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It’s a red flag for me when I see atheists portrayed in the terminology of the Christian apocalypse.
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The great thing about atheism is that there is no club or organization required. Just stop practicing religion and you’re done!
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Well, that’s because it wasn’t a “movement” and it wasn’t new. “New Atheism” is a term that was imposed on current atheist writers, not one coined by them. As many of the so-called New Atheists have pointed out, it isn’t new. You can find spirited criticism of Christianity by Tom Paine. The great orator Robert G. Ingersoll was as anti-Christanity as Dawkins ever was, though maybe less than Hitchens. So anytime I see critical commentary on the “New Atheism” I take it with a grain of salt.
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Usually when I see it, it is someone complaining about Dawkins’ characteristically poor behavior to someone. Why he’s considered a star of Atheism these days, I will never understand. I should find the video of Neil Degrasse Tyson, in a friendly way, telling him off.
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I like to call myself a mititant agnostic sometimes. I don’t know if there are gods or a god or not, and neither do you! 
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While there are certainly legitimate issues one can take with Dawkins, often I see people trying to vilify him based on nothing more than witch hunting, often on issues that the critic has mischaracterized or overstated. All too often theists think they can knock atheists down by attacking the atheist Pope, Richard Dawkins, not understanding that atheism is not hierarchical, nor that science rests on facts and evidence, not personalities. And then there are the stoical liberals who want to signal their virtue by trying to distance themselves from Dawkins.
Dawkins has been a “star” of atheism because he’s a prolific popular science writer who’s an outspoken atheist. PZ Myers, on the other hand, hyped that he was writing a major book, and instead published lightly reworked blog posts. I think much of the criticism of Dawkins is based off of professional jealousy. So, as with criticism of the New Atheists, I take criticism of Dawkins with a bunch of salt, too, because not all criticism is equal. I suspect that most people, if asked, couldn’t give you an accurate reason for why they think Dawkins is bad. (Not saying you are one of those people but you did just generalize Dawkins as having “characteristically poor behavior” rather than citing an actual issue. I suspect you could cite valid instances worthy of criticism, but I take issue with your over-broad claim.)
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You made adjustments in one of my paragraphs, but YOUR new paragraph didn’t represent the real world. My original did.
Very few atheists propagandise to their innocent children, so that is a false equivalence you attempt to make.
The secular don’t need saving from themselves, so that is a false equivalence you attempt to make.
Atheism is not demonstrably a false world view, like most religions are in the majority of their claims, and patently not “the cause of much of the distress and destruction in the world”, so that is a false equivalence you attempt to make . . .
I condemn religion as a whole, it is worthless, teaches people to remain ignorant, destroys any attempt to make all people live as one, and generally ruins everything it touches, first and foremost, blights the lives of the children of its adherents.
Sort of my point. what little that seemed to be there was in this isolated group of publications, events and what have from a small group of writers including a fair cross over with the skeptic movement. It wasn’t particularly fresh, wasn’t particularly consistent within itself. And wasn’t particularly representative of atheism as a whole.
Which is why it looks a lot more like a fandom group than it does like any sort of movement. That’s pretty much what it was.
“New atheism” was coined by the press. It’s the current standard, accepted term for that particular scene. So it has utility. And at least some new atheist writers use the term. That does tend to be how such trends in writing, art, and philosophy are named. After the fact and from the outside.
Because he presented himself as such? His books sold like gangbusters and the angry controversial guy makes for good headlines?
Either way his star seems to be falling.
It is in isolation?. Religion?. You must live with your eyes shut, miss what is going on in the world.
It is death to doubt the common superstition in half the countries of the world. Women denied schooling. Homosexuals hung in groups of ten. Mobs attack and burn whole villages at the mere mention that some other sect might build a meeting house. Little children left to wander from door to door in their own village till they die of thirst, because a superstitious person (religious in the raw) declares they are “a witch”.
Even in "civilised countries like Italy, people get ostracised and abused because of their religious doubts.
You make all the excuses you like, religion is at the centre of most of the ills of the world, fact.
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And there are countless. Endless. Examples of horrid shit caused and predicated on other terms. Neiztche’s work was used to justify and feed antisemitism and the holocaust despite his explicit opposition to antisemitism and his atheism. Tons of bullshit racial science was used to justify the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and genocidal policies toward Native Americans. Along with various ethnic biases and restrictions. And economic theory too justifying the horrendous excesses of colonialism generally, including in Europe. You’ve got the secular atrocities of the French revolution. Explicitly athiest communist/socialist states. Where not only was there forced indoctrination, including atheist indoctrination of children. But Soviet and Chinese purges likely killed far more than the holocaust. Purely ethnic slaughter between tribal groups in Africa. And so forth.
All of that often dovetailing or bouncing off religious biases and roots. Because nothing exists in a vacuum. Things that superficially look religious in root are often better understood or explained through politics. Or class. Or race/ethnic lenses. And vice versa. In some cases politics or ethnicity were/are synonymous with religion. Anything religion included can be characterized this way. Everything is, somewhere at some point, responsible for something heinous.
Meanwhile there are certainly good things that have come out of religion. Including Modern Science which has its roots directly in medieval Catholic and Islamic religious examination of nature (among other things). The labor movement has deep ties to Methodist theology. Modern voting rights movements including women’s suffrage have roots in various religious movements. As did abolitionist movements both in the US and Europe. That was almost entirely based in Christian churches here in the US. And on and on.
Pick a subject, if you want to you can carve it out from the myriad influences that drive and effect it. List all the ills it’s supposedly caused. And make it sound as evil and wrong as you think religion inherently is.
Or you can acknowledge that complex issues and events often have multiple, complex, long lived roots. And attempt to actually understand them. Call out the vast wrongs, criticise and resist their roots. Where ever they exist.
I like to go with the latter. People do horrible shit. And they will find an excuse to justify that horrible shit. And convince others to join them. Whether that excuse is animal rights, Catcher In The Rye, or a magic rock.
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Yes, I know about the “rediscovery” of Buddhism and Hinduism. I was actually talking to somebody about it only yesterday. The Christian attempt to Christianise Buddhism is surely at worst a form of cultural imperialism, but the original people who did it seem to have been trying genuinely to understand, but did so through the lens of their own beliefs. Which is what usually happens.
I see no point at all in getting involved in this kind of nitpicking or the “my Buddhism is more Buddhist than yours” arguments. I stated my own position; I explicitly said I didn’t expect other people to agree with me and in fact said that they shouldn’t do so. I then get a load of argument trying, I think, to prove I am not a Buddhist.
Your post seems to me to resemble the occasional, slightly veiled, threads we see on here about what it means to be Jewish. And, if I may so so without being too rude, about as pointless.
It would seem it is possible to be mansplained at without, in fact, being female. Anyway, I deleted my original post as it was clearly not contributing anything.
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Not a lot.
The Gnus were a thing about five to ten years ago, but they’ve splintered since then. Hitchens is dead, Dawkins and Harris have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be arseholes (via sexism and racism, not atheism) and the Pharyngula/Skepchick crowd split off into Atheism+ (aka left-wing atheism that rejects misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism).
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Yeah but it’s the current standard term for talking about it past tense. Just because the band broke up doesn’t mean they never recorded the hits.
That is a very polite characterization of what totally sounds like it should be all good, but in practice A+ is a hot mess of tribalism. Granted, it was formed, in part, as a reaction to some genuine crap on the part of some atheist/skeptic men, it has gone way past that. Thunderf00t is one of those men, now there’s someone you should call out. Harris, well, I find many of his arguments to be superficial, and I find his scholarship shallow. Dawkins? Twitter doesn’t do nuance - he probably shouldn’t tweet. But I think Dawkins as been Hillaryed, to a point. Which is that people have heard people complain about Dawkins so much that they just assume the complains are valid, when I think most of them aren’t.
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Going back to the original comment, this seems like a storm in a teacup:
It is a public statement of sorts, but very low-key and only as a brief reply to a direct question in the comment thread of a bland holiday greeting. If this is the first we’ve heard, I don’t think we can claim that he’s using religion to gain popularity.
On the other hand, it does tie into the way that “spiritual but not religious” is much more palatable to Americans than outright atheism. There’s a common narrative that atheists are against religious people, which doesn’t even seem to be true for the Four Horsemen. They do (did, in the case of Hitchens) oppose religious belief, but not through force or violence. Nothing they have said is more inflammatory than comments you’ll hear in many pulpits across America and around the world. They don’t agree that it doesn’t matter what you believe, but this is a perfectly rational position to hold (and again, very common). There are plenty of nice people who follow different political viewpoints and who see important values in them (and there may well be many good elements), but this does not mean that all political views are fine and the “true meaning” is something harmless and positive. In the case of religion, you’d have to be at least a deist to claim this. While some atheists do bring significant racism into the mix, I don’t accept the narrative that opposing Abrahamic faiths is Islamophobic or Christophobic, and I believe in protecting the rights of religious people, not defending their deity from blasphemy.
However, as an atheist I don’t see religion as a separate entity in itself, as if something like communism has to be seen either as a point against atheism or basically a religion. Merely believing in a god is not the dangerous thing, and non-religious ideologies share many good and bad elements with religions. Another similarity between religious fundamentalists and some new atheists is the idea that harmful elements of human nature would disappear merely because people ascribed to the same ideology.
YMMV, but to me: the critique Dawkins gets for his atheism is bullshit. The critique he gets for his misogyny is entirely valid.
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But, with the alt-right in the ascendant, I’d have thought he’d avoid identifying as Jewish?
Given that most of the Alt-Reich subscribes to the One Drop theory of racial purity, it wouldn’t matter if he converted to Christianity in a streamed broadcast across all of Facebook–he’d still be a dirty Jew to them, and thus vermin to be purged before he ‘contaminates’ the White Race. At this point, that particular consideration is hardly political.
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Dropping in to second this point; I’m a Jewish atheist, and a fairly vocal one at that (within the Jewish community). However, Jewish atheism is very different than Christian atheism (Dawkins et al), as it comes with a completely different set of basic cultural assumptions and expectations, and has a very different outlook on many things that Culturally Christian Atheists take for granted (most of which has been on display in this thread… such as the assumption that all religions are Christianity with the serial numbers filed off).
So, yes, I lit Channukah candles this past week and sang the blessings from memory, not because I believe that the ancient candelabra in the Temple actually had its oil supply last for a factor of 8x, but because this is who and what I am–the latest link in a chain reaching back to antiquity. And there’s tremendous power and identity in knowing that I’m observing the same traditions (more or less…) as my ancestry, stretching back eighty generations. I may not believe in a God per se, but I do know that I have roots and connections to those roots in a way that most of the world can only imagine. (Bonus points this year for celebrating Channukah in Germany.)
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Religion isn’t expected to go away. But it is constitutionally and philosophically required to keep out of affairs of state. Unfortunately, humans are in charge of implementing the separation of state and religion, and haven’t figured it out. We’ve continuously allowed religion to infringe - which isn’t odd, given how fervently people believe in, or use, religion.
You’re very accurate on the power point. Religions are a pre-proven method of getting into peoples’ heads, and present an easy conduit for politicians to use to gain votes, and therefore, power.
I am not sure the USA is a secular state at all - how is religion not enforced / mandated in terms of influence and access? You may not need it to get on, but if you travel those pathways, progress to money / power is facilitated. I’m not sure as I age that without some kind of framework, people don’t simply become a dangerous mob.
It’s an interesting discussion. We won’t resolve it here. But let’s continue.
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The Christian Right in the States is very big on Israel, the existence of which is required for the End Times. Thus they are far less anti semitic than their secular European counterparts.
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