Some horrible tragedy is in the news, and in the comments someone's aunt goes
How terrible! I pray the victims' souls find peace in Heaven 🙏
Suddenly, atheist guy
You DELUDED FOOL, souls do not exist and there is no God or the afterlife. Try using more logic
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I can't fully articulate how I feel when I see it happening (I am really bad at explaining my thoughts), but when I see someone doing "le epic atheist dunking on the deluded sky fairy believer" routine when all the religious person is doing is expressing sadness in a comment section, I would rather the atheist would just shut up and maybe use the energy to do something productive.
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I see plenty of non-religious people shape their lives around equally absurd ideologies. When I see a comment saying "my prayers are with you" it just registers to me as someone offering solidarity or condolences. Two things which, when expressed over the internet, are equally as useless. Railing against it just creates conflict where there was none before and I hate to see it.
The main posts "thoughts and prayers" example is petty cringe online discourse from dorks that has zero material influence on the world. The commenter above is showing what 90% of religious people believe and its objectively insane unless you're extending the most innocent interpretations to deluded adults beliefs/motivations who would probably have you skinned alive if they knew you were a socialist.
They're not necessarily even all that religious, we just happen to live in a culture that's heavily influenced by a certain monotheistic religion
It's just not productive. I'm certainly an atheist, but just yelling at people online does basically nothing to either change anyone's mind or advance any kind of useful cause. There was some argument to be made in favor of this kind of behavior 20 years ago in virtue of the need to culturally normalize atheism, but outside of things like evangelical communities (which aren't going to be receptive to this kind of thing in any case), I don't think that's particularly necessary anymore. Everyone knows that atheism exists, and is actually fairly common; mainstream popular culture (at least in the US) doesn't really treat it as the kind of shameful, freakish secret that mandates complete social ostracism anymore, and "no religion" is one of the fastest growing demographic groups. Unless religious people are being belligerent themselves--in which case they absolutely deserve pushback--I don't think there's much to be gained by this kind of public performance of atheism.
All the New Atheist authors (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.) were pretty obnoxious and most were pretty intellectually bankrupt--of all of them, only Dan Dennett is even remotely qualified to expound on philosophy of religion and social ontology--but they did at least succeed in mainstreaming the idea that it's possible to be a decent person without being religious, which was pretty much totally anathema to popular culture in the US during the 20th century. There are certainly still senses in which religious ideology is harmful, but that harm is usually parasitic on the politics of the religion rather than the metaphysics per se. If you think that trans people are subhuman or whatever, I don't really care if you're being motivated by theology or something else: you're still a fucking scumbag. It's the practical, material, political impacts that need constant tireless pushback in public, not the metaphysical ideology.
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Yup. You can absolutely draw a direct line from the emergence of New Atheism/"Rationality" as an online social movement in the early 2000s, and contemporary neo-reactionary politics (including the alt-right). There's a particularly close ideological link between the Hitchens/Harris crowd and the kind of "anti-feminism" that fueled Gamergate and the rise of Trumpism, as you say. Not everyone who was involved in that stuff gleefully slid down the slope into fascism, but those who weren't amenable to that kind of thing had largely abandoned the "movement" by 2012 or so. This is a pretty underappreciated piece of recent cultural history that lots of people who weren't Extremely Online (and moving in the right circles) in the early 2000s-2010s frequently forget about.
Again, I'd except Dennett from the atheist-to-fash thought leader pipeline. His interest was significantly more academic/professional than that of the rest of them, and Breaking The Spell is a respectable piece of philosophy rather than a polemic (though I think it gets a lot of stuff wrong). It's no coincidence that he stopped appearing with the rest of the crew pretty early on.
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Definitely agree that alt-right is no longer very alt, in the same way that neo-conservative is no longer very neo.
The alt-right pretty much came to a halt when Milo was cancelled. People still called fascists alt-right, but the actual movement has been dead as a doornail since 2017.
Some people flip flopped hard on atheism, others are part of a second wave drawing from the misogyny generated but going in a different direction
:citations-needed:
I got you fam!
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-12-new-atheist-celebrities-crusaders-for-empire
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Because it’s a meme. If bullying works the world would be communist right now. But it’s not, so it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t work outside of your niche list of twitter followers who make 50 tweet thread arguments
Go on the bus and scream at some lady about how she’s contributing to genocide for supporting the democrats or something and report back to us
It depends on what the behavior you’re bullying people about is, and the portion of people bullying them. When all of Twitter dunks on someone for a stupid take, they’ll likely apologize and hopefully internalize why. When one dickhead is telling you one of your core beliefs about the nature of the universe isn't real, it doesn’t help much.
What I’m saying is we need to make Christianity so socially unacceptable and stupid that spouting it’s beliefs gets you mocked by every single person around you.
I think a lot of internet atheists (or "skeptics" as they used to be called) just really, really enjoy being assholes to people without getting punched in the face for it.
Getting mad at religious on the internet is also pure performance
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then parish. Would you slap zinc tablets out of someone's hand when they are sick? There's a time and a place to fight someone. When they are trying to express compassion over a tragedy, you're not going to convince them that God isn't real. You're going to convicne them you're an asshole.
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Yeah exactly it's the atheist version of saying "Jesus is all you need" after someone suffered a tragedy
I mean I would definitely try to convince someone taking the horse paste not to do so.
Then it's a good thing I neither said that nor is it an applicable comparison.
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That wasn't the metaphor. My point was you're being an ass when you try and fight someone when they are coping in a way you disagree with and it literally doesn't affect your life. Argue with a religious person when they are hurting you. Fight tooth and nail. But you're just an ass if seeing someone show compassion to someone else in a way you don't like makes you apoplectic with rage.
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You should mastirbate in public. Lots of Christians are against that for moral reasons
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Your motivation is not to convince or address a specific wrong being committed, nor to be prosocial or kind. So if you're just doing things to piss off or offend Christians, masturbate in public.
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Is that relevant to what I said? I'm talking about how shouting at someone doing something you disagree with when they are coping with something and it isn't materially or socially hurting you, is just being an ass.
The validation of Christian beliefs in general does materially hurt me and people I care about.
Is someone expressing belief the same as that belief being validated?
In this case, yes. It normalizes adults believing in magic, a belief that’s frequently used to justify harming people like me and those I care about.
I want saying you believe in God to be socially unacceptable. If you reveal it in normal company, you should be laughed out of the room and called a child. It should be looked at like an adult saying they believe in Santa Claus, and also Santa is homophobic.
The fact that it’s considered normal and okay for adults to believe in magic means you have to take seriously the evil conclusions they come to as a result of those beliefs.
Bigotry, or whatever other threat you face from certain religous people, is not a resukt of religion and exists outside of it. You have no useful perspective on this matter and I will not speak with you on it further.
Fr. Modern day christianity and religious institutions in the US are essentially the most efficient distribution network of reactionary ideology (outside of facebook) but because some goobers were annoying on reddit in 2012 it somehow made atheists/agnostics the weird ones and not grown adults believing in glorified Harry Potter.
Religious belief and church attendance is dying regardless of petty internet fights and its an objectively good thing unless your politics are stuck in the 60's where churches are community spaces w/ revolutionary baptist preachers and not just hotbeds for ski-doo owning chuds trying to feel better about themselves for cheating on their wives with the manager at their car dealership. Tax the $50 billion churches pull in annually and retrofit 90% of the 300,000 churches into homeless shelters, hospitals, and community centers for people.
The people who are sympathetic to leftist causes and ripe for radicalization are the people who are leaving the church in droves - not the opposite.
Pardon my fedora.
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I'm heavy ASD I've got the R word pass
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u right I edited it
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Why delete all your comments bruh
I think a lot of those people are very genuinely dismayed and upset.
Yeah, that's what I was going for. It's no different than when people express their sadness at bad news on hex chapo bear dot org dot gov with the :sadness: or similar emoji
It’s a bit pointless in the face of tragedy because their belief is not based on any reality. Unlike being smug about, say, the geopolitical history of 9/11, there is no “facts” you can point to regarding god and bible when someone says “god be with you” when 9/11 happens.
What are you going to do? Cite Josiah 3:19 or something? None of it is based on reality and you will just make them double down. These days a lot of voters are glued to their parties like religions, but still having the concrete material facts will be a more productive use of your time than some philosophical musings. Maybe wait until they’re no longer sad and getting smug about their religion, then knock them down a peg with whatever bullshit you got because these people don’t get any training on how to defend their faith outside of, well, having faith.
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They either believe the childish fairytale or its performative.
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Then it's not a performance
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