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

  • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    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.

      • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

            • ivygroup [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              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.

          • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            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

      • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        :citations-needed:

        I got you fam!

        https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-12-new-atheist-celebrities-crusaders-for-empire

      • Shoegazer [he/him]
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        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.