This is personal for me, because I'm just old enough to have been active and around for that weird time in Dubya years when it finally started to become permissible, even cool, to call oneself atheist in at least some parts of the United States, especially on college campuses like the one I went to.
I kept in contact with scores of people that I had close ties with from the early 2000s, but watching the followers of the "Four Horsemen," as well as the horsemen themselves (fuck Sam Harris in particular, the quack hack), lead their flock in an increasingly reactionary direction was disturbing. Dawkins in particular had many swans to wrestle, especially against even the slightest attempts to make the movement about anything in particular other than dunking on religious people and feeling smart about it.
I saw the "dunk on fundies" video makers become "dunk on feminists and SJWs" almost overnight, around the time the Gamergate reactionary movement began.
To summarize though, it freaks me out how many of my old New Atheist college contacts started calling themselves "culturally Christian" (which means lots of tradwife craving and authoritarian and colonial aspirations, minus the inconvenient deity part) and even started becoming subscribers to Jordan Peterson.
Wild ride, buckos. :agony-yehaw:
Huh, interesting I’ve been sorta calling myself culturally Christian recently. However, I had no idea this was a thing related to New Atheism and I arrived at it independently. Getting into Marxism rehabilitated religion in my eyes.
Analyzing religion through a Marxist lens showed me nothing is inherently wrong with following a religion. In fact I think being a believer of any faith can be a very powerful feeling. Think of Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca. Religion would have not been used as a vehicle to dominate and subjugate much of the world had there not been a need for endless expansion of markets. So many conflicts were fought over resources and material goods with religion being the theme. And you can even look at the Taliban. If you listen to their rhetoric, it’s a twisted form of anti imperialism because of Afghanistan being at the mercy of the United States.
So yeah I don’t believe in a higher power and none of the abuses at the hands of Christianity or any religion should be hand waved away but I’m definitely more at peace with a religious faith. I grew up with the ideology of hope, charity, and redemption and I think it helps reinforce my socialist beliefs even if it’s in the background.
Edit: I wonder if there was any overlap of new atheists and liking Ron Paul because damn do I remember scouring YouTube around 2008 for videos of Ron paul being censored and Dawkins dunking on creationists.
Jesus was a brown socialist anti-imperialist Jew
Liberation theology is good stuff. I don't actually see a problem with being religious in and of itself.
The reactionary New Atheist angle of "Cultural Christianity" is a nightmare word of redpilly tradwife colonialism, though.
I don’t doubt it’s reactionary. It just so happens I named my changed attitude the same as they did.