The particular neckbeardy, fedora wearing, Sam Harris listening trend of atheism was a pretty clear reaction to the evangelical psychosis of the Bush administration.
Other geriatrics here can attest that the character of Christianity at the time was way different than it is now. These days, the fascists are more "culturally Christian" and avoid overt bible apologism. But back in the day, these people were constantly on TV spewing young earth creationism and other shit, and they were largely taken seriously. It's hard to believe now how much time was spent "debating" evolution back then. The atheist backlash at least affected discourse aesthetically for some time, making these views laughable, which deplatformed a lot of evangelicals or made them hide their power levels on TV.
Some argue that this brand of atheism justifies imperialism. It does so really only in theory. There really is no material basis for atheists in the US to justify an invasion anywhere in the world. The truth is that Christianity is still a far more powerful force for imperialism. Bush said that God told him to invade Iraq. I don't see any president saying anytime soon that the US needs to secularize a country through force.
If fundamentalist and political religiosity were defeated, then belligerent atheism would dissolve, but the reverse is not true.
Overall, it really does seem like people over emphasize this group of internet no-lifers because of the cultural cringe they manifested.
Nu-atheism always had a white chauvinism element to it, which was why it was so quickly weaponized to serve Islamophobic ends. Their whole understanding of history is that humans were enslaved by superstition and religion until a certain group of humans (ie white people) realized that superstitions and God aren't real. Their partial freedom from the God delusion lead to a flourishing of human thought and achievement, first realized as the Enlightenment, which then lead to them ushering forth the Industrial Revolution upon which their thriving societies are built on. The rest of humanity is stuck as backwards people living in mud huts thinking praying to the rain god would give them rain because they're still enslaved by superstition and God, so it is the duty of the atheists of the secular world to free the rest of humanity from the darkness of God.
This is just typical missionary white chauvinist bullshit. It's no wonder they would eventually "find God" again once it became more in vogue to embrace religion. Perhaps the rise of China has something to do with it. Once a non-European country ruled by an atheist ideology begins to rise, suddenly "atheism is the key to human progress and civilization" begins to lose its luster.
This makes a lot of sense.
I always wondered why so many of these dudes who would openly mock religion took such a hard right turn and became alt right christo fascists themselves. Really weirded me out.
Didn't Dawkins himself turn into an anti-muslim lunatic? Not to mention Sam Harris of course.
Speaking of which, one of my favourite Zizek quotes is "People ask me why I support the death penalty. It's because Sam Harris is still alive." :che-laugh:
Perhaps the rise of China has something to do with it. Once a non-European country ruled by an atheist ideology begins to rise
from this one would locate the catalyst for pop atheism in the 2000s being the fall of the soviet union :thinkin-lenin:
That genuinely might be the case. There was always a great deal of ire directed at the Soviets on theocratic grounds. When they were gone, that habit of religious rage had to go somewhere . . .
The rest of humanity is stuck as backwards people living in mud huts thinking praying to the rain god would give them rain because they’re still enslaved by superstition and God, so it is the duty of the atheists of the secular world to free the rest of humanity from the darkness of God.
Carl Sagan had a book about that, it was called, "The Demon-Haunted World". It was a best-seller, of course.
If the PLA had not marched into Tibet, still today they would be living in that demon-haunted world and serving the lamas.
Idk maybe I was too engrained in the tumblr SJW side of the conflict at the time but I really think this is an overly rosey view of things. Like, I personally remember the anti-feminism and racism coming from that side very viscerally. I know that a lot of people say that the athiest youtube channels they followed started out just doing athiesm and THEN did the anti-sjw thing but idk. I feel like the fact that that happened so many times tells me there was always something poisonous there.
I feel like this was more the case 2010 or thereafter. Youtube didn't even exist before 2005 and I remember internet atheism BBS forums and stuff from before then.
It was always a boys club though (and also libertarian)
I think at heart, they're just people who greatly enjoy pissing on other people's treasured values. When Christianity was the norm, they pissed all over it with a great deal of glee. Now that the shine's come off Christianity and social justice values have made great strides into our lives, they piss all over that, too.
Atheism/what-have-you isn't a positive ideology, it's a negative one. It's not about what you should do, but what other people are doing wrong. And what's that saying about people being wrong on the internet?
This post hit the mark.
2002 was a hell of a time to be a. Non-Christian and/or b. Against the invasion.
Christ I had forgotten all about that.
That event did get my local science fiction con, amid just gnashing of teeth from the CHUDs, to lay out specific, detailed rules about consent, taking pictures, harassment, and similar things.
Yeah, I was just posting about that somewhere the other day. Some "oh my sweet, summer child" was doubting that such a thing was ever justified and I had to step in as someone who was around when cons used to reek of authenticity and explain that it was bad, it did require public education, and that when cons started ejecting people who were walking biological weapons things improved dramatically.
It ties back in to the whole pre-Halo days, before sci fi and video games and whatnot were main streamed, when you actually could get your ass kicked for being a nerd, so the nerds tended to let almost anyone in to their spaces out of a pure "safety in numbers" attitude and close ranks to defend them when they did bad things, especially to women or minorities. This culture of protecting each other against, you know, literally everyone else was very ingrained and it took a decade or two for people to realize that no actually we can throw the sex creeps and racist wehraboos and other assorted scum out in to the street. Telling people "Use soap or fuck off" was an important part of that process.
For those who weren't around in 2001; HALO:CE represented, at least from my perspective, a massive culture shift. The X-box, or really HALO, was wildly successful and brought gaming to the main stream in a way it had never really been before, and all other nerd shit followed. Nerds of various kinds used to be a fairly culturally isolated and mocked subculture, but suddenly everyone was in to all our shit. It was a very disorienting couple of years.
Yeah, I feel really bad for the incel lady. It must be horrible looking at that movement and thinking you had a hand in it, however small and well intentioned.
Yeah, another "No shit I was there" thing. I remember the very early days before it got coopted by GOP agents where it was sort of a hazy, vaguely libertarian protest against the clearly unjust and bogus bank bail outs, but no one present knew how to do street politics. That lack of any real movement, leadership, or theory was part of what made it so easy to coopt and turn in to the right wing circus it rapidly became.
Occupy had a lot of the same problems with lack of direction or theory, but I think it was less appealing to the capitalists and they didn't try as hard to coopt it before having Obama bring the boot down.
I remember the tea-party being a few years before Occupy spun up. Wasn't tea party, like when it first started and was actually somewhat grass roots, like 08-09? And Occupy was 11?
I'm reading the Wiki article on it right now and honestly most if this stuff I had no idea. I didn't really have anything like coherent politics prior to Occupy, so I had no idea what was happening or who the players were or how anything worked.
Eugh. Remember all the Ron Paul "Revolution" with "evol" highlighted to be "love"?
Again, I had no really coherent politics back then except Republicans bad, bush bad, Iraq war bad, Obama good, voting good (I had never heard the word "electoralism"), non-violence good. I don't recall having any real idea what Libertarianism in the American sense was, just that there were a lot of very enthusiastic white bros in their 20s who seemed to think that Ron Paul was going to save the world is a very messianic, religious mania kind of way.
It's so weird to think about. In some ways it wasn't very long ago, but in other ways it was like five epochs ago. Nothing made sense at the time, but in hindsight and with a little bit of theory it all makes a lot of sense. And honestly it all runs together. I remember sleeping under a bench outside city hall during Occupy, lots of yelling at cops, lots of trying to scrounge up outdoor cooking gear and various supplies. I remember the news hammering on and on and on about "what are their demands?!?!", which I recognize now was probably workshopped to discredit Occupy, since the demands were pretty simple. Cops beating people up in NYC while we all watched on the news. Lots of speeches. Lots of pointless marching that accomplished nothing except giving people sunburn and heat exhaustion.
The city decided that we were all in danger due to the extreme cold (We'd been at it for a few months at that point, since the original OWS camps started in NYC), so we had to be removed from our little protest camp for our own good. The same city now routinely clears homeless camps by sending in city workers supported by about a hundred cops with assault rifles, destroys all their stuff, and throws them out in to the streets knowing that there's no where for htem to go.
2011: Destroy Citibank!
2021: This Pride float proudly sponsored by Citibank
I stopped going to pride because I accidentally ended up marching with the BLM contingent and could see the hate dripping off the faces of white PMCs in the crowd, but the FBI recruiting booth and the Target themed pride merch were also major factors.
I think I went to maybe one or two local things before I started to get a bad vibe from it. And honestly I'm not even sure about that, I might be conflating memories from some other protest with things I saw on the news. Memory is tricky at the best of times and mine has never been especially reliable.
Tea party were a bunch of chuds who thought electoralism solved things and they were angry at the "bankers" (wink, wink) got the bailout money and not themselves. They had no idea of organization and thought they were going to vote the bastards out and take over themselves and throw the "bankers" into concentration camps. Entryism was used to calmly dismantle them.
when cons started ejecting people who were walking biological weapons things improved dramatically.
Ha ha ha ha ha...story time? This sounds hilarious.
You might enjoy the story of the MTG tournament where a man got banned for crusading against exposed ass cracks.
I had checked out for a couple of years by then, but I remember a couple of "rationalists " discussing it at a pub at the time. Well, avoiding discussing it.
I think of it as when internet atheism went from implicitly to explicitly anti-feminist, and every woman in the community had to define themselves as "one of the cool ones"
Dawkins and/or some affiliate atheist organisation paid for a bus to drive around London with the words "There is no God, so stop worrying about it".
I'm not going to look it up to verify it, it is too cringe
How is that any more cringe than the christian billboards I drive past on my way to work? Genuinely asking.
threatened to rape her
FYI that's not at all what happened.
According to Rebecca, this is the elevator comment made to her:
Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more, would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?
Yeah it's kind of fuzzy because it was a while ago. But come on, it was implied. You don't corner a woman in an elevator at 4am and then do something like that. She felt threatened, and that's all that mattered. She posted on her blog about it and was viciously attacked by these supposedly liberated-from-the-shackles-of -Christianity humans who reacted the exact same way Christians would.
For sure, it was a long time ago with a lot of arguments in its wake. To be clear I'm not at all claiming that the backlash to her stating she felt uncomfortable was justified, it wasn't. I just felt your description was somewhat exaggerated.
Nah I definitely didn't say all that and am just taking Rebecca at her word but go off.
Gotta post it again, twice in one day. :citations-needed:
But I will say, @UlyssesT is right it's a secular Calvinism. There's no real humanism or materialism behind it, it's not like the new atheists were supportive of a welfare state or material changes
I should clarify that there's nothing wrong with atheism as such, especially if it leads to a Marxist humanism where we care for each other and build a world worth living in because it's the only one we've got.
However there's veins of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, etc that also foster this kind of worldly community just as there are also versions virulently opposed to the world and degrading to life in it.
Basically, reddit atheism is probably as corrosive to communistic politics as the forms of evangelical Christianity it opposes. It might produce a slightly less hostile society for certain minorities in the imperial core, but at the cost of a fig leaf for adventurism in the middle east.
More and more people are saying Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and the idea of secularization by eschatology are worth understanding to better understand the techbros.
Yeah I'm just ready for the same shit as the early church that Blumenberg describes. They start out believing the eschaton is near, it's any day, but then when it doesn't happen, you have to create a worldly politics and secularize.
The trouble is the politics the new techbros religion will create is probably going to be so demonic.
This sidenote that I was going to do is so off topic that I'm actually going to put it in another comment because its just, way too left field
This whole thing has me thinking about RationalWiki. And how despite being athiest to the core, its violently AGAINST the bigoted elements of nu-athiesm. How the fuck did that website come to be. What are its origins. (Not that RationalWiki cant ever be cringe, its got some terrible takes on AES countries obviously and its obsessed with Christy Myth in an unbecoming way).
Idk who or what Big Yud is. I am less online than you.
But also who or what is it.
“Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” was funded by billionaires lmao? Thats incredible. Thank you for this gift.
Ugh my dad read that when it came out, so fucking stupid
You know Atheism has been around for thousands of years before a bunch of hat wearing racists got real popular with debate nerds, and will continue to exist for probably as long as their are humans, right?
It really sounds like a lot of you have only ever encountered atheism from New-Atheist bullshit, when that is literally five or six years out of a thought tradition that goes back a very, very long time.
I really don't understand what you're getting at. Atheism is Empiricism encountering religious delusion. Atheists, at least the ones who are serious about it, don't believe in gods and fairies and magic and healing vibrations because there's no evidence of any of those things, and they do believe in an empirically observable universe.
“Atheists are cooler and gooder than religious people” is self-satisfying to say
Yeah that's the hat wearing racist new-atheism I'm talking about, the phenomena that is a blip in the history of atheism and doesn't define it or even comment on it in any meaningful way. People weren't running around France shivving priests during the Revolution because they saw South Park make jokes about Mormons.
And the Soviet Union did a really, really good job of getting rid of religion, with relatively little violence, in like 70 years. It's not some pie in the sky when you die thing. Socialist societies have been very effective in relieving people from religious belief, and I sincerely hope we'll continue to be effective in the future. Europe is doing a pretty bang up job, too, with religious adherence plummeting since WWII.
Just as someone who was around during that time and very conscious of the atheism thing, they absolutely were justifying invasion. Sure they acted appalled at Bush saying god told him to go to war, but they also spent a lot of time talking about how fundamental Islam was a threat to Western enlightenment. When you have Hitchens giving speeches saying that Muslims are dangerous and they have mushroom clouds on their Jihad flags during a time when wacky Christians are leading their own holy war, it's kinda helping them.
Yeah. To add to this - The Nu-Atheists started out mostly opposed to the 2000s version of Christian Fascism. Their big bugbear, initially, was evolution. That's why dipshit's like Dawkins shot to the forefront.
When 9/11 happened it turned out that their only issue was religion, and they were perfectly happy to support, defend, and apologize for the Christian Fascist crusade to kill as many Muslims as possible and plunder the middle east. In so far as they had an analysis, their analysis was that Islam was turbo-Fundamentalism, uniquely evil, and extermination of all brown arabic speakers was totally justifiable. In foreign policy they were 100% aligned with the Christian Fascist regime.
That's pretty much when I broke with them. I want to kill god, not brown people who believe in god, and that turned out to be an irreconcilable difference.
What everyone else is saying about secular calvinism is spot on. They were protestants in every way except a professed belief in god. They basically took the protestant secularization of Christianity one little tiny step forward and just removed god, while retaining all the beliefs and values of calvinism.
It's not really surprising that a lot of them have turned towards other secular religions like techbro utopianism, or lapsed back to just being Christian Fascists again. A lot of them were probably also involved in GamerGate and the various bowtie debate bro movements that have been bouncing around the last few years
TLDR
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Reactionary anti-Christian Fascist/Fundamentalism
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100% pro imperialism, American empire
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Liberal PMC white supremacy. No klan robes, but totally on board with killing as many muslims as possible
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Mostly either Democrat style right wing or GOP-Lite, back when the gop was less bizarre and openly unhinged than it is today.
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Really liked debates even though debates never achieved anything useful, ever
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I don't remember too well, but I think a lot of them neatly transitioned from "relgion is oppressing us" to "feeeeeeeeeemales, feminisms, SJWs, and women in game's journalism is oppressing us"
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They're mostly CHUDs now. I bet a lot of them ended up in the Why I Left The Left right, because that would fit with their whole shtick of being against "oppression" while siding with the establishment in every way that matters.
And the consequence is that when non-New-Atheist Atheists say things like "I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above." and "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness" and "Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule." we get yelled at for being part of a quasi-movement that hasn't really existed in any coherent way in years.
There's sort of a counter-reaction-reaction to a New-Atheist boogieman that mutated in to anti-SJW fascism or whatever it is :funny-clown-hammer: is doing years and years ago.
We've lost Socialism's principled opposition to delusion, falsehood, charlatans, and false hope. A lot of woeo woo new age delusions have been allowed to have a space on the left and that's at least partially because New Atheism tied all atheism to right wing reactionary imperialism in the public mind.
There’s sort of a counter-reaction-reaction to a New-Atheist boogieman that mutated in to anti-SJW fascism or whatever it is is doing years and years ago.
This is mostly what I'm getting at, I think.
Hot take: I think that most socialists are pretty against religion on principle, but they keep their edgy opinions to themselves in company in order to avoid the association. I bet the mask falls when in private company, though.
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Some argue that this brand of atheism justifies imperialism. It does so really only in theory.
Except it also did in practice, making this claim categorically false.
New Atheism was a deeply, deeply liberal movement in the way that it worshiped uncritical ideas of "rationality" and "science", which just like classical liberalism can only produce a farce as the ruling ideology increasingly casts itself as "rational" and thereby wins the approval of the self-satisfied chauvinists who were always the base of New Atheism. See Neil DeGrass Tyson's "Rationalia" for an even more recent example of this flimsy approach to values.
It is also the natural and inevitable development of any "movement" so concerned with castigating backwater rural populations and promoting their "universal" values that they would seek to impose these values on other places they saw as backwater. The Islamophobia was therefore not a change in ideology but a change in focus.
The western chauvinism was always there, but my memory of the day to day posting was largely Kent Hovind, "look at this bad take on christian-mom-forum.org", and proto-manosphere dating advice.
At least when I was doing the rounds in the mid-2000s (so post 9/11 and during the main Iraq occupation). I was definitely after the heyday of Usenet channels.
It was always just assumed that Western culture produced superior values to the hyper religious middle East, as can be shown by how we just beat them in a war, but it rarely actually produced that much discussion.
Well said. It is not "in theory" if it was the sentiment that was trotted around by everyone from atheists to secular americans to Christians who don't seem to realize they themselves are partisan religious followers in order to dehumanize Muslims. I would say the same sentiment with the same train of thought is shared between a lot of the weird crusader guys pushing for war with Afghanistan and Iraq as with nu-atheist people. I don't seem it as a coalescence, but the same strain between the two "look at these savage people with their moon god" shit. They didn't come to the same conclusion, they both built their worldviews around justifying their imperial expansion
Reactionary Christianity is back on an upswing right now. There needs to be a counter.
Nu-atheism is just weaponized white privilege and ultimately is not effective. So we need a new way. Is more or less what I mentioned to say
I get what you mean, but nu-atheism hasn't been a thing for several years, and we're in a different situation now. I saw a clip of a debate yesterday where a bunch of young right wing christian guys were debating with young liberal women and they forcefully argued against divorce being legal even in cases of domestic violence. Religious extremists on the Supreme Court have thrown out Roe. We shouldn't be afraid of making a forceful case for secularism and atheism to counter this.
I think that is undialectical. People need religion, and church. The nu atheists didnt, they were able to tap into tbe power of white privilage to replace all their social and emotional needs. That doesn't work at scale. Christianity offers both, however it is reliant on old technologies of social control. Which does scale, but has negative outcomes. I do like our wet boy's idea that we need a new church based on drugs and podcasts, with socialism replacing our need for religion. :baby-matt:
I think that is undialectical. People need religion, and church.
The Soviets sure didn't think they did, dude. Every ML state has been officially atheist.
The Soviet union didn't win. So we have to learn. You can have atheist religions and churches. They are better that way. We just need like... a 4th space. Churches evolved to fill those needs. But we have too much residual fish DNA so we need to have spaces to school occasionally.
Don't suppose you still have that clip in your browser history?
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1659278274898325516/vid/720x1280/_dyA_F_r5EpXFRY9.mp4?tag=14
We didn't mean to do it. At the time we didn't understand we created one monster to fight another. The church was strong, and the only thing we could find powerful enough to fight it was white privilege. So, sorry about that one.
I do remember the anti-islam justifying of why the US could beat Iraq (clearly a case of the secular West against the zealotry of the Middle East, in the internet atheist's eyes), the areas I was in definitely focused a lot more on Bush's religious right with the teaching of evolution stuff.
Looking back on it, it had a pretty huge undercurrent of right libertarianism that I'd put ahead of justifying the Iraq war or being explicitly anti-islam (though those were a part of the culture, and are also connected).
This was largely my experience, as well. Tbh, I don't remember things related to libertarianism being discussed at all. But I had my Fukuyama glasses on at the time, so I probably just didn't notice.
I don't remember libertarian stuff being discussed explicitly, but almost every explanation for some policy or other assumed libertarian assumptions. Trying to think of a good example. Probably something about the "dating marketplace" or moral hazards about welfare.
In a just world, he'd only be posting on an obscure star wars BBS and none of us would know
Tangentially related, but I just remembered everyone flying flags on their car windows after 9/11. So fucking cringe.
I didn't say they'd become comrades or less hateful or selfish.
What I mean is that atheism would cease to be an identity that these people rally behind. They would certainly be assholes in other ways.
Like you say, the athiesm thing is a veneer to justify the violence they benefit from (when directed at enemy nations).
As you say, we're getting rhetorical, and I'm mostly agreeing with you, but I didn't say if religion completely disappeared. I said fundamentalist and political religion.
Which is to say, there wouldn't be a reason to unify behind athiesm as a political identity anymore.
Would too. Delusion and false belief are bad, even if they're not driving any specific atrocity at this exact moment.
Atheism is deeply enmeshed with empiricism. Atheism is, more than anything else, the position that no evidence for any supernatural entity or phenomena exists. In the absence of religious belief and superstition people would go right on believing in an empirically observable universe devoid of magic.
