I know the whole atheist neckbeard meme is a thing but why do we regurgitate it?
good post, thank you. I've never read anything about atheism, I've just always been one. I've never really felt comfortable talking about it in leftist spaces (or anywhere really). my autisim brain always pipes up when I see people making fun of atheists, like what am a supposed to do, just pick one?
It's mostly fine to shit on atheists as a bit, the same way there was a trend on chapo to make fun of Italians - although of course like anything in that vein it's important to be careful that you aren't making the space legitimately unwelcome to those people and attracting bigots not in on the joke.
With atheism in particular it's kind of the default of most socialist thinking - materialism, natch, though that isn't to say that religious socialist movements don't exist and haven't done a lot of good - so when people make fun of " "atheism" ", they're really making fun of a pretty small subset of atheist dude bros that make it their whole identity.
As for why they're targets, it's because of the way that a ton of what used to be the quote-unquote "leaders" of the atheist movement a decade ago, Richard Dawkins and such, went on a massive right wing tangent against muslims, trans people, etc in the name of "western civilization" - and as an atheist myself (tips fedora) I say we bully any losers who actually buy into that as much as humanly possible.
Anyone making the "I believe in logic and reason, which is why I'm going to team up with the reactionary right to harass brown people" argument deserves to be dropkicked into the center of the sun.
Its okay to shit on New Atheists in my book, but not atheists generally
is that the same as "new atheisim"?
New Atheism was coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century.[1][2] This modern-day atheism is advanced by a group of thinkers and writers who advocate the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever their influence arises in government, education, and politics.[3][4]
New Atheism lends itself to, and often overlaps with, secular humanism and antitheism—most particularly, in its criticism of what many New Atheists regard as the indoctrination of children and the perpetuation of ideologies founded on belief in the supernatural. [a][5][6][7][8]
Yeah, I meant New Atheism. Theres a lot of Western chauvinistic hangups wound into the rhetoric and it smuggles in some real dangerous ideology
Obligatory, topical CN: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-12-new-atheist-celebrities-crusaders-for-empire
I'm an atheist, and us being an acceptable target, at least in online spaces, is a reaction to the plague of pretentious white debate bros, the kind you especially see on reddit
I was one of them for a long time, and I'm glad I've grown out of it
far right evangelicals aren't good but they're a relatively smaller problem in the grand scheme of things, I had to realize focusing so much effort on opposing them almost exclusively was a waste, and feeling all superior because I was "winning arguments" against the most intentionally ignorant people I could find who wouldn't change their minds anyway didn't really mean much
I'm an atheist, but I'll mock self described atheists all day because anyone who's an atheist that doesn't describe themselves as a communist/socialist first is a reactionary moron.