When I left Christianity, I was initially drawn to the atheist/skeptic community, but he and his ilk turned me off in a big way. I eventually decided that religion had taken up enough of my brain space, and I didn’t want anything active to do with it, for or against.
It’s helpful to distinguish between small-A atheism and big-A Atheism. It’s perfectly reasonable and normal to think “this idea of a god has no evidence to support it and isn’t adding any value to the world” and leave it at that.
If you try to replace organized religion with organized Atheism hoping for some community and maybe a bake sale or two, well, then you discover the Dark Intellectual rabbit hole very quickly and there’s nothing good down there. That isn’t the fault of a lack of religion though. That’s the fault of angry cishet white men determined to make everything about them.
Edit: I should also note that there’s a fuzzy, but real, line between the Atheism people and the Skeptics. The latter are a fun group of people who have the bake sales and lovely podcasts like Skeptics Guide To The Universe which will regularly renew your hope for the world. There is some overlap between the groups, but one is definitely not the other.
None of the fun ones.
I don’t want to completely disparage the concept, but there was an episode of wife swap where a family unschooled, but instead of being curious kids who taught themselves, they were woefully behind their peers, where the older child couldn’t read text messages her friends sent well. 
Clearly I don’t think those parents were giving the tools or even guiding.
Though I could see the concept working if you ask the kid what their interests are, and then tailor lessons around that. Including math, reading/English, and science that relates to the interest.
Shit, I’m an atheist and I’ve spoken to God. And had a straight-up yelling match with some of the Many-Angled Ones. That was a heavy weekend, I tell you what.
I understand that feeling well, though I am unfamiliar with him specifically. When I first realized I didn’t believe in god, I listened to and read things by prominent atheists, but drifted away from them as I didn’t like how being an Atheist was their entire identity. Maybe it’s because I was never indoctrinated into any religion, but I never found any identity as an atheist.
Even worse. Many of them are, in fact, quite aware that they are limiting the child’s future prospects. If you hobble them when they young, they can’t run away from you and your twisted community when they’re older.
ive asked. the (infuriating) response was: god works in mysterious ways. and: you just have to trust god’s plan
there’s nothing that humans aren’t able to justify when they set themselves to it
There are evangelical atheists in much the same vein as the evangelical christians of the article. For many it’s not enough to simply have a belief – if someone else can find comfort in a different belief that means their own may be wrong.
Right, the old “sometimes God works through imperfect men” bit.
Which begs the question “so why are you so sure God isn’t enacting His will through Obama/Hillary/Biden etc.?”
because those people were democrats! obviously /s 
( and also – i fear – probably not explicitly racist enough 
)
[ this is my family, so everything about it is disappointing to say the least ]
I don’t necessarily denigrate the idea of home schooling and know Martin DeMaine who home schooled his son, Eric, so well that Eric became the youngest professor ever at MIT. I was thinking about the unintended consequences of the work John Holt and even Ivan Illich or Paolo Freire have done with unschooling and deschooling which, whatever their intentions, has played into the “Christian” home schooling movement now which has built their own closed education system from kindergarten to graduate school and has obvious plans to eliminate the idea of any public schooling at all.
Careful with that false equivalency though. Yes, many prominent atheists are dicks, but that’s not even close to the twice-weekly Christians who knock on my door during dinner, campaign to remove my rights, and generally make me fear for my safety and my future.
Atheism is also not a “belief”. It makes no claims. Religious people make an extraordinary claim for which the standard of evidence is necessarily immense, and their evidence comes nowhere close to meeting said standard. It’s not a “belief” to say that, that’s simply applying rationality fairly across all claims.
Part of the confusion here is often that people confuse agnosticism and atheism. Atheism does not claim there is no god, as people often think. You can’t prove a negative in any case so that would be a silly claim. A lot of people call themselves “agnostic” as a soft dodge because they don’t like the word atheist, but nobody considers the Flying Spaghetti Monster an equally reasonable alternative and thus is “agnostic” about His Noodly Appendage. So what most people call “agnostic” is “atheism that I haven’t thought very much about because I’m busy living my life”.
The Christian homeschool movement came well after Holt and Illich. It was a hippy thing at first-since it centered on letting kids guide their own lives, the exact opposite of the Christian model.
The thing I find of concern with the push to homeschool is that it assumes there is a parent available to do the work, which presupposes a two parent family with solid finances. At least, I’ve never heard of anyone working on a curriculum to be used by poor folks when one parent is unemployed. So it becomes another way for the middle class to disengage with public schooling. Just like Montessori schools were developed in the post WWII years in Rome, as schools for kids who lived in chaos, they have become the province of the well-heeled.
Blue eyes, blonde hair, & white skin, of course.
Oh, speaks English [more or less], too.
To be fair, all, or not even most, are all that bad. Since atheism is going to include a wide swathe of people, it is definitely going to reflect that range and quality is going to vary by a lot. It can run the gamut from insufferable Randroids to insufferable Communists. PZ Myers rates pretty high, though.
About thunderf00t - I’d never claim he’s a great example of many things, however, I’m here for it when he’s skewering dopey ideas and people. See his videos on Tesla and Elon for more of that, and of course, reasonable people will part ways with him on the misogyny and so on.
I might steal that, and add “maybe your god is punishing you for your love of Mammon by inflicting [Obama/Hillary/Biden] on you”, in the same way they claim gay marriage, trans being able to poop in public restrooms, no prayer in schools, etc. is blamed for hurricanes.
unfortunately, promoting him means promoting all of him - especially when you left it to others to first point out how problematic he is
every like, retweet, follow, or citation puts his name and his platform out to more people. and that increased exposure is harmful to the people he targets
there are plenty of better qualified and less harmful people out there to get the “hot elon dish” from
I mean, the banana thing I found just so hilarious on so many levels. First of all, the visuals for this were like - are they not even the least bit aware? Did NO ONE think to pump the brakes on that?
The next thing up was - yeah, did they even briefly search on the topic? Or did they only use Conservapedia for their “research”? I mean, really, bananas? They are not only bred, but they are clones (at least the variety he shows, not so sure about apple bananas). AND the one that was the most popular (in the U.S., anyway) was virtually wiped out from disease.
The level of goofiness of this as an argument for creationism is epic, and then the icing on the cake is that this brain trust says the banana is an “atheist nightmare”.
Shrug. Not every reference to a person can come with a list of qualifications and disclaimers in a comment section. IIRC, I probably found his early videos via BB itself, long before anyone knew about the problematic parts. I figured most around here now do. If they did not, and sought him out based on my reference, I’m sure the type of people that read and comment on BB are more than capable of looking into said reference and making that assessment for themselves.
Certainly, it’s not my intent to promote thunderf00t. As for his work on Elon, I’ve not seen other videos that go into such length and details, though I’m sure they exist. I’m pretty sure it was another leftist blog that I found the reference to the series he had done. I still watched even if it is thunderf00t, because I was curious about the arguments.
