This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?
I grew up secular. My parental figures were not particularly religious, and I myself saw no reason to buy into any organized religion when I was a kid or subsequently, either. I am not a physicalist reductionist. I'm one of those people who thinks that the hard problem of consciousness may well be beyond the reach of science. However, that does not compel me to become a Christian or a Muslim or whatever. I am basically an agnostic who has zero belief in any organized religion but who also thinks that there may well be true mysteries in the world that are beyond the reach of science.
In part because of my agnosticism, which I have never seen reason to revise, I missed the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing. The issue of religion was just not very interesting to me back then. I neither could imagine that any Christian, for example, could really turn me into a Christian, nor did I need any more arguments for being an agnostic than I already had.
In the last few years I have seen many people refer to New Atheism and the atheism wars and so on, but I don't really have much context for it other than that it's something that people on 4chan refer to in order to make fun of stereotypical Redditors. While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.
I know who Dawkins is, having read his The Selfish Gene, but I have not read any of his stuff about religion. I also vaguely know who Dennett is, he seems to be convinced that the hard problem of consciousness is not real, a position that I find rather absurd, but to be fair I have not actually read any of his stuff. For me the question of consciousness is orthogonal to the question of whether any particular religions are valid. Anyway, I would like more information about the whole brouhaha and the extent to which it is or is not important.
because people were:
okay so one of the things that you saw on reddit a lot was this complete disdain for anything Christian. probably because they were teenagers or whatever, but the people getting upset over people saying "bless you" or "merry Christmas" or their mom wanting to pray at Christmas dinner or whatever were absolutely flooring. it seemed like a caricature. the amount of people saying how they owned the fundies or whatever, whether true or not1 was absolutely flooring. you also had the professional quote makers acting with a complete lack of self awareness. or the faces of atheism people. or the people who would argue about it endlessly in YouTube video responses (remember when those were a thing?) and culture war forums.
people essentially made their identity about not believing in God and getting really really mad at anyone that found comfort or peace within religion. it kinda dominated the internet. and when people would discuss how not everyone are like these knuckleheads, it'd erupt into a well... holy war with everyone else being wrong on the internet in their view.
i imagine a lot of them were teenagers who were rebelling against their parents for making them go to church on Sunday or whatever. and no doubt, people do have legitimate grievances, but internet flamewarring and circlejerking didn't really do anything.
1: i would be remiss to not point out the MsScribe story where a woman spent years faking harassment from Christian internet stalkers for internet clout.
More options
Context Copy link
America was going through its mini great awakening with a christian evangelical president when 9/11 happened, to which the Bush responded by starting his own holy war in the middle east. It seemed like religious fanatics would just keep ruining everyone's day forever and atheism looked very good by comparison. A few books were published about the topic, somewhat coincidentally and it sort of picked up steam on the internet, especially the nascent youtube.
The label "New Atheism" is mostly just a press label, like IDW, it doesn't really denote anything in particular. If you read arguments about atheism from the late 1600s almost everything is already there (minus evolution and geology).
And then the evangelical awakening died out, McCain lost to Obama (who acknowledged atheism in his inauguration speech) and there was no reason for the movement anymore. What remained ended up being the first victim of SJWs in 2012. Then gamergate happened and people from new atheism either became sjws or anti-sjw (the "skeptics"). The anti-sjw side of atheism doesn't really have a home in american politics (it can't be with the democrats but it also can't be republican because it would alienate the reliable evangelical voter base); when tech platforms (twitter and youtube in particular) moved to do politically biased content moderation (mid 2017 and 2018) the atheistic side of anit-sjw was essentially wiped out.
I think atheism is due for a comeback, this decade, because of all the dissident right people who are adopting orthodoxy/sedevacantism to own the libs.
Boy, you're opening a huge can of worms here...
More options
Context Copy link
Until the Internet became a thing, atheists were pretty fringe - certainly they have always existed, but to actually declare yourself an atheist, let alone join an atheist organization, required a commitment towards nonbelief that, in those days, was very strongly coded as countercultural, antisocial, and quite possibly a dirty un-American commie. The most public figurehead for atheists was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who founded American Atheists in the 1960s and was, by all accounts, a remarkably unpleasant woman.
Then came the Internet, and like every other niche tribe, atheists all over the world were able to gather, commiserate, and wage tribal war against their enemies. Early Internet atheism was mostly marked by edgy militants dunking on Christians (the "Invisible Sky Fairy" and similar memes were popularized in that era, though I'm sure someone had used that phrase much earlier).
New Atheism was basically a movement to put an intellectual, academic face on atheism. Instead of keyboard warriors flaming each other on the Internet or bitter legal nuisances like O'Hair, you had scientists and journalists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris presenting atheism as serious opposition to religion, attempting to attack religion's privileged place in society and education.
Then public atheism was largely consumed by social justice activism ("SJWs" in those days, "wokes" today). New Atheism fell to movements like Atheism+, which criticized New Atheism for being too Straight White Male, not feminist enough, and for criticizing Islam. (I am only kind of joking but not really with that last one.) The original New Atheists are still plodding along, but seem to have largely lost cultural relevance, while A+ long ago added their ideological and technological distinctiveness to the general woke movement and their culture was adapted to service it.
Very interesting. I did not realize that religion was still a powerful enough force in the West in the first decade of this century to motivate a backlash of this nature. However, I myself have pointed out before here on The Motte that there are many people even today in the West who grow up in oppressive religious environments, and I suppose that probably in their rebellion against those environments, they formed a large part of the core of the atheist movement.
The idea that there would be a movement to put an intellectual, academic face on atheism also surprises me. I have been under the impression that atheism was already predominantly an intellectual thing long before New Atheism and that it also very often expressed itself in an academic way long before New Atheism.
Atheism+ does seem pretty strange to me at first glance.
-https://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/08/atheism/
To me, the political consequences of atheism have always been secondary to whether it is true or not. I can of course understand why people who feel oppressed by social conservatism would be drawn to atheism for political reasons, given the long-standing connection between social conservatism and organized religion. However, to me the above quote seems almost as silly as if someone wrote:
It might help to understand that the Atheist movement was sort of built around the idea that the Problem With Modern Society was that it was still beholden to religious superstition, and that if religion's stranglehold on the general population could be broken, a new era of reason and cooperation and enlightened policy could dawn. A lot of them weren't just arguing that religion was dumb, they were arguing that religion was the obstacle to a better world.
One of the problems is that this wasn't actually true. Once religion appeared to be on the run in the Obama years, it turned out that none of the problems were actually solved, and so they needed a new target, a new explanation for why everything was still so fucked up even when they'd won.
Hence, Wokeness.
More options
Context Copy link
But this is the mistake of atheism in a nutshell. No, it doesn't actually matter if the symbolic lies are true or not, all that ever mattered was the political consequences.
And they, well we, learned it pretty harshly. Reason, skepticism and technics cannot stand alone, Man craves religion, and religion he will make even in irreligion.
The fogey christians whom we mocked for being concerned what it was we believed in if not Christ, those who couldn't fathom that there could be a lack of worship altogether. Far from the close minded fools we took them for, those people were just right if in a very roundabout way. And one of the cornerstones of New Atheist argumentation, which is essentially to say that we can have morality and 90s liberal society without Christ, whilst it sounded and still does sound very nice and coherent, was just wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Presumably you've read Scott Alexander's essay on the topic (if not, you should). Internet culture was just different back then. It was taken as given that the purpose of discussion and argument was to convince people, or at least to discover the truth.
This classic XKCD from 2008 captures the feeling. What made the atheism wars especially susceptible to this phenomenon is that it was not a disagreement of opinion or judgement, it was a disagreement of fact, which meant it was theoretically possible to literally prove the other side wrong. The idea, common today in the intellectual right circles that many users here frequent, that religion is important because it binds the community together, provides shared values, and gives meaning to the lives of the populace, should not be anachronistically read back into the discourse. That's just not what these controversies were about. People back then really thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, hurricanes were God's punishment for abortion, and that demon possession was a real physical occurrence. Some people still believe that, but they know better than to open their mouths about it in public now.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not able to help with the new atheism internet history but if you've read Dawkins that's probably enough to get the gist of the general sense of the righteousness of the atheist tribe and of course the rational points raised against faith beliefs.
But as you mention agnosticism and seeing the limitations of physicalism I really want to point you to the idea of non-theism. This is the idea that contemporary framings of religion and atheism share the same modal mistake in the focus on propositional beliefs, with say a literalist creed asserting that everything in the bible being literally true, and an atheist refuting those beliefs.
But in many ways, while the rationalist critique of atheism is valid, it is also a straw man. Religion has also always been about participating in relationship with a phenomenological reality that is beyond oneself. Atheism, mired in a reductive physicalism is not able to engage with this and so ignores it, also reducing religion to this limited frame.
I disagree with this, at least in the case of Christianity. I think the vast majority of Christians throughout history would agree that Christianity stands or falls on the proposition that Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead. If this is false, Christianity is false, and if it is true, Christianity is true. As Paul said, "if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain." You can try to construct some kind of Christianity where the historical reality of whether or not the resurrection took place is besides the point (see, Shelby Spong) but such endeavors have always struck me as pointless.
There's truth in that of course, but your rebuttal somewhat proves the point as it's very reductive and misses a lot of what religion also is. Religion in addition to the creedal beliefs is also pointing beyond as it is about engaging with that which is greater. The Christianity of different times, say Meister Eckhart or Thomas Aquinas, is not sufficiently countered by Jesus never did miracles or was the son of God because it would be scientifically impossible.
The point is that atheism is lacking also, it is floundering on the rocks of reductive materialism. Religion points to some of what it's missing. What we do next is not theism as we've done, and it's not atheism, hence the idea of non-theism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would guess a lot, maybe most, of the more obnoxious internet atheist warriors, such as I was in my preteen and teenage years, were probably raised Christian (and usually Christian of the more serious, fundamentalist variety). And for me at least, it started out as a quest to prove one way or the other whether or not Christianity was true, and once I decided it wasn't, morphed into a somewhat vindictive impulse to own Christians online. The 2000s, were also the height of Evangelicalism as a cultural movement in the US. Evangelicals had a much stronger cultural presence than they do now, which made it more fun to dunk on them. Bush was the evangelical president (even though, technically, he was a mainliner).
As to why New Atheism exploded in the 2000s, I think it was precisely as a reaction to the apotheosis of evangelical Christianity. Which in turn was mostly a backlash to the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Which in turn...you get the idea. It died out mostly because evangelicalism receded from the public eye, and also because, yes, it became unbearably 'cringe' and uncool. I genuinely think there are a non-zero number of individuals who have more or less memed themselves into being religious just since they don't have to be associated with the fedora people.
I never read Dennett, Dawkins, or any of the 'four horsemen.' I never really got into the whole creation vs evolution thing either because I was never much of a STEM kid. I was more into arguing about the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, etc. Things that remain abiding interests for me to this day, though I think I am less annoying about it now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link