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There do seem to be a fair number of genuine Christians here. I've made a few posts here before in which I wondered why Christianity usually doesn't get the same kind of merciless skepticism here that progressivism does. It seems to me that it is basically because:
(This is basically what you already said above) Most people on The Motte live in parts of the world where Christianity has little power, so they do not feel much of an urge to criticize it.
Christians on The Motte rarely try to argue that Christianity is literally true. When they do, they usually do actually get a lot of pushback.
Christianity as a cultural influence aligns decently well with the mild social conservatism of what seems to be the average Motte poster.
On 2) I haven't actually seen a lot of spirals about whether Christianity is literally true. I've seen lots of people say they believe it and be ignored, I've seen a little bit of smug atheism get ignored, but back and forth on whether Christianity is literally true happens very rarely. I suspect this is because people like me, who literally believe Jesus was born of a virgin, died and rose again, and is present under the appearance of bread in thousands of altars at this very moment don't use it as the basis of our arguments.
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As an atheist Motter, I'll add another - arguing with Christians is just not what I'm here for. We did the whole arguing religion thing a couple decades ago, and it's just kind of stale. I have softened quite a bit on the virtues of religion, but I really haven't changed my mind on the specifics at all. Believing that transubstantiation happens every Sunday in Catholic churches around the world still seems so ridiculous to me that it's hard to believe that serious thinkers believe it, but oh well, it is what it is and it's easier for me to just respect that this really is their stance and move on to something more interesting.
I'll add that as an Atheist, Ive concluded that politics has become everyone's new religion and I hate it, and I especially hate the progressive/leftist religion. To my mind, I'm the last New Atheist, being a stubborn prickly contrarian against smug sanctimony and moral panic regardless of the mask it wears.
Yeah, I think the time I started noticing this was happening was when Atheism+ happened and New Atheists started saying that merely being against religion wasn't enough, that we had to stand for something. My response was and is that no, my lack of religiosity doesn't have downstream implications about what I should support politically. At the time, I didn't realize that this was going to be the manifestation of a religion-replacement, but I suppose I should have.
Being as fair as I can be to the New Atheism/Atheist+ stuff, I think when the New Atheists were riding high and getting public notice, they thought that finally the moment had come for atheism/non-religion to go mainstream at last and that now eventually religious belief would be laughed and scorned and pitied into oblivion. But if you wanted to make that a mass movement, you needed something more than "well we don't go to church on Sundays" because a lot of ordinary people don't go to church on Sundays, either, but don't identify as atheists (or as the Science! loving types that New Atheism were tending to venerate).
So if you wanted to get the average Jack and Jill interested in coming out as "yes, I'm an atheist!", you needed something that could hook them and where they could see their atheism being part of their lives. And since not everyone is going to be "oh all my life I have longed to be a white-coated scientist", that had to be things in ordinary life.
And politics is one of those things. And a replacement for religion is, too. "Atheists are lovely people who believe in equality and fairness and niceness and reason and science-based decision making and live and let live" type philosophy to attract everyone, which of course then gets bogged down in "to non-existent hell with you for your incorrect opinions on tea in first or milk in first" because that's human nature.
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Your experience with New Atheists and Atheism+ seems similar to mine. I always scoffed at the notion of people having a "god shaped hole" in their heart or whatever that I'd heard from religious people, but the behavior of atheists in the last decade or so since Atheism+ have convinced me that this metaphorical "hole" is as biologically real as the physical heart. And, quite possibly, leaving this hole empty to let nature take its course with its abhorrence for vacuums, is far worse than filling it with something like Christianity, which could be considered the least-worst option that at least has a track record of surviving more than a generation or two.
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Regarding 2, I see Christians perhaps not arguing, but casually stating that Christianity is literally true, quite often. In fact, the two groups I observe here are the church-as-pragmatic-social-grouping folks and the Jesus-is-king folks. None of the "casual Christians" who basically believe in all the same generic good things a generic atheist believes in, but call it God.
Christ the King Sunday will be 24th November this year, mark your calendars!
No, it’ll be October 27.
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