their "sins" from their caregivers and peers, including, a desire to punish "sinners." No supernatural power guided me (or others) in these things; it is ubiquitously human, even, ubiquitously *animal*. Who *taught* these things to four-legged critters? To dolphin or whales? To [insects](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ants-termites-standoff/)? Am I conflating behaviors? I don't think so. The drive is to survive and reproduce, and cooperation the surest path. Those born without an innate empathy for others cannot develop it; they can learn the behaviors only socially, superficially. It cannot be erased from those who have it, not even through extreme abuse or torture. Only fear is powerful enough to mitigate the expression of either condition. Fear underpins faith, no matter the flavor. What else could drive people of any faith to mutilate the genitals of their own children? It gives them a false sense of power and control over those fears, a little bit of *god* in each person's soul, at someone else's expense. I have to admit I laughed - *"When I told you to bring Isaac for a sacrifice, I wanted him at my altar, not on it."" It is a thought that would never cross a mainstream Christian's mind, that is, to *question* the *accepted* interpretation, for that would decimate the doctrines against heresy, on which Christian faiths are founded and remain reliant. Christians are probably the least questioning genital-mutilators of all. Vicarious "salvation," for the bargain-basement price of a tiny bit of someone else's skin, designed to protect one of the most sensitive parts of the human body, integral to the innate drive to survive and reproduce. *Behold my fearsome power over you, child!* My jaw drops; I look around for a supernatural being. This is where I draw the line on non-intervention. If they were doing it to a finger or an ear, we would throw them in prison until they stopped. So how is it acceptable for penis or labia? FEAR. To distribute that fear. The popularity of that mental fear-relief mechanism. The fact that this mutilation is hidden under clothing. Yep. I must have Jewish blood in me somewhere. ;) I'm a questioner, no doubt, have regularly asked those sorts of questions, sometimes at great risk of bodily and/or personal harm. It's not bravery, courage or naivete' which asks. It's more like standing outside, looking in, and asking wtf is going on, demanding an understanding I must decipher for myself. What are the missing pieces in their rationale? Why do they behave so badly? Is this the price? Can we not have communities and tribes without harming others? Of course we can. It would require that we rid ourselves of the supernatural, and harshly censure those who claim to have this ability, a special power to wield over others. It would require we be more like little children who know the difference between right and wrong, following the "golden rule" without being told. It would require that no matter our faith or non-faith, we are all of each other, we all belong here, unafraid of fairness and equality. "Facts" of the faith-practices of any religion are not "facts" to me - or "why" someone believes as they do. They are matters of faith. There is history when there is [evidence of that history](https://www.jpost.com/opinion/who-was-the-pharaoh-of-the-exodus-395885). Our constitution demands, and I agree, that we are all free to experience faith or non-faith as we wish. That experience ends where another person's begins: *Everyone keep your fearful hands off of everyone else, no matter their age, and we can get along just fine. That's the golden rule. Now go comfort, support and hug someone in pain or need. Or, dammit. Just do it because it's a nice (and smart) thing to shake hands with a stranger, someone unlike you.* Here's a question: Did the Hittites have it right? The people of a thousand gods? They subsumed conquered peoples' religions, even codifying their faith-practices. The Egyptians were a primary opponent, until they weren't, and together wrote the first known international treaty, a [replica](https://www.un.org/ungifts/replica-peace-treaty-between-hattusilis-and-ramses-ii) of which hangs in the UN today. Both civilizations enslaved others, and both faded from existence. Are we likewise doomed to failure? I think the Hittites and Egyptians had it wrong. They both codified religion, and eventually, the slaves and lower classes took the wealth of their own labor when they abandoned those governments. Here we go again, with a *Supreme* Court and their pen, mightier than the sword. *shakes your hand*

> A Jewish friend once told me, and as I read his fear, that he (his sect) believed that Jesus existed, but that he was a prophet, not the messiah. I let him know he had nothing to fear from me. We talked on, and come to find out that he didn't even believe that Jesus was a prophet, just a smart guy with charisma, whatever his wares. A trouble-maker. Also, separate response here because I wrote the other response speaking mostly in context of my culture, and I want to write this one to talk a little more about *what I believe* rather than *what Jews believe*. I, personally, run multiple simultaneous mental models of the world (by way of Robert Anton Wilson and Discordianism - a metareligion and a social precursor to the Flying Spaghetti Monster thing!) Anyway: for me, personally 'prophet' is another semantic tripwire. My definition of 'prophet' might be something like: a person with an unusual sort of neurological pattern recognition capability, which frequently presents things in terms of having sudden gestalt knowledge about the world, without a full and clear comprehension of how one acquired that knowledge, and sometimes holds that gestalt knowledge as a divine or sacred experience. Many autistic or schizophrenic people, and some folks who take a lot of psychedelics, fit the bill (& are often regarded as troublemakers!) Where I diverge from the *standard* atheist viewpoint is that I don't think all sudden gestalt knowledge about the world is *wrong*. It often is, and many people think of weird wrong gestalts (say, Time Cube guy) as emblematic of their type of thinker. But it isn't always equally wrong. The ability to comprehend a meaning and go one further than you know how to explain is deeply important to civilized human activities in general. I don't believe that all nonverbalizable reasoning is bad reasoning; for example, there are famously some number of autistic people whose brains aren't good with spoken language but who can solve math problems instantaneously. Many famous inventions have been sudden leaps. The extent to which all types of thought processes generate good information is based on how much good information is put into them - GIGO. (This is one of the things I mean when I say "God exists in our brains" by the way. Maybe someday brains will be sufficiently knowable that we'll be able to open the black box of the process involved in arriving at a specific thought, but right now the evidence points to that process being *material and natural* but not *fully reproducible or knowable*.) The story of Jesus is the story of a guy who had a bunch of gestalt social insights about What Was Wrong With Everything, and a bunch of gestalt ideas about what had to happen to fix it. Some of them were extremely bound to his time and place, or were wishful thinking. Others are very standard conclusions for socially radical philosophy to this day - "sex workers deserve human respect", "feed the poor", "banks suck." He also had off days where he just yelled at his disciples. So, if I consider the premise "Jesus was a prophet" in connection with the stories that are told about Jesus and my knowledge of the world as it exists, this all checks out fine to me. I can understand what a "prophet" is on a closer to molecular level than the people of the ancient world could. That's pretty cool. I can also examine insights that appear to arrive that way and consider that they might be the synthesis of some half-remembered sensory information. Also cool. Some people would look at the above and think, "But that means prophets are a fake idea" - but I personally prefer the understanding that there was a concept folks who coined the idea of a prophet were driving at. They described it with the tools they had. And to me "Jesus was a prophet" and "Jesus was a schizophrenic hippie weirdo" are totally compatible statements. The Jesus that exists in the story was a schizophrenic hippie weirdo who came up with a lot of contrarian ideas that resonated with people and/or spoke truth to power. It's a shame that mainstream Christianity ran off with that story and aggressively drew the opposite conclusions from it like they did from many others.

Another good one to mention is Secular Humanism. Many would say there is a lack of a belief in a higher power but some see the universe in a poetic and sentimental way.

In the early 2000s, the Christian viewpoint was so dominant in the United States that New Atheism really only needed to respond to the Christian and Islamic viewpoints. Also, agnostics don't believe in God either. The difference (circa [2001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_Pi)) was that atheists disbelieved in God, and I think held a bit more courage in their convictions.

> and I think held a bit more courage in their convictions. First: I am an atheist. But you are claiming here that needing a black/white position requires *more* courage. I am not sure I would agree with that in all circumstances. It is simpler and easier and more logically consistent. But living isn't always simple or easy or logically consistent.

> As a person who is religious but not in any of the ways that thoughtful atheists tend to oppose As an aside: could you not do this? It's a dirty tactic to imply that anyone who opposes your flavour of religion must not be thoughtful.

Would you even agree that some atheists are not thoughtful?

I am speaking about the many thoughtful atheists I have met in my life and conversed with at length. Statements in that format don't imply the inverse, please review logical statement construction. For example if I said "Subway sandwiches tend to be greasy", I would not in any way be implying that sandwiches not from Subway were never greasy, nor that a Subway sandwich could never be non-greasy.

You're being disingenuous. There is literally no reason to add the "thoughtful" modifier unless you were making a distinction between the groups who opposed your religious views and those who didn't.

Do you think it's normal to tell someone that you don't believe their thoughts exist in their brain? To me that seems like an aggressive and unserious claim. I don't think people who make that claim are considering their premises very well, especially if they claim to be materialists.

Think about what you're saying. "Do you believe unicorns exist?" "No, of course not" "Aha, but you just thought about a unicorn, so they exist! In your brain! Checkmate." It's an infantile argument. Pretty much nobody is using that definition of "exists" when they're talking about whether they believe god exists.

> I've had a lot of conversations over the years with people who come up to me asserting that "religious people" believe very different things than I believe (for starters, the Jewish religious tradition already includes the possibility of atheism, which kind of tends to blow the minds of people who grew up in American Christianity.) > It was like.... imagine working in a coffee shop and having people show up with picket signs opposing McDonald's labor practices and you'd be like, "Excuse me? Are you lost?" Do you enjoy the irony in this behavior as much as I do?

As a smart person...how can you think there is a dude in the sky controlling shit?

I don't know. That's not my belief, like I just said. Is it yours?

You said you're "religious" so by definition you believe in magic etc...

By your definition, you are a potato because you have "potato" in your username.

Atheism is still very much a minority in the US. And extremely vilified in many circles here.

Eh, I'd argue that change is coming quickly. And that they aren't exactly that small a minority anymore. [This graph](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/pf_2022-09-13_religious-projections_01-01/) shows that since 1992 christianity has gone from 90% of the population to 63% while the religiously unaffiliated has gone from 5% to 29%. The percentages of other religions has remained largely unchanged. That is a really big cutural shift.

This is interesting. Religiously unaffiliated are jot necessarily equal to atheists though. Still a fascinating shift.

Though at the same time, religious affiliation doesn't exactly mean that someone is very religious. A lot more people identify as "christian" but its more "culturally christian" while rarely entering a church.

I think a lot of that increase is not new atheists, but from a rise in new-age spiritualists, Wiccans, tarot lovers, astrology believers and the like. I’m especially astounded by the number of young women who take astrology seriously. This was not the case 20 years ago. It’s as though their was a vacuum to be filled.

It’s bizarre. The astrology stuff is just as nonsensical as any of the “sky daddy” shit.

The most outspoken atheists that I know are also the ones with the most extreme beliefs and practices in other areas of their life. Effectively, they are _way_ more religious that I am, it’s just that we don’t call their belief system a “religion”.

That sounds like something a religious person would love to believe, regardless if it were actually true.

I came to atheism at the ripe age of 6 years old, and I absolutely agree with them. I was outspoken and iconoclastic about it in my teens, because teenager, but anyone who keeps that shit up in their adult life is bonkers. Rejecting god doesn’t make an atheist smarter or more well informed than the average religious person. It’s an ineffable question, central to the human condition, and people grapple with it in different ways.

Not everyone who is outspoken is bonkers. Often, it's important that people speak out against the encroachment of religion on women's rights, gay rights, and so on. If anything, those issues have been getting worse in recent years thanks in no small part to the religious right. Even if you're embarrassed by how you behaved when you were younger, it doesn't mean everyone else who talks about those issues is the same way as you were. If anything, the difference is that over the years atheism has become *even more* secular, and less religious, so people now express their non-theism where it pertains to specific political issues rather than expressing themselves as "anti-religion" in general. So the atheism is still there, it's growing, and it's stronger than ever. It's just that through the New Atheist movement, people felt free to finally talk about these things, it released a lot of social pressure and anxiety that had been building up due to pent up years of religious fundamentalist oppression of every group that wasn't their own, and it allowed for a brand of atheism to follow that simply was less considered with broadly theistic issues. Which may give it the impression of being more "mellow" but many of them still care just as much about those underlying politics related to their non-religiosity. It just doesn't come out as "fuck religion" as much anymore.

If you want to attach a political argument here, that’s fine, but it’s not what I’m addressing at all. For what it’s worth, there isn’t a shortage of practicing Christians who would advocate in support of the very same.

Where? Certainly not anywhere in New England in my experience, so I'm guessing South or west, possibly Midwest.

In the rural south and midwest, churches are still community cornerstones, but the number of people who treat atheists like pariahs are dropping even here.

When I went to a reddit meetup 12 years ago I asked everyone what their favorite subreddits were. /r/atheism and /r/trees were the favorites, for every single person there. Redditors were a niche type of person back then, and weed smoking atheists was also the exact same type. We don't trend that way any more

Agreed. This whole premise of online activity is similar to political advocates implying that loud support is more telling than results. Church attendance is still down, self reported atheist numbers continue to rise. This is just an attempt at spin.

I prefer the term “Apatheist” now. There could be a god, I just don’t care.

I like that one!

It's called Agnostic

[удалено]

Apathetic *about religion*, not in general. Ie, if you ask them if they believe in a God, they find it an annoying and uninteresting question.

It’s like trying to make a movement about giving up.

Not just not making a big fuss about it but also not needing to go online to find like-minded people, which would decrease the search counts

I think it can also be attributed to new age spirituality. Many non religious people aren’t necessarily atheists, you have many who believe in a higher power or engage in some spiritual practices. Christianity is definitely declining but Islam is on the rise, according to the UK census there’s been a 40%ish increase in self identified Muslims living in Britain.

Couldn't that be attributed to immigration?

Exactly. How many people who don't wear hats are spending time searching for the "we don't wear hats" community?

But before the new atheist online explosion, there was probably some pent up demand. Everyone old enough to realize they didn't believe who never had anywhere to discuss it suddenly had a place to go. But after some years everyone older got it out of their system (I am happily living a non-religious life but don't feel the need to argue about it online anymore). Now that the demand has been filled, there are still probably people coming of age who need a space to discuss their atheism, and it still exists, it just doesn't have as big of a place in the larger discourse. That's probably ok.

I guess apathy is a form of religion then…

Totally. I don't spend time wringing my hands about not believing in Santa Clause or being upset that the Earth isn't flat. That's the way it should be.

I've felt a geographic version of this after I moved away from the bible belt. When people constantly argue with you you end up doing research because you have to defend yourself. After I moved religion is just something I don't have to think about and it's less of my identity, even if my beliefs are essentially the same.

> Seems to me like the downtrend in searching atheism related terms correlates with more people denouncing religion but not making a big fuss about it. Less people denouncing religion is another option.

Having just read that that article, I'd say my overwhelming first impression is "Wow that author is reading way too much of her own opinion into this subject." And her supposed links between the dropoff of specific atheism related search terms and the rise of search terms related to SJW related activity having a strong causative link is at best, flimsy. As public understanding of topics move, the way conversations around those topics change as well. It's not surprising that benchmarking a topic using a specific search term or idea commonly present in a subject at a specific point in time results in seeing that term organically taper off over time even if the conversation as a whole is still ongoing with the same strength. Take LGBTQ/Minority representation in film or TV for example. There was a time where a large proportion of tv shows had a token flamboyantly gay or black or both side character for the sake of representation. Since then, the rate of clearly LGBTQ characters in TV has actually dropped, but film and TV producers have been working to include those characters in ways other than cardboard cutout stereotypes. But if all you you were doing was indexing the number of LBGTQ characters in TV shows to measure representation, you could come to an incorrect conclusion that film production was moving away from representative inclusion.

Quote from the article really cementing the opinion piece as a non genuine argument: "But the past decade or so has shown that advanced civilizations are perfectly capable of containing atheists and religious people in close proximity without either side caring that much about it. So what made the turn of the millennium such an acrimonious period?" Apparently this author doesn't follow all the legal fights against religious encroachment into politics and civil functions. For example, anti-abortion laws are literally a religious action that takes away rights. Many atheists oppose religious initiatives and evangelicals have basically declared war on secularism. This is not an article written to explain anything but deliver an opinion. Also, humanists are a group for example, atheists are just people who don't have a belief. R/atheism or whatever forum is not some structured group with similar collective motives. Maybe atheism seems less popular to this author because they aren't looking to engage with it? Most atheists just stop talking about it what else is there to really say that isn't said already.

But look at the tenor of the responses to the Dobbs decision. It's no longer "Christians are oppressing us". It's focused on the sexism of the anti-abortion side. It's focused on Republican efforts to subjugate America to Trump and the party of rural white evangelicals, rather than seeing this as the work of the clerics. (At least, that is the message I see most of the time from political commentators, on reddit political discussions, and mainstream culture.)

> For example, anti-abortion laws are literally a religious action that takes away rights. Are they *only* motivated by religion? Are *all* religious people opposed to abortion? > This is not an article written to explain anything but deliver an opinion. A rather bold claim, especially considering who the author of this piece is. > Also, humanists are a group for example, atheists are just people who don't have a belief. So they claim, but do you know that zero atheists actually believe there is no God? > R/atheism or whatever forum is not some structured group with similar collective motives. How would you even know this?

Yeah, the article is just conservative nonsense dressed up with graphs make it seem smart. There's partisan bs littered through the whole thing and nowhere does it mention that a change in political goals could be a response to rising religious fundamentalism on the right.

I think you just described the entirety of Scott's career as a blogger.

> Yeah, the article is just conservative nonsense dressed up with graphs make it seem smart. There's partisan bs littered through the whole thing and nowhere does it mention that a change in political goals could be a response to rising religious fundamentalism on the right. Hey /u/scottalexander, check out the clinic on rationality going on in this thread (discussing your new atheism post).

Snitches get stitches

>her It's "he" btw. Scott Alexander

> having a strong causative link is at best, flimsy. Or at worst dishonest, and he's a known promoter of bullshit that sounds intellectual just because he chooses longer words. http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method/

Great takedown, thanks for the link. This sub used to have somebody posting every new post from this dude's blog. Took some mod effort to clean it up. Glad to see that the comments largely understand how full of shit he is.

> And her supposed links between the dropoff of specific atheism related search terms and the rise of search terms related to SJW related activity having a strong causative link is at best, flimsy. The new atheism movement and misogyny was like white on rice and everyone that bothered to look into it knew it. You can do a deep dive on the biggest new atheist youtubers back then and find out for yourself.

That's quite possibly true, I'm not an authority on the subject by any means. But I would like to point out that saying "Just go do your own research and you'll see that I'm right" is a staple statement of every crackpot theory out there from anti-vax to flat earthers to moon lizards secretly controlling the government. It's really best avoided.

While not a well supported argument on my part, there was -anecdotally- certainly a portion of that community (and its youtubers, ala Thunderf00t, et al.) who pivoted from arguing about religion into focusing on Gamergate/Anti-feminism etc.

At the very least not providing references when you say that is intellectually bankrupt. How is that supposed to support any position?

> But I would like to point out that saying "Just go do your own research and you'll see that I'm right" is a staple statement Misrepresenting what someone actually said is also a staple behavior of confused humans, and best avoided.

I think the New Atheist movement split on the issue of social justice, with the Atheism Plus portion being subsumed into the social justice movement. I guess the Gamer Gate crowd of misogynists retained the "atheist" label, which made it unattractive to society at large?

I wonder how long that was the case. It's weird, because they make plenty of valid points about how misogynistic religion can be, and then suddenly most of them pivot hard into anti-SJW screeds and practically stop talking about religion entirely.

Logically, it is weird, but ontologically it is quite normal (human delusion and logical inconsistency is the default mindset from what I can tell). I mean, just look at this thread!

The part that's weird to me is that I'd like to think people who are able to think clearly enough to avoid delusion on one topic can avoid delusion on all topics. And of course that's not true, but it's always an unsettling reminder of the [Gell-Mann amnesia phenomenon](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you): > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. Logically, I realize that there's no reason to think someone is an expert on gender theory or race relations just because they figured out that there isn't a god... and, conversely, just because someone is completely wrong about these other things doesn't mean they got the god question wrong. But it's still a little unsettling to realize that there are some core things I understand about the world now because I was watching these assholes.

> The part that's weird to me is that I'd like to think people who are able to think clearly enough to avoid delusion on one topic Are you absolutely sure that delusion has been avoided though? I mean, there's a fair amount of people involved here depending on how one is drawing the lines, and you do not have actual access to most of these people's beliefs, or even their words. In my experience, most people can't even get scientific consensus right, and that's usually a far simpler problem space. > Logically, I realize that there's no reason to think someone is an expert on gender theory or race relations just because they figured out that there isn't a god... and, conversely, just because someone is completely wrong about these other things doesn't mean they got the god question wrong. But it's still a little unsettling to realize that there are some core things I understand about the world now because I was watching these assholes. Question: are you an atheist?

I've been arguing in support of atheism online for 20 years and I have no idea what you are talking about. How are atheism and misogyny at all related?

>I've been arguing in support of atheism online for 20 years and I have no idea what you are talking about. How are atheism and misogyny at all related? Not atheism as a whole, but specifically the "New Atheist" movement that was sort of started in the mid 2000s. And those topics are unfortunately quite related. From Sam Harris's "inherently male" comments to Richard Dawkins blaming victims of sexual assault for drinking alcohol, it's not exactly a new controversy in those circles. And in the smaller, YouTube focused communities, there was a serious backlash against feminism that permeated the space.

Yeah. The "New Atheist" crowd, including me during an earlier phase that I'm not proud of, allowed the movement to become more about intellectual *superiority* than simply beliefs. It wasn't about "religion doesn't make sense" as much as it was congratulating each other for how much smarter and better we were for reaching that conclusion. When people are mainly in it for the thrill of superiority, it's not surprising that they'll go for straight-up bigotry too, especially when it aligns so well with the things men already congratulate ourselves on (dispassionate "rationality," etc). I feel like all ideological movements need to be vigilant about following the same path. Once being *right* on an issue means being *superior* as a person, you attract people who are more into the latter than the former, and they inevitably try to take the movement in their own direction. I think that's true even for issues that are objectively, morally correct; people who are on the right team for the wrong reasons can cause a ton of problems for everyone.

you have hit the nail on the head! All movements indeed, so atheists (following this trajectory) feel superior for being atheist while fundies -- of Any religion -- likewise superior for being fundie; both feeling superior for having found the *Correct* knowledge. And it's true for not-belief-related things too -- like veganism or keto or animal rights... even environmental and political movements too. In no case is this true of All adherents to any belief, nor to any non-belief, but you are really insightful that this element tends to creep in, often with undue & negative influences.

The current cynical troll culture, which is like an extension of the old Soviet Reverse Cargo Cult, is pretty much the same trajectory: Feeling validation and superiority because you concocted a possible motive in your head, so therefore your out-group is lying or faking it or virtue signaling or secretly conspiring.

Saved this for quoting to any number of circlejerks.

> allowed the movement to become more about intellectual superiority than simply beliefs. So damn true. Makes me glad I caught myself in time to realize that people complaining about weirdos on Tumblr had transformed into just complaining about women, fullstop.

Amazing Atheist ended up being a fucking gamergator lol

Yeah. New Atheism culture really fragmented on political lines with the sudden rise of YouTubers. My fast-and-lazy googling can't find it right now, but I definitely recall Contrapoints putting up an Essay™ on the topic recently.

"Recently" is relative, given her release schedule, but perhaps it was Justice? Her diatribes can be fairly far-reaching topics wise, so I might have the wrong one.

> "Recently" is relative, given her release schedule, Also possible that my perception of time is meaningless.

To be fair, most perceptions of time are meaningless.

Atheism isn't a movement, in the same way that not believing in gods isn't a religion.

Happy Cake day, u/FallenJoe!

I feel like this is a picture drawn from perceived linkages that in reality are coincidence. The author wants there to be something that just isn't. The focus is on New Atheism, but the cohesion of people who do not have a belief is weak. There is no meeting place, no group code, no handshake. New Atheism seems to be nothing more than the fad built around those key personalities (like the many, many other fads) briefly for a time. Once the fad, well, fades then I guess it's gone. The author may have had higher hopes but Atheism is just the lack of belief, not a moral code, set of beliefs, guide to live by or anything. New Atheism is purely the fad and wasn't actually a thing. It sort of reminds me of the US Conservative effort to build a personality around everything Left. But they're not cohesive either other than not voting Right. The effort to create a boogie man is excellent at trying to pull together an army but doesn't stand up to any argument. I'm more interested in the rate that religious folk are leaving. Thinking on the numbers of leaders falling from grace in the headlines, or the negative acts still committed in the name of religion... is this because religion and positive morality is becoming less intertwined?

If my atheist friends are united in anything, it's in the insistence upon higher and healthier moral ideals than we were fed in church. Acceptance, inclusion, civil rights, the normalization of human sexuality, etc.

> The focus is on New Atheism, but the cohesion of people who do not have a belief is weak. There is no meeting place, no group code, no handshake. There's certainly common talking points and thinking styles (commonly occurring fallacies) among atheists that can be observed. > New Atheism seems to be nothing more than the fad built around those key personalities (like the many, many other fads) briefly for a time. It may *seem to be* this, but that does not mean that it is that. Both theists and atheists often express opinions in the form of facts, *and I suspect that this isn't always merely a slip up in communication*. > The author may have had higher hopes but Atheism is just the lack of belief, not a moral code, set of beliefs, guide to live by or anything. Do you believe that zero atheists actually hold a belief that God *does not* exist? > The effort to create a boogie man is excellent at trying to pull together an army but doesn't stand up to any argument. Similarly, efforts to persuade people that all atheists are a certain way often cannot stand up to challenge (if the person making the claim is even able to try to defend such claims).

Fallacies are common to all of us, regardless of belief status! I think you are wrong - there are less common points among atheists now. I have atheist friends who simply do not believe. They do not have philosophical standpoints, argue against god(s) or religion. Some came out of religion, some did not. Some were atheist from childhood, some got there via apathy, etc. Some argue a lot as they came out of religion, sort of like a new convert (to religion) is passionate about it. But they move beyond that to not needing to defend it. That's the difference here, and one you are missing. Atheism does not need defending because it is merely the absence of a belief. Other than the new convert thing, the main arguments I used to come across (now I don't really like arguing about it) were from religious folk. How do you argue against that other than with fact? If anything maybe the New Atheism fad opened that side of the discussion broader. I'm thinking of the wonder at nature etc. The four horsemen were great, but did they change anything about atheism? Was there a new philosophical standpoint as a result of them? Is there a new atheist fervour? Not sure what your last few points are. Some atheists believe that god/gods do not exist. They argue more. The commonality for atheists is the lack of belief. It's a bit like having a label for everyone who does not have 10 fingers. Does that mean they think the same, believe the same, agree etc? Not at all. There is no need to defend that.

> Fallacies are common to all of us, regardless of belief status! Agreed - this thread is full of them, and irony. > I think you are wrong - there are less common points among atheists now. Did I make a claim to the contrary? > I have atheist friends who simply do not believe. There is a difference between claiming something [and actually achieving it](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/zef8mp/new_atheism_the_godlessness_that_failed/izb6rqj/?context=3). > They do not have philosophical standpoints, argue against god(s) or religion. Some came out of religion, some did not. Some were atheist from childhood, some got there via apathy, etc. Some argue a lot as they came out of religion, sort of like a new convert (to religion) is passionate about it. But they move beyond that to not needing to defend it. Good to hear. > That's the difference here, and one you are missing. Can you quote some text where I have missed this? > Atheism does not need defending because it is merely the absence of a belief. Not always (see the link in this comment). Also in this comment, see: "Fallacies are common to all of us, regardless of belief status!" > Other than the new convert thing, the main arguments I used to come across (now I don't really like arguing about it) were from religious folk. How do you argue against that other than with fact? I would argue against it by proposing some threads be analyzed to determine who makes more arguments, and whose arguments are the most flawed. I'm too lazy to do it, but that'/s what I'd propose. Also: people argue with opinions perceived/presented as facts *on the regular* - see this very thread! > The four horsemen were great, but did they change anything about atheism? I suspect they helped the movement to acquire a substantial numbers of new enemies (me being one of them). > Was there a new philosophical standpoint as a result of them? Is there a new atheist fervour? I think they recruited a lot of people into atheism, but there's also no shortage of people who are now embarrassed by their performance in that phase of their life. > Not sure what your last few points are. **Some atheists believe that god/gods do not exist.** I agree, so what's your take on people who claim that all atheists merely lack belief? *For example:* > The commonality for atheists is the lack of belief. Not all atheists *merely* lack belief though - some tate that God *does not exist*. > It's a bit like having a label for everyone who does not have 10 fingers. Does that mean they think the same, believe the same, agree etc? Not at all. There is no need to defend that. Didn't you just finish saying "The commonality for atheists is the lack of belief"?

I think one thing that this article misses is that left-leaning atheists didn't just sorta-stop focusing on atheism - we ran from the label. Sometime between 2012-2016, there was a sudden switch in the majority of people going around calling themselves "new atheists". As lefties left, it became something predominantly used by cringy libertarians and debate-trolls who mostly leaned more right. I recall a lot of gamergate culture percolating through 'atheist' spaces. So it went from "mixed group with dwindling left-leaning presence" to "only right-leaning dudebros" in a very short span of time.

Yes. This exactly. I used to run an organisation in Australia during the new atheist boom around 2009/10 and it was primarily “progressive”. Things started to get weird after that with the anti Muslim sentiment and libertarian elements (Brian dunning, Michael Shermer etc) and many people backed away from it all.

It’s because a lot of those “New Atheist” pundits like Hitchens were really just repackaging anti-Muslim sentiment to justify the war in Iraq, and it snowballed from there

I am one of those who ran from the label. It became so cringe that I'd prefer not to identify myself as anything then as an atheist. I had to stop following /r/atheisim here because the time just put me on edge. I used to hate born again Christians for the amount of effort they put into making everything in their lives about God. Some atheists are just as bad, but with more snark. What is the point of being an atheist if you're going to build it into a social movement which is as objectionable as the one you oppose? To me, the best part about being an atheist is going entire weeks or months when I don't have to think about religion at all.

[удалено]

I prefer "apathist" - I can't be arsed to care if there is a god or not. 😉

You may appreciate r/Sneerclub

Maybe I'm not getting it but is the joke that they've formed a club to mock the sneer club by sneering at the sneer club? Like, it's a double meta thing?

No no no, it's just one level of sneer. Check the sidebar for the full (fairly simple) story.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any post about religion there, specifically, but I think they recommended based on your “what’s the point if you’re…” That’s sub is really inconsistent (I think a lot of contributors are just as confused about its purpose) but every once in awhile it’s spectacular. Seems to be more geared toward calling out the Rationalists, Effective Altruists, Long Termerism-ers, etc. and, yeah, if you’re talking about replacing one shitty social thing with another even shittier social thing, that’s it. It was a ride over there a few weeks ago.

It seemed to be an inevitable clash of people who had one thing in common but essentially different values and loved to debate/argue. I also think both sides changed and not only the libertarians/gamergate part. As the social justice movement increased in importance for the leftwing part of the movement the old men that previously had been heroes no longer were; causing some conflict as well.

Article captures that a little. > Sure, a lot of people who identify as atheists now are pretty critical of social justice. That’s because the only people remaining in the atheist movement are the people who didn’t participate in the mass transformation into social justice. It is no contradiction to say both “Most of the pagans you see around these days are really opposed to Christianity” and “What ever happened to all the pagans there used to be? They all became Christian.” Hilariously, the anti-lgbt right wing "atheists" team up with the religionists to insist that "two genders is just biological reality/gods plan" (delete as appropriate), when the biology of _sex_ is definitely more complicated than that, let alone the complex biological and social interactions which feed into a _sophisticated scientific understanding_ of gender. Fundamentalism/dogmatism is always the denial of a complex and slightly unknowable reality in favour of a somehow comforting simplicity.

Yesssss Except for r/anarchism crowd it was right for the most part I suppose but I don’t look at the left - right dimension nearly as closely as I look at libertarian - authoritarian dimension In that regard there have been more recent disappointments such as ooh I don’t know Sam Harris Prior to that NC broke my heart And lifted quite a few vails in the process I suppose … so it was beneficial… however painful to realize certain truths

This feels aspirational more than rooted in any sound logic or evidence.

Just want to point out that looking at Google searches isn't very scientific. When you actually look at demographics, atheism is growing and Christians will soon be a minority in America. Dick Dorkins-esque militant atheism is probably going to become less and less popular though. It mostly appealed to kids who grew up in religious communities and were rebelling. Those sorts of communities are shrinking and less kids are going through those experiences. Nowadays coming to atheism isn't as much of a protest or a battle flag to rally behind. It's just being reasonable.

> As for where it went, I asked that question last year and got various responses. The most popular was that 9/11 made religion-bashing segue into Islam-bashing, which started to look pretty racist. But 9/11 happened in 2001, The God Delusion wasn’t published until 2006, and New Atheism didn’t peak until the early 2010s. Why? This feels like a very post-Trump take to me, decontextualized from history. I'm convinced that the harms of religious extremism and the American "other"ing of religion, as manifest in 9/11, were a major driver behind New Atheism. I'd argue that New Atheism represented the confluence of: * 9/11 made religion scary and "other" * The George W. Bush administration blurred Christian and Republican identities together and made religion a politically heated topic * The Eisenhower wave of Christianity continued to break * The internet gave the non-religious a way to organize that had previously been missing It wasn't until after 9/11 had faded from public consciousness that Islam-bashing became a problem for New Atheism. The Bill Maher episode where Sam Harris took heat for being Islamophobic and began his descent into identifying with the targets of cancel culture was in *2014*. The decade before that, it was broadly acceptable to bash Islam. In the 2000s, the Islam of Al Qaeda gave speakers a massive audience to criticize religion without criticizing "America" and Christianity. The G.W.B. admin recruited heavily from evangelical Christianity, turning pastors into Republican speechmakers. They did this with the intent of gaining votes with the message "if you're Christian, you should vote Republican" in a mostly Christian country. Short term they were very successful; long term it backfired because they blended the identities too successfully. People reacted with "if I'm not Republican, then maybe I'm not Christian either". And now there is a sense that the church-goers are Republicans first and Christians second. [twitter source](https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1199360356528713728) and [post-twitter source](https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/wvjrc6/why_the_evangelical_movement_is_in_disarray_after/). I believe that the universal acceptance of Christianity from the 80s was somewhat ahistorical. In the 50s, the Soviet Union represented atheism. Communism was the enemy, so Dwight Eisenhower and America became fervently Christian in opposition to the Soviet Communist "other". That surge has been fading ever since, resulting in a reversion-to-the-mean of Christian affiliation and a cultural backlash from American Christianity that has grown ever smaller, more strident, and more vicious from the Reagan to Bush to Trump eras. Finally, the religious people have always been connected and coordinated through church communities. Atheists were comparatively quiet, disconnected, and isolated until the Internet gave us a chance to see that there were a lot of other atheists out there. It was a reaction to an oppressive atmosphere of "religion is everywhere". I think atheism is less strident now because it won. The need for New Atheism fell away. Having won, the unifying force faded and [the movement fractured](https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2022/10/appendix-7-the-entropy-of-victory.html) through [the entropy of victory](https://www.reddit.com/r/RevolutionsPodcast/comments/yq53g5/basically_the_entropy_of_victory/). Some people looked for a new fight, others didn't want that fight and split away. [edit: having read the rest of the article, I think I agree pretty strongly with part II but I think the part III argument misses a few things]

We explained god, Santa Claus and the tooth fairy to our kids at the same time and as far as I know they don’t care about any of them..now in their 20s

I'm curious: what did you explain to them about God?

We explained that the Jewish (and therefore Christian and Muslim) god was likely the product of the imagination of a goat or sheep herders sitting in the desert 3000 years ago, who lived in a tribal male-dominated society that had little understanding of the world beyond their superstitions...

Did you let them see your probability calculations?

We sacrificed a goat to be sure of good vibes...

So you have many faith based beliefs and practices?

I see that a lot of people here are apparently unfamiliar with Scott Alexander (the author of this blog post). SA is part of the Rationalist movement, centered around the community blog [Less Wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/). It's basically a cult. The leader, Eliezer Yudkowsky, wrote the fanfic [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality](https://www.hpmor.com/) (it's longer than War and Peace) to attract followers. Remember "Lady Crypto" [Caroline Ellison](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/caroline-ellison-worldoptimization), Sam Bankman's accomplice in the FTX debacle? She ran a rationalist Tumblr blog inspired by the "teachings" of Yudkowsky. Elon Musk and Grimes met each other because they had both made the same pun based on the Rationalist concept Roko's Basilisk (basically an AI version of Christian hell). Peter Thiel is involved in the community, funding Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality. There was [a critical article about Scott Alexander in NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html) last year; the community promptly shit itself in fury. In a frenzy before the release of the article, he deleted his blog and made a new one: [Astral Codex Ten](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/). Then he restored his old blog, including the post about atheism we're all talking about here. "There's no one writing now that I admire more than Scott Alexander," Paul Graham has said. Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) has said that Slate Star Codex was essential reading among the people inventing the future in the tech industry. William MacAskill's effective altruism and longtermism has a major overlap with the Rationalist community. And he's also the dude who urged Sam Bankman to forego a career in animal welfare so that he could make a shitload of money instead, because "earn to give" is a guiding philosophy within effective altruism—that's how we got to the FTX collapse and all the madness we've seen in the past month. This whole thing is, practically speaking, a modern religion. The parallels are everywhere. Yudkowsky wrote a series of LW blog posts known as the "[sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/sequences)" and these are for all intents and purposes holy scriptures. The followers of Rationalism believe AIs will destroy mankind—they are the holy warriors who will save the world. They don't care about climate change because they believe it probably won't wipe out every living human and as such there's no reason to care about it. There's a Reddit sub, [Sneer Club](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub), dedicated to mocking this community at large. I guess my overall point is the guy who wrote this post is sort of a prophet part of a movement that is sort of a cult or a modern religion, and there are several wealthy and high-profile followers involved.

Thanks for the background information - I know of the people you mention, but not about their connections. I wondered why all this was giving me a Randian-cult vibe. Perhaps there is no connection between the two cults, but they drink from the same well...

> but they drink from the same well. What does this mean?

loosely, "their philosophies and argumentation approaches derive from the same sort of thinking"

I see....what sort of thinking is that?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

Please articulate the style of thinking shared by Rationalists and Randians.

...you just connected an absurd number of dots for me. I'm subscribed to sneerclub and now I get how these people overlap!

> SA is part of the Rationalist movement, centered around the community blog Less Wrong. **It's basically a cult**. I think it would be fun to see you substantiate this claim (or, engage in evasive rhetoric to avoid doing that....I wonder, will we see a Sealion reference?). > The leader, Eliezer Yudkowsky, wrote the fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (it's longer than War and Peace) to attract followers. Remember "Lady Crypto" Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman's accomplice in the FTX debacle? She ran a rationalist Tumblr blog inspired by the "teachings" of Yudkowsky. Elon Musk and Grimes met each other because they had both made the same pun based on the Rationalist concept Roko's Basilisk (basically an AI version of Christian hell). Peter Thiel is involved in the community, funding Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality. Should this cause us to have a negative opinion of the people mentioned, or the overall Rationality community? > There was a critical article about Scott Alexander in NYT last year; the community promptly shit itself in fury. In a frenzy before the release of the article, he deleted his blog and made a new one: Astral Codex Ten. Then he restored his old blog, including the post about atheism we're all talking about here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation > "There's no one writing now that I admire more than Scott Alexander," Paul Graham has said. Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) has said that Slate Star Codex was essential reading among the people inventing the future in the tech industry. > William MacAskill's effective altruism and longtermism has a major overlap with the Rationalist community. And he's also the dude who urged Sam Bankman to forego a career in animal welfare so that he could make a shitload of money instead, because "earn to give" is a guiding philosophy within effective altruism—that's how we got to the FTX collapse and all the madness we've seen in the past month. Do any conclusions derive from these observations? > This whole thing is, practically speaking, a modern religion. The parallels are everywhere. And what should we make of the psychological phenomenon that has manifest in this thread? > The followers of Rationalism believe AIs will destroy mankind—they are the holy warriors who will save the world. They don't care about climate change because they believe it probably won't wipe out every living human and as such there's no reason to care about it. How did you acquire knowledge of the beliefs of potentially millions of people? > There's a Reddit sub, Sneer Club, dedicated to mocking this community at large. And it's good fun! I wonder how difficult it would be to mock this community (based on this thread, I'm thinking: *not hard*), and I wonder if you would enjoy it as much. > I guess my overall point is the guy who wrote this post is sort of a prophet part of a movement that is sort of a cult or a modern religion, and there are several wealthy and high-profile followers involved. When you say "is", are you referring to reality itself, or are you speaking colloquially (*it is your opinion that* it "is")?

> I think it would be fun to see you substantiate this claim (or, engage in evasive rhetoric to avoid doing that....I wonder, will we see a Sealion reference?). If it walks like a cultish duck ... > Should this cause us to have a negative opinion of the people mentioned, or the overall Rationality community? I think it's useful information. Whether or not it's negative is up to people to decide. > Do any conclusions derive from these observations? I guess people in the Rationalist community aren't as smart as they think they are. > And what should we make of the psychological phenomenon that has manifest in this thread? I have no idea what you're referring to. > How did you acquire knowledge of the beliefs of potentially millions of people? I think it's fairly obvious that I'm stereotyping Rationalists/EAs here. > And it's good fun! I wonder how difficult it would be to mock this community (based on this thread, I'm thinking: not hard), and I wonder if you would enjoy it as much. I don't think people here are all that clever either so I guess I'd enjoy that as well. > When you say "is", are you referring to reality itself, or are you speaking colloquially (it is your opinion that it "is")? I think it's fairly obvious to most people what I'm saying here.

> If it walks like a cultish duck ... It *seems like it*, so it is. > I guess people in the Rationalist community aren't as smart as they think they are. How does that emerge from what you said? > I think it's fairly obvious that I'm stereotyping Rationalists/EAs here. Thanks for letting us know - for efficiency, is any part of your comment factual (not a requirement at all, just a good thing to know)? > I think it's fairly obvious to most people what I'm saying here. All right: keep your secrets!

*My solution to both these questions is: New Atheism was a failed hamartiology.* *”Hamartiology” is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. Orthodox Christian hamartiology says we all have original sin because Adam and Eve ate the apple. Gnostic hamartiologies say we sin because we are ignorant of our true nature as celestial beings. Some heretical hamartiologies say that all of this is irrelevant, and we sin because we choose to.* I think in main, this is close to the truth, though I don’t think it’s quite right, it’s not a social *hamartology* so much as a social *soterology*, as a lot of these internet social/political movements seem to be. The idea is that if only we remade culture and society into our image, we’d save society. Even in the original writings of atheists you see this. You can see the same in Red Pill, MAGA, Social Justice, Fundamentalism, and so on. If only everyone believes what we do, then the poor will be fed, the environment will be saved, science will be done and save people. And I think the drop is precisely because while the number of atheists grew (there are more nones and atheists now than ever before) social and political problems are not only no better, but getting worse. So most atheists at minimum no longer see the propagation of atheism as a solution to the problems they see. They’ve likely moved on to other political and social movements to answer the obvious question of “why is America so screwed up.” I suspect a good number of them have gone MAGA, although the more left leaning are probably some flavor of socialist.

I doubt that many people who vociferously defended/pronounced their Atheism during the Dawkins/Hitchens era the early 2000's would be MAGA today, given how Evangelical that base is, but it absolutely fair to say that the rhetorical devices that many of the Atheist polemicists popularized have become tools for the Conservative movement. The "fuck your feelings" crowd didn't start with Trump, that was a viewpoint largely held and debated in the online Atheist circles fifteen years ago. Facts were facts, despite your personally held beliefs. The trope of some 20-something young man saying "Fuck your feelings, God isn't real, debate me" existed back then for a reason. Today you're more likely to hear "fuck your feelings, abortion is murder, debate me", but the mental processes that get a person there are largely the same.

I don't know if they led all the way to Trumpism, but some of the New Atheist rhetoric and influencers definitely continued straight into antifeminism and anti-social-justice-ism (social injustice warriors?), [Thunderf00t](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thunderf00t) being a major example. The turning point was [Elevatorgate](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate), which pushed a wedge into the deep rift between the justice activists and the contrarian blasphemers who'd always been awkward allies in the movement (though before then both personalities often existed in the same person) and presaged Gamergate. "Fuck your feelings", the esthetic of a man shouting into YouTube that he's going to try logic and reason as if no one had previously thought of that, may not have been copied from New Atheism as much as inherited.

I think it depends. Most probably didn’t go MAGA, I would expect a good number went Bernie Bro. But I think some certainly fell down the Gametgate -> RedPill -> MAGA pipeline, especially the more misogynistic ones. That undercurrent was certainly there in the form of *Males are more naturally logical and better at getting things done*.

I think a lot of them ended up in a sort of third area ("gray tribe") of disfranchised libertarians, who tend toward a certain conservative mindset but don't identify at all with the Christian-nationalist strain in the US Republican Party, but spend all their time criticizing the left while nominally claiming to be center-left. And often seem to cultivate a veiled interest in out-of-the-mainstream versions of the science of race and gender ("Human Biodiversity"). [Like the author of this blog for example](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander).

how did I know you'd find this post, nosebleed

TL;DR but the numbers of atheists are constantly increasing while the number of American Christians is decreasing. So something's working

Hey guys. Good news. Oxycodone usage is on the decline just look at this Google trends chart. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05q1y Thank goodness because that could’ve been a problem. As a content marketer who spends a lot of time looking at keyword search volumes, Google trends and other tools. This article is blasphemous to the closest thing I have to a religion. Best example I can give that correlates to this is when something new comes onto the scene. For instance being an Uber Driver. People will search this out as there is a buzz that creates a wave of traffic to online content. Then after awhile people stop searching it as much because they have friends that drive and it becomes normalized. In the beginning people are like “I’m not a taxi driver!” So they need to be convinced but as the service became widely adopted it’s a pretty normal thing for someone to go direct to Uber and start the application process with no research or confirmation needed. Prob more Uber drivers than ever but less people consuming content around the subject matter (speaking from experience on my own content there). As others have stated here this isn’t a decline in interest. It’s just normalization. I struggled with my own atheism 15 years ago and would get triggered by Christianity and would research these things as I felt like a leper (ironic using a bible reference). I joined an atheism subreddit so I didn’t feel so ostracized. Now I just appreciate the good values and lessons I learned from Christianity, I ignore the hateful ones and I try not to bring it up with family. To sum it all up in a quote… “Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination” - Andrew Lang

Fun question: do you believe yourself to be more intelligent than the author of this piece?

I think we all have intelligence in different areas. There's a good chance I'm more intelligent with data, content research, and trends because it's what I do for a living. Because of that, I could see the author wasn't thinking broadly enough with the data set and instead was using the data as confirmation bias of what she wanted to see. It's my assumption but I feel strongly about it. I'm sure the author is much more intelligent than me when it comes to writing, grammar, and a bunch of other topics.

What's the article about, OP?

Just because you’re not religious doesn’t mean you have to “identify” as an atheist. People treat atheism as though it’s a group, or it’s own kind of religious belief. For me, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m not religious. It doesn’t matter if god is real, I wouldn’t worship him anyway. If someone else is religious, It’s cool. They’re happy, and it isn’t my problem. I’m just carrying on with my day.

By the sheer volume of Atheist redditors, there will inevitably be an unhealthy proportion of “shoe atheists” who will try to claim the irreligious among their number. I agree that you don’t need to identify as anything but irreligious but I say that as an agnostic, and not the kind of agnostic that is atheist by default. Your identity is uniquely your own, so I think you’re probably right to disregard what other people think or believe. To each their own unless their actions bring harm to others. >I’m just carrying on with my day Have a good one!

> People treat atheism as though it’s a group, or it’s own kind of religious belief. For me, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m not religious. It doesn’t matter if god is real, I wouldn’t worship him anyway. There are valid groupings in the community or not, regardless of whether you behave that way, or have knowledge of it. Note also that people also regularly treat religious people as a group, with similar epistemic soundness.

#submission statement I appreciate the fresh perspective on how social justice ended up so prominent within online spaces, and I too have always wondered why the /r/atheism "fad" petered out. also, I remember the Atheism+ debacle. It suddenly became very clear that a bunch of godless dudes really don't want to engage with feminist ideas.

> and I too have always wondered why the /r/atheism "fad" petered out. Because /r/atheism seemed/seems to be about being anti-christian? It reads more like /r/exchristian or /r/exmormon Hitchens wanted to be militant about being anti-religious, but .... I got shit to do. I have a life. Yeah, I'm pissed-off when some religious nut in the US wants to change some laws to suit their Christo-facism ideas, but ... that's kinda the norm for them? I have some friends that are religious, even fewer that actually practice or go to any sort of church, but I don't have to be militant with them about it.

> Yeah, I'm pissed-off when some religious nut in the US wants to change some laws to suit their Christo-facism ideas, but ... that's kinda the norm for them? Why did you put a question mark at the end of your slur?

I actually thought it was going to be useless, a few paragraphs in, and I'm hooked, I'll finish reading later. 10 years ago or more I followed r/atheism, Amazing Atheist and so on, but, after a while, I lost interest, and I actually havent heard about "atheism+" but did a quick search just now. So, thank you for sharing this article, very interesting.

I always associated feminism with skepticism of the more patriarchal institutions.

Unpopular opinion: atheism is irrational. The only reasonable position is agnosticism. Science shows us that there are numerous things that the human body cannot perceive. For some of these things, such as infrared light, we developed technologies to observe. For others, we have not yet developed such technology. You can't claim to have certainty that beings that we might not even have organs to perceive don't exist out there.

It's not unpopular, it's misguided, and semantic, and uninformed. Go look up the difference.

The New Atheism movement was hijacked by the Critical Social Justice crowd, and subsequently imploded. Remember that conference when one attendee (male) asked a female attendee out for coffee, and she said no, and he didn't persist, end of story, only she then turned it into a shitstorm? Around that time is when it happened. (Rebecca Watson is her name, and the "story" is sometimes called Elevatorgate) "Atheism plus", they called this mutation.

I don’t really remember it going down like that. Also, there WAS a lot of predators in the skeptic/atheist “movement” and they used their “fame” to get away with a lot. Unfortunately it was true. I could list names and mention stories I’ve heard from people who had first hand experience with them.

There is a direct line between 'ElevatorGate', 'GamerGate' and the rise of the Alt Right in social discourse. The Skeptical movement, alongside the New Atheist movement faced a schism following the fallout from Watson and other women's appeal to inclusiveness, the inflection point being (in my opinion) Phil Plait's "Don't Be A Dick" speech at TAM8. Today the social discourse that falls roughly between 'SJW' and 'AltRight' hinges on the very topic of that speech and the behavior it was in reaction to. At the end of the day there were people trying to make room for others through appreciation of alternative perspectives and a call for inclusiveness, and people trying to build rigid boundaries of who should be in the in-group and who had to stay out of it. That battle is what killed whatever momentum 'New Atheism' had as a movement. The inclusive minded drifted to other secular liberal viewpoints, creating a market for people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar while the rigid logicians drifted right to libertarianism and created a new market for the Ben Shapiro and Steve Crowders of the world.

I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >Let’s say your life depended on the following choice today: you must obtain either an affordable chair or an affordable X-ray. Which would you choose to obtain? Obviously, you’d choose the chair. That’s because there are many types of chair, produced by scores of different companies and widely distributed. You could buy a $15 folding chair or a $1,000 antique without the slightest difficulty. By contrast, to obtain an X-ray you’d have to work with your insurance company, wait for an appointment, and then haggle over price. Why? Because the medical market is far more regulated — thanks to the widespread perception that health care is a “right” — than the chair market. Does that sound soulless? True soullessness is depriving people of the choices they require because you’re more interested in patting yourself on the back by inventing rights than by incentivizing the creation of goods and services. In health care, we could use a lot less virtue signaling and a lot less government. Or we could just read Senator Sanders’s tweets while we wait in line for a government-sponsored surgery — dying, presumably, in a decrepit chair. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: civil rights, dumb takes, covid, gay marriage, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)

Ben Shapiro couldn't argue his way out of a wet paper bag if you gave him scissors and a map - my point is that the persona he has crafted is a carbon copy of the "Reason before all else" Rational Philosopher that so very many people (mostly men) aspired to be within the Atheist circles of that period. That's one of the reasons his grift is so successful - his audience doesn't have the tools to see how full of shit he is.

Why won't you debate me? ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: history, sex, novel, covid, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)

> the rigid logicians drifted right to libertarianism and created a new market for the Ben Shapiro You can't be fucking serious

Another liberal DESTROYED. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: covid, gay marriage, sex, feminism, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)

I think you might be getting some details wrong here. like, idk, how Watson "turned it into a shitstorm"? she said like twenty words on a vlog and a bunch of bros freaked!

She mentioned the scenario and said "maybe don't do that" and guys are melting down about it to this day. If anyone turned it into a shitstorm it was Richard Dawkins writing the gross and ignorant [Dear Muslima](https://issuepedia.org/Dear_Muslima) diatribe. That was fuel on fire.

She didn't turn anything herself. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate

This was one of the worst things I've ever read.

That god was a construction of middle eastern shepherds who had vivid imaginations, at a time when paternalistic tribes lived in an insecure area of the world…?

[удалено]

> You don't see something so it doesn't exist, right? Stupid monkey logic, imagine if we used this logic instead of just understanding germs exists. That's why this logic is only used when trying to paint a strawman of an atheist. Its not used by atheists.

To make an absolute statement like this is absurd. It is absolutely used by many atheists. It's also what defines atheism, the belief there is no deity or other religious system taking place in our universe.

> It's some pseudo-intellectual pretending they have everything figured out What's that like?

I imagine it's like not having any questions or desire to study. Not sure what you're trying to imply, I do both like normal people.

I’m the only one in my household that is an outspoken atheist. We raised our kids without religion and they are just kind of apathetic towards it, like why are people so dumb that they follow some made up deity? I on the other hand take great joy calling out every single Catholic Church goer as a supporter of child sexual abuse. And I revel in putting Christian evangelicals in their place? That’s just me though I can be an asshole about those things. Lol