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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.
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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.
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