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:

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I've always seen the New Atheists as a kind of very thin intellectual cover to spread Islamophobia. It wasn't a reaction to something oppressive so much as a lurching, malformed twisted response to 9/11 as a way to get the fundamentalist Christians and the more cosmopolitan liberal types in the same side. New Atheism was the by product. They spent so much focus on Christianity because that's who they were around, but their main focus of hatred was always Islam. Now so many of these same people are overt reactionaries I'd say the intellectual cover worked well. It did what it was supposed to do.

    Also there is genuine oppression perpetrated by religious groups in the USA, largely cults and evangelical groups brainwashing LGBTQ kids or destroying their lives. You'll notice that was hardly ever the focus for the new atheist currents. They were more focused on wacky creationists or justifying imperialist invasions.