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
I’m no longer that guy, because I’m no longer 15 and an asshole. But I do still understand the thoughts of that guy:
I don’t want people saying that shit about me if I die in a tragedy. I don’t want your fucking prayers, I want you to do something to prevent this issue from happening in the future. If I die from COVID, I don’t want “What a terrible tragedy” I want “This is the direct fault of Joe Biden and I’m gonna fucking kill him.” Seeing those kinds of messages used to make me super mad because I knew that if I was one of the victims they would say the same things about me.
To me it always read like some aspiring fedora wearer not having the ability to read the room and trying to own some grandma expressing their shock at a situation using canned phrases we as a culture have come to use at such situations
Absolutely. It's not like fedora wearer is offering up any solutions. If anything they are just creating a hostile environment in which no further productive discussion will take place.
Please repeat your condolences into the flower arrangement :fedposting:
I think at least for people that grew up in the US, being surrounded by the consequences of capitalism and religion intermingling, it's cathartic to just tell these people they're absurd and need to shut up. Like if your parents or teachers were religious and used that to excuse being abusive. For me it was that sort of thing that pushed me towards edgy atheism, I was already atheist in the sense that no one had taught me about religion and it didn't apply to me till I was like 12 when a stepparent put me in a church program, so I don't recall ever having believed it or even considering it as something that could be true. Come to think of it I don't remember actually believing Santa either, damn I wasn't a very whimsical child. Anyway, what got me away from Internet Atheism is those people were homophobic and used their hate of religions as an excuse to just be racist towards people in the Middle East. Anyone else remember the "well if 1 in 10 M&Ms were poison would you eat any?! No, so why would you let in a Muslim that might be a terrorist!" I remember that being shared around by people on Facebook. I'm on a tangent now but another thing that pissed me off was, I live in the southern US, but the moment Obama got elected and it seemed like being gay was normalized every gay dude I knew immediately cashed in on the fact that they were still white and men so they became massive racists and misogynists, and of course obnoxiously atheist. Was wild to see happen in real time.
well if 1 in 10 M&Ms were poison would you eat any?! No, so why would you let in a Muslim that might be a terrorist!
This but for allowing Christianity to exist
“well if 1 in 10 M&Ms were poison would you eat any?! No, so why would you let in a Muslim that might be a terrorist!”
That was feminists. And they were talking about the 1 in 6 men who are rapists. I believe it was Andrea Dworkin who said every male is a potential rapist. Assume that every man has violated someone rather than assuming they're innocent until proven guilty. Here's a good writeup from the zeitgeist.
Next time you're in a large, mixed group, count all the women, always count to six. Every six is your rape-victim. Count the men. Count to 15. 15 is your rapist. Fact is, the victims and the rapist just look like everybody else, you'd never have guessed.
Trump twisted that one to make it racist, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You should mastirbate in public. Lots of Christians are against that for moral reasons
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.
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.
and it isn’t materially or socially hurting you
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.
Getting mad at religious on the internet is also pure performance
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.
the whole performative thoughts and prayers routine
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.
I only caught the tail end of it
:flattened-bernie: I was there for the whole thing. Starting from early youtube fundie owning compilations.
:reddit-logo: remains in the bacon era.
Also a related type of post.
Description of benign thing regular ass people do for reasons of faith and spirituality
Reddit guy: Heh, I bet you thats just the cover story they tell gullible morons.
Or just the same type of rant regardless of context about how "99% of bad things are because of religion and/or how humanity would live in epic bacon Ready Blade Runner 1 future if it wasnt for people believing in magic guys living in the clouds."
I was admiring an absolutely gorgeous Church once, and someone was complaining about how much money was wasted on it. This person is against social programs, so who knows what he wanted done with the money. I still don't comprehend what the thought process is. Like, if people didn't pray before meals we'd be teleporting? Explain to me why our space program has gotten progressively worse in a rough correlation with church attendance declining then. I obviously don't think these things affect each other in this, but since they see a connection they need to explain it.
I think with this kind of stuff they think like, if you are religious that means you are stupid, you lack intelligence, and if less people were religious(stupid morons) that means we would be overall smarter, and as the smartness line goes up that directly translates to faster and further progress in all fields of science and technology.
The church was a work of art. It was brilliantly made, with many gorgeous statues and reliefs within it. You don't have to believe in or in any way support Christianity to look at the pieta or sistine chapel and find it moving, beautiful, and worth the time and resources spent on it. Or do you think the Iliad sucks because it ties into a religious tradition?
When I was a teenage atheist I called everything that involves "convince people to die for it" religion including nationalism and because I was a shitlib Marxism because I thought marxist just bring communist manifesto and preach about communism to spread marxism like religion.
How dare you accuse I, prominant journalist Tucker Carlson, of being a fed
I remember back in the day watching some videos of epic atheist scientists debunking christians, and then came across a channel called something like "thunderf00t". About half of his videos were similar things or criticizing scams (SOLAR FREAKIN' ROADWAYS), but literally the entire other half was just rants about Anita Sarkeesian and how she is the devil. The repetitiveness made it boring and that was part of why I moved away from watching people like that, even regardless of the content.
Yes the Gamergate stuff kinda turned me off from the epic atheist dunking religion youtubers, like it just turned into a sort of childish "PLS DONT TAKE AWAY MY TOYS" contrarianism.
Yeah, specifically I never really got the hate for Sarkeesian. The biggest criticisms I saw at the time was "oh she's scamming the backers because she's behind schedule!" and "she's not filming her own gameplay footage!" which were bad I guess but not enough to justify anything other than just ignoring her. Then the videos came out and they were really, really basic criticisms like "In Double Dragon the only women are damsels in distress" and I was like "That's it?".
For Gamergate in general, I remember it seeming to first kick off with outrage that Zoe Quinn allegedly cheated on her boyfriend (which of course turned out not to be true anyway). Meanwhile my thought process was "damn that sucks for him, but that sort of thing should probably stay private rather than being publicized on 4chan". I guess I'm 5-10 years older than the targeted demographic, but still it just didn't ever make sense the reaction it got.
Also ironic that she was hated for not liking sexualized female characters and and now sexualized characters like Kaisa from league and Skull Merchant from dbd are critisized by gamers (who arent ladder sweatlords) for being generic sexy characters.
Eh, gamergators are still way too horny for sexualized female characters. More places need to adopt the ways of the :volcel-judge:
Yeah many :gamer-gulag: still suck but for some reason people like Pop Cultural Detective guy or Tbskyen who honestly has the same or more radical opinions than Anita never get as much backlash than her .
Idk maybe most of the :frothingfash: are just shallow as fuck and just get their opinions from their favorite reactionary youtuber like that fucking criticaldrinker guy so people like Pop Cultural Detective never got backlash because the criticaldrinker duded never talked about him.
Most likely (I've never heard of either of either of them), though it definitely also helps if they're guys rather than women.
Ah yes, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. He was the heart and soul of the atheist community for a while. Anyone remember the A+ movement? Well that came to a screeching halt with elevatorgate. A "skeptic" (LOL this is bringing back memories) cornered a feminist in the elevator at 4am and threatened to sexually assault her.
There are people in this audience right now, who believe that a woman's reasonable expectation to feel safe from sexual objectification and assault at Skeptic- and Atheist events is outweighed by a man's right to sexually objectify her.
—Rebecca Watson
Then I forget what thunderf00t did, but it was a huge drama and he got cancelled. Bye-bye asshole.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence :so-true:
The upvotes on that post, holy shit. :data-laughing:
Atheist Raphael's smug face needs to be an emoji
It's presented poorly, but the argument is that religious extremists don't take school shootings seriously because they believe the children massacred in them are fine. Is that not a valid argument?
Americans in general don't take mass shootings seriously in other countries the response was such that the governments had to prevent them from happening
it's very wrong to say religious people don't think murdered children is a big deal
Bless me? I don’t need some magic sky daddy to bless me? Why don’t you science me next I sneeze.
Until I was like 13 I thought it was “bleshew” and it was just a gibberish thing you say when people sneeze, like gesundheit.
I still hear it that way tbh
gesundheit
that's german for health it means get well soon
What about the Genetically Modified Specimen guy? So far i just watched his recent videos and he seems to be pretty okay., if a bit lib. Heck considering how he pushed against the whole "taqiyya equals muslims lies to you" thing, he seems like the only yt atheist who can criticize Islam without coming off as racist.
Holy shit I remember when they were really concerned about Muslims tricking gullible westerners with the ancient Muslamic code of El Taquito :michael-laugh:
Your local friendly kebab shop owner may seem alright but secretly he could very well be part of the Muslim hivemind and planning to cut off your head for being a dirty kaffir the moment you let down your guard
Funny how westerners think that when in reality taqiyya basically just states its okay to fake convert to another religion if you are threatened with mortal danger , which most people will find it reasonable if it wasnt associated with scary arabic words.
It's actually insane to think about how for like 10 years after 9/11 westerners were afraid of some sort of combination of Red Dawn and Manchurian Candidate scenario where all Muslims living in the West regardless of ethnicity or sect of Islam they belonged would rise up and establish the Caliphate
Which if I remember right turned out to stem from a marketing push by the fucking pork lobby
I think you meant to say "I tip my hat to you, fellow gentlesir"
Embarrassing fact: I bought an official reddit T-shirt featuring this image back in the peak Bacon Era (apparently it was through the XKCD store? Weird.). When I got it in the mail, I held it in my hands for a long moment, thought to myself "Jesus Christ this is embarassing...I can never be seen wearing this," and then shoved it into the back of a drawer. Even as a teenager I realized that shit was cringe, and I was already pretty cringe.
find the shirt and ritually burn it, a literal angel exiled by god will get their wings back
At least George Carlin made it funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PiZSFIVFiU
