I really like Massimo Pigliucci, he's always been a good critic (generally with positive and constructive criticism) of the stupid stuff New Atheism and the Scientific Skepticism movements have...
I really like Massimo Pigliucci, he's always been a good critic (generally with positive and constructive criticism) of the stupid stuff New Atheism and the Scientific Skepticism movements have done. I think his approach is a lot better than others who have attacked these movements. It's something that is really good and can help these movements a lot.
I used to be a big fan of the New Atheists, but man did they all go crazy with their trans hatred and "anti-woke" stuff. Only a few (e.g. Matt Dillahunty) avoided it.
Yeah, the 'new atheists' really went off the rails. While they were an integral part of my journey out of my faith, the ones that went anti-trans/anti-woke, islamophobic, etc. and all that lost...
Yeah, the 'new atheists' really went off the rails. While they were an integral part of my journey out of my faith, the ones that went anti-trans/anti-woke, islamophobic, etc. and all that lost all my respect.
I no longer really need to partake in most of the media (debates, etc) associated with atheism, but it was disheartening to see all of that happen. Especially from voices I had once respected.
Thankfully Seth Andrews (The Thinking Atheist podcast, etc) is another that avoided those pitfalls, and has even posted about his disappointment in the others
I'm feeling really out of the loop at the moment. I grew up in an extremely religious household and the online community of atheist debates really helped me come to terms with my life-long doubts...
I'm feeling really out of the loop at the moment. I grew up in an extremely religious household and the online community of atheist debates really helped me come to terms with my life-long doubts and be willing to outwardly say that I do not believe. This was about 20 years ago, which felt like a heyday of the atheist movement with some really awesome content being created. The quality seemed to go downhill about 10 years ago, so I stopped watching -- didn't really need it anymore.
So.... that leaves me wondering... what's going on? Which creators have gone down that path? What do you think has caused that?
I'd argue that the reactionaries of the New Atheist movement have started to abandon it; Christianity is too useful tool for reactionary politics. Peter Boghossian says that new atheism was...
I'd argue that the reactionaries of the New Atheist movement have started to abandon it; Christianity is too useful tool for reactionary politics.
Peter Boghossian says that new atheism was misguided; that Christianity is far preferable to what he calls the religion of "Wokeism." Richard Dawkins now calls himself a cultural Christian. Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently converted to Christianity, naming political considerations as her motivation.
Cultural Christian isn't an unreasonable label - most of us in the US for example are subsumed in Christian culture and unconsciously carry the biases of it. It's a way to check ourselves on...
Cultural Christian isn't an unreasonable label - most of us in the US for example are subsumed in Christian culture and unconsciously carry the biases of it. It's a way to check ourselves on something we think is "neutral" but is actually Christian oriented (like stores being closed on Sundays still, or meatless options being available specifically on Fridays or celebrating Carnival)
But I'm going to assume he's using it differently since that doesn't seem to be the vibe, nor is it an identity label I'd use rather than a descriptive one.
I had kind of an epiphany last year and got really, deeply annoyed at just how pervasive Christian default is in our culture. Absolutely everywhere, from business hours to language to laws to...
I had kind of an epiphany last year and got really, deeply annoyed at just how pervasive Christian default is in our culture. Absolutely everywhere, from business hours to language to laws to holidays to traditions to idioms...
What’s would an alternative default cultural substrate? Because from where I’m sitting the prevailing options are either the vague ceremonial deistic Protestant Christianity we have or the...
What’s would an alternative default cultural substrate? Because from where I’m sitting the prevailing options are either the vague ceremonial deistic Protestant Christianity we have or the hedonistic hyper-consumerism that exists in tension with it.
Remove one and the other takes over, which isn’t ideal but at least as long as they’re duking it out there can be some space in the middle where there can be sanity.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which they're in conflict, for one (the Protestant work ethic contributes to both imo), but also it's very easy to look at other parts of the world...
I think you're overestimating the degree to which they're in conflict, for one (the Protestant work ethic contributes to both imo), but also it's very easy to look at other parts of the world where Christianity is not the dominant cultural paradigm to see that it is indeed possible for society to exist in that state.
The key word there in Protestant work ethic is “Protestant.” I think there are some basic theological ideas embedded in Protestantism that underlie a lot of modernist thought that operate above...
The key word there in Protestant work ethic is “Protestant.” I think there are some basic theological ideas embedded in Protestantism that underlie a lot of modernist thought that operate above the specific theological claims of Christianity. But they presume a certain Christian sort of worldview.
Even societies that aren’t dominated by Christianity are dominated by interpretations of the indigenous religious customs that are irrevocably tied to Protestantism, primarily the insistence on doctrine over practice and tradition as well as the insistence on scriptural originalism as the truest representation of a religion’s truth.
These schools of Islam, for example, that we view as backwards and wanting to take society back to the Middle Ages are actually extremely modern schools of jurisprudence. It was only in the late 19th century that Islamic jurisprudence took this hard turn towards strict scripturalism and that was due in part to the Islamic world’s conquest by the British. Even the most commonly attested form of Hinduism among educated English speakers is a school of thought that is most amenable to a sort of Deistic worldview that they absorbed through English medium education.
I brought up the Protestant work ethic to dispute your claim that generic US cultural Christianity is somehow in tension with rampant consumerism. I don't think these things are remotely in...
I brought up the Protestant work ethic to dispute your claim that generic US cultural Christianity is somehow in tension with rampant consumerism. I don't think these things are remotely in conflict and I think much of modern American Protestantism actually synergizes with the rampant consumerism you describe as being in tension with it.
I do think Christianity's position as the dominant cultural hegemony in the most powerful countries right now means it inevitably influences even parts of the world that are not majority Christian, but I think it's farcical to claim that this means Christianity (and specifically Protestantism) is thus necessarily the default cultural hegemony in those other parts of the world. It would be absurd to claim that Christianity is the dominant cultural force in China, for instance, and it would also be absurd to claim Protestantism specifically is that force huge swaths even of the Christian world.
I definitely don't dispute Christianity's pervasive cultural influence. I live in a country where stores have to close on Sundays. But I think responding to that with a rhetorical "what's the alternative?" implies that you believe this state of affairs is necessary and/or unchangeable, and I think that's just wrong.
You’re viewing these as a single basket of goods but I’m talking specifically about a set of beliefs about what the world IS and how it works that comes from Protestantism that has become...
I think it's farcical to claim that this means Christianity (and specifically Protestantism) is thus necessarily the default cultural hegemony in those other parts of the world.
You’re viewing these as a single basket of goods but I’m talking specifically about a set of beliefs about what the world IS and how it works that comes from Protestantism that has become generalized into the conventional secular worldview and, mostly, remains unexamined. In the same way Protestantism was an outgrowth of Catholicism which was an outgrowth of Roman state religion the worldview of sort of utilitarian physicalism evolves out of that same lineage.
But I think responding to that with a rhetorical "what's the alternative?" implies that you believe this state of affairs is necessary and/or unchangeable, and I think that's just wrong.
I didn’t say it was unchangeable I said what the change will be unless something big changes in how society is organized and how people view themselves. If the stores don’t close on Sundays that means the store will never close because we will be living in a hyper-capitalist dystopia that doesn’t respect anything as sacred except money. I say, as a non-Christian, that I would largely be more comfortable living under a hegemonic cultural framework of sort of vaguely deistic Christianity in an otherwise secular system than I would living under avowed Atheists in that same system. This has nothing to do with theological beliefs, as theologically I’m much more in line with where soft atheist/agnostics are, but more to do with our ideas about personal values and what is actually compatible with human flourishing.
You picked a good time to leave, lol. It was right around then that the bottom really dropped out and the majority of the big names in that cultural sphere became regressive anti-feminists if not...
The quality seemed to go downhill about 10 years ago, so I stopped watching -- didn't really need it anymore.
You picked a good time to leave, lol. It was right around then that the bottom really dropped out and the majority of the big names in that cultural sphere became regressive anti-feminists if not outright white nationalists. It turns out Christians don't have a monopoly on reactionary regressive politics.
Here's one take on it from five years ago: New Atheism: The godlessness that failed (Scott Alexander) ... So the claim is that many people don't need atheism anymore, because anti-racism fills...
And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?
And New Atheism had an answer: religion.
That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.
...
Betweem 2008 and 2016, two things happened. First, Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president. Second, Ferguson. The Blue Tribe kept posing its same identity question: “Who am I? What defines me?”, and now Black Lives Matter gave them an answer they liked better “You are the people who aren’t blinded by sexism and racism.”
Again, it was beautiful, simple, and perfect. We were “the reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on blind hatred and prejudice. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by white supremacy and an all-consuming desire to protect their own privilege, and so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservativism began with the cotton plant in Jamestown. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by bigotry separates us from the Republicans.
So the claim is that many people don't need atheism anymore, because anti-racism fills that role. I don't think that will be true for the people who are genuinely still struggling with religion, but maybe it's true for a lot of people.
I absolutely would not put much stock in a take that frames anti-racism as more or less a religion and claims it displaced atheism to describe the fall of New Atheism. Especially given that so...
I absolutely would not put much stock in a take that frames anti-racism as more or less a religion and claims it displaced atheism to describe the fall of New Atheism. Especially given that so many prominent New Atheist figures became vocal far-right reactionaries during the early to mid 2010s and remain so to this day. The excerpt you quote here reads like it's from an "anti-woke" screed.
It's true that he's describing "wokism" from an outside point of view, but it's deliberately parallel to how he describes atheism, and he's an atheist. I don't think he said either atheism or...
It's true that he's describing "wokism" from an outside point of view, but it's deliberately parallel to how he describes atheism, and he's an atheist. I don't think he said either atheism or anti-racism is a religion. An ideology isn't the same as a religion, though there are some similarities if you go about it in an ideological way.
I simply see no validity in a claim that "wokism" replaced New Atheism when the observable reality was that New Atheism developed into an extremely racist and misogynistic reactionary right-wing...
I simply see no validity in a claim that "wokism" replaced New Atheism when the observable reality was that New Atheism developed into an extremely racist and misogynistic reactionary right-wing movement -- the opposite of the "wokism" he claims replaced it. As @rng pointed out in their earlier comment, some have remained part of this reactionary far right political movement while abandoning atheism itself.
Also... A lot of "woke" people are religious. They didn't leave atheism or New Atheism for wokeness, they were and are religious people with anti-racist principles. Personally I'm agnostic but...
Also... A lot of "woke" people are religious. They didn't leave atheism or New Atheism for wokeness, they were and are religious people with anti-racist principles.
Personally I'm agnostic but briefly found that brand of atheism interesting - but found it immediately misogynistic and really fucking annoying. Like, I was an annoying, smart-ass teenager/young adult and I couldn't handle it. It's really not surprising where the ideology has ended up, because I think it was always defined in opposition.
And when the "Blue Tribe" wasn't on board with them, they pivoted the PR to oppose the Blue Tribe's "new religion" or whatever. But the only one who believes that conservatism began in Jamestown is that author.
Edit: Oh, I've gone down a Scott Alexander rabbit hole and I would not consider his opinions on race and gender to be valid as he does seem to believe in the genetic superiority of white people. He explicitly states his belief that this theory is really "or at best not provably not true" and that calling tech people racist "retards their growth" and that we only got rid of IQ tests because of race (but he means it in a bad way.)
Also women just aren't biologically interested in things like computers and there's no harassment based reason why there are fewer women in the field.
Ah yeah I had my suspicions that someone writing about anti-racism like this would have some other bad takes, but I didn't want to bother digging in and looking. Thank you for your service going...
Ah yeah I had my suspicions that someone writing about anti-racism like this would have some other bad takes, but I didn't want to bother digging in and looking. Thank you for your service going down that rabbit hole for me.
Racialism getting laundered as Human Biodiversity (HBD) by Stormfront and the like is my new least favorite piece of knowledge. But the more you know™...I guess.
Racialism getting laundered as Human Biodiversity (HBD) by Stormfront and the like is my new least favorite piece of knowledge. But the more you know™...I guess.
Being able to argue yourself into the position that “We must commit genocide in order to improve the biodiversity of the human race” is honestly a pretty impressive feat of pretzel logic.
Being able to argue yourself into the position that “We must commit genocide in order to improve the biodiversity of the human race” is honestly a pretty impressive feat of pretzel logic.
"Between 2007 and 2014, terminology used by Stormfront for scientific racism changed from "racialism" and "race realism", to "human biodiversity" (HBD).[17]
The Southern Poverty Law Center has associated "human biodiversity" with the alt-right and white nationalism.[18][19] The Anti-Defamation League has associated HBD with the alt-right and white supremacy.[20] An April 2017 article in New York Magazine described HBD as a "mainstay" of the alt-right.[21]"
I probably shouldn’t be at this point, but I’m often surprised by how often people on Tildes will wildly misread Scott Alexander. They’re very often seeing things that he didn’t actually write and...
I probably shouldn’t be at this point, but I’m often surprised by how often people on Tildes will wildly misread Scott Alexander. They’re very often seeing things that he didn’t actually write and accusing him of believing things that, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t actually believe.
And I have to think that it’s a problem with the writing that people get such different vibes. Maybe it’s the use of hyperbole?
I don’t want to get into it though, because he’s written a lot, I haven’t read everything, and we’d be here all day. Also, I don’t really want to defend it all; I have criticisms too.
But I will warn you not to trust anything people say on Tildes about Scott Alexander that’s based on a brief skim. It’s the blind leading the blind.
I thought it was an okay article, but I regret linking to it, because people have misread him again.
As I have no way of knowing how much or how deeply someone else has read someone's work, I think based on this instruction I should also not trust what you have to say here about Scott Alexander....
But I will warn you not to trust anything people say on Tildes about Scott Alexander that’s based on a brief skim. It’s the blind leading the blind.
As I have no way of knowing how much or how deeply someone else has read someone's work, I think based on this instruction I should also not trust what you have to say here about Scott Alexander. ;D
People disagreeing with you on someone's work may well be misreading him. But they just as well may understand the text just as well as you but disagree on its quality and implications. I'll freely admit I haven't read his stuff, but at least some of the people on Tildes who criticize his work are people whose readings of other work I have read have generally been trustworthy and well-founded. You're free to disagree, but I think if its so common for people to read his work and come to the same negative conclusions about what he's saying, it's worth considering that either they're right or he's wildly bad at conveying what he actually does mean.
Fwiw I won't claim to be an expert on the man, I absolutely feel similar about him as I do to Jordan Peterson. Though JP has made himself much louder in recent years, I don't feel compelled to...
Fwiw I won't claim to be an expert on the man, I absolutely feel similar about him as I do to Jordan Peterson. Though JP has made himself much louder in recent years, I don't feel compelled to read all of his work to identify the concerning things I find in it. And if I go do research on him and find others also identifying concerning things, well, that's concerning.
He's a "walks like a duck, quacks like a duck" for me. It'll take me a lot to believe he's a flamingo instead. I'm always open to evidence to the contrary though.
Screenshots of Emails from Scott Alexander to Topher Brennan Perhaps you may not agree with the conclusions I have drawn. But I don't actually see any particularly strong evidence to the contrary....
Perhaps you may not agree with the conclusions I have drawn. But I don't actually see any particularly strong evidence to the contrary. I found other comments of his that I believe support eugenics.
Find him however you like, but my genuine opinion on his remarks is not slander nor libel. I have neither malice nor am I spouting a known falsehood.
Yes, Scott Alexander has enemies and they’ve made certain emails easy to find. I’m going to delete my comment rather than continuing to misuse legal terms, but the part I really object to is...
Yes, Scott Alexander has enemies and they’ve made certain emails easy to find.
I’m going to delete my comment rather than continuing to misuse legal terms, but the part I really object to is associating Scott Alexander with Stormfront. I don’t actually know much about what Stormfront believes, but I assume they are rather different things. (“Not entirely false” doesn’t mean they believe the same things.)
I think by making vague associations like that, you are at least being pretty reckless about spreading gossip.
Scott Alexander does have an interest in genetics - he’s written about it a fair bit. Regarding eugenics, people like to throw that word around to make their opponents seem like Nazis. I think we should make a distinction between state coercion (things like anti-abortion laws, forced sterilization, China’s one-child policy) and reproductive freedom, which I think should include things like birth control, IVF and pre-natal genetics tests. This is all about giving parents choices, so they don’t have to, say, have a child with Down’s syndrome if they don’t want to.
(Parents of a child with Down’s syndrome will insist that they love their child and it all worked out for the best, and of course we should do whatever we can to help people who already exist, but I don’t think that’s an argument for future parents not getting a choice about it.)
If someone says I agree with Stormfront because I think air is useful for breathing, that would be certainly some questionable comparison and probably some logical fallacy or another. If someone...
If someone says I agree with Stormfront because I think air is useful for breathing, that would be certainly some questionable comparison and probably some logical fallacy or another.
If someone says I agree with Stormfront for saying I'm on board with a specific racist/eugenic ideology that they espouse, that's another.
I do think that the people with Downs syndrome who voice an opinion should perhaps be given weight here as you dismiss their parents, but regardless I don't want to get into a separate ableism discussion or even a eugenics discussion. It's very off topic and we won't agree.
"HBD" is explicitly a racist ideology. If I talked about genetics I'd probably try to be quite clear that I wasn't on board with that ideology. If I'm doing the complete opposite it's not unreasonable to point that out. If I don't want Stormfront to be my bedfellows, I should probably not agree with them on racist ideologies.
The "human biodiversity" movement refers to a set of ideas about scientific racism that formed in the 1990's.[10][11][12] Sailer developed a concept of "ethnic nepotism", favoring members of one's own group.[13] Sailer took this as a biological imperative that necessitates, "ethnocentrism, clannishness, xenophobia, nationalism, and racism," when applied to the scale of an entire society for "ethnic nepotism".[13]
... (From the previously linked wiki article on the Human Biodiversity Institute)
Human biodiversity" was one of the main publishing subjects of Washington Summit Publishers, a white nationalist publishing company run by Richard B. Spencer.[22] Quillette has also published work supporting "human biodiversity", leading to accusations of pseudoscience and eugenics.[23][2] Contributors who have written about HBD for Quillette include Ben Winegard, Bo Winegard, Brian Boutwell, and John Paul Wright.[2]
"Human biodiversity" has been promoted by Milo Yiannopoulos.[8][24] It has also been promoted by Stefan Molyneux.[1] HBD influenced Stephen Miller, political advisor to Donald Trump.[9] It also influenced Dominic Cummings, political advisor to Boris Johnson.[9]
If you don't want Stephen Miller, Richard Spencer, and the like to be your counterparts, don't sign up for their newsletters.
You’re still doing it. Cut it out. “Human biodiversity” might have a particular meaning, but “some parts” of it does not. We simply don’t know what Scott Alexander’s opinions were at the time,...
You’re still doing it. Cut it out.
“Human biodiversity” might have a particular meaning, but “some parts” of it does not. We simply don’t know what Scott Alexander’s opinions were at the time, because he didn’t share them, not even in that leaked private email that his enemies like to point to.
And now you’re quoting things he didn’t write as evidence of his opinions. Going from “some (unsuspecified) parts of biodiversity” to “therefore, he believes all the same things that these other people believe” is a leap of logic that only makes sense if you’ve already decided to be suspicious of him.
The reason I’m fairly confident that he’s not into the bad stuff that I imagine Stormfront is into is that he has a lot of libertarian opinions and has discussed them at length, so advocating for state coercion or violence against minorities would be out of character.
Although, fair warning, Steven Sailer does show up occasionally in the comments section. He never posts about anything harmful that I could see, once I started recognizing the name. (He’s boring.) My guess is it’s because Scott has banned him before. And the comments section wouldn’t be evidence of Scott Alexander’s opinions either, although it does show what he puts up with.
No. I'm expressing my thoughts and providing sources. It is a racist ideology. You don't say "I believe in some parts of white supremacy." and expect no criticism because you might have meant the...
You’re still doing it. Cut it out.
No. I'm expressing my thoughts and providing sources.
“Human biodiversity” might have a particular meaning, but “some parts” of it does not. We simply don’t know what Scott Alexander’s opinions were at the time, because he didn’t share them, not even in that leaked private email that his enemies like to point to.
It is a racist ideology. You don't say "I believe in some parts of white supremacy." and expect no criticism because you might have meant the "good parts." I'm not familiar with any "good parts" of racialism or HBD. Remove the racism and it isn't HBD.
And now you’re quoting things he didn’t write as evidence of his opinions. Going from “some (unsuspecified) parts of biodiversity” to “therefore, he believes all the same things that these other people believe” is a leap of logic that only makes sense if you’ve already decided to be suspicious of him.
I'm quoting the Wikipedia article on the "far-right" org full of "pseudoscientific race theories" that created the euphemism "HBD" or "human biodiversity". It is not unfair to provide details on that ideology. I only "decided" to be suspicious after reading his words.
The reason I’m fairly confident that he’s not into the bad stuff that I imagine Stormfront is into is that he has a lot of libertarian opinions and has discussed them at length, so advocating for state coercion or violence against minorities would be out of character.
Human Biodiversity is one of the bad things Stormfront is into. I'm going to listen to his words on that rather than assume he's misrepresenting himself.
Although, fair warning, Steven Sailer does show up occasionally in the comments section. He never posts about anything harmful that I could see, once I started recognizing the name. (He’s boring.) My guess is it’s because Scott has banned him before. And the comments section wouldn’t be evidence of Scott Alexander’s opinions either, although it does show what he puts up with.
Him permitting far right racists in his comments would actually be further evidence of his tolerance of racism, IMO.
But I cannot say what he believes, only that he's willing to align himself with a racist ideology, and now tolerates a major white supremacist, the person that popularized the term in question, in his comments.
I don't understand defending someone who's perfectly capable of defending himself. If he's addressed these allegations elsewhere since they're public I'm open to reading it. But I'm also not going to disbelieve his private words.
This isn’t really about Scott. He doesn’t have to defend an opinion he didn’t make public. Besides, he’s not on Tildes. The behavior I object to is that I can’t share a link to an article that I...
This isn’t really about Scott. He doesn’t have to defend an opinion he didn’t make public. Besides, he’s not on Tildes.
The behavior I object to is that I can’t share a link to an article that I thought was pretty good without someone spreading innuendo that the author is Nazi-adjacent. I’m pretty sure it’s not true and It’s very annoying.
I cannot promise not to look up the person that you post an article from and find him espousing his support of racist ideology. It was relevant to the quotes you posted. I'm not spreading...
I cannot promise not to look up the person that you post an article from and find him espousing his support of racist ideology. It was relevant to the quotes you posted. I'm not spreading innuendo. He espoused support for an explicitly racist ideology, full stop. If he appears Nazi-adjacent it's because he's standing next to the Nazis.
He doesn't have to defend the opinion, but I see no reason to believe your opinion of him above his own words. I understand you like him. The frustration you feel about him being associated with white supremacist viewpoints is as far as I can tell because he's associated himself with those viewpoints. If you're only mad because it's being pointed out, then idk what to say to that.
People are going to have different opinions than you about various public figures, and they're perfectly entitled to bring them up when you post an article by such a figure. There are lots of...
People are going to have different opinions than you about various public figures, and they're perfectly entitled to bring them up when you post an article by such a figure. There are lots of situations where people disagreeing with you can feel annoying, but that doesn't make them expressing their opinions about an article you posted or its author objectionable behavior.
I shared two small quotes from a longer article, which has more evidence, if you’re interested. It’s not something I know a lot about and I’m not entirely convinced, but it seems like a plausible...
I shared two small quotes from a longer article, which has more evidence, if you’re interested. It’s not something I know a lot about and I’m not entirely convinced, but it seems like a plausible argument to me:
There are fewer people writing about New Atheism than before, when it was more popular. So the question is what did people do who stopped writing about it? Maybe some were conservative all along, but it doesn’t sound like it was everyone? Is it unreasonable that some people might have ended up in another popular movement?
It’s a theory. I don’t see why people are dismissive. What have you done to try to answer this question?
If a theory absolutely fails to address what I observed happening as the New Atheism movement decayed into a misogynistic racist alt right reactionary movement and blames the movement's decline on...
It’s a theory. I don’t see why people are dismissive.
If a theory absolutely fails to address what I observed happening as the New Atheism movement decayed into a misogynistic racist alt right reactionary movement and blames the movement's decline on something that is fundamentally ideologically opposed to that, I will dismiss that theory because it does not account for the facts as I see them. I am especially likely to be skeptical of claims that lay the decline of New Atheism at the feet of "wokism" when the author is himself a racist and misogynistic atheist.
I think as Evangelical Christianity lost political salience the urgency of needing to argue about atheism went away too. Political Evangelicals themselves seem to have lost the plot on their own...
I think as Evangelical Christianity lost political salience the urgency of needing to argue about atheism went away too. Political Evangelicals themselves seem to have lost the plot on their own religion and seem largely preoccupied with some sort of culty nationalist civic religion instead. The relationship with God is secondary.
Then the people who would have been drawn to it went off in different directions to inflect that sort of strident dogmatism I associate with the New Atheist movement into whatever other causes they glommed onto instead, be it philanthropy (turning it into effective altruism), or the whole “rationalist” movement and their flirtation with eugenics, or one of the many fractally intricate subfactions of Marxist politics.
Not having answered the question differently doesn't mean I don't have valid grounds to state why one suggested answer is bad. I'm not the people above, but essentially that article (or rather,...
Not having answered the question differently doesn't mean I don't have valid grounds to state why one suggested answer is bad.
I'm not the people above, but essentially that article (or rather, for fairness sake, the excerpts you quoted) imply a development that is counter to my understanding of many of the "leading lights" of the new atheist movement.
Those figures primarily (again, to the extent of my own familiarity) didn't get subsumed into the woke anti-racist crowd but rather in the anti-woke (racist) crowd.
To suggest then that wokeism is the replacement/continuation of the new atheism movement seems ludicrous.
One could easily reframe the second half into the anti-woke movement, making the french revolution or whatever the beginning or liberalism and the opponents be driven by "fanatic egalitarianism and cultural Marxism" (replacing prejudice and such in the quote) or whatever.
I don't think that would be exactly right either, but at least that would be consistent with the actual overlap of major figures from one movement to the other.
I think you’re talking about different people - the most famous or notorious ones versus all the people who were interested in new atheism at the time.
I think you’re talking about different people - the most famous or notorious ones versus all the people who were interested in new atheism at the time.
That writer and me? Maybe. Not sure his point holds up then either, though. Unless many of these major figures had a quasi-complete replacement of audiences they will have had a number of people...
That writer and me?
Maybe. Not sure his point holds up then either, though.
Unless many of these major figures had a quasi-complete replacement of audiences they will have had a number of people join them.
Those alone would serve as a basic counter to the writer versus what this thread initially discussed.
I think a lot of people who were interested in new atheism have moved on? Also, turnover is pretty normal for any movement. Today’s college students weren’t in college before. It seems pretty...
I think a lot of people who were interested in new atheism have moved on? Also, turnover is pretty normal for any movement. Today’s college students weren’t in college before.
It seems pretty plausible that among newcomers, the demographics of who is attracted to atheism might have changed?
I mean, turnover obviously exist but at some point you might be talking Theseus's ship. I meany this isn't talking about atheism in general, it's talking about new atheism specifically. If the...
I mean, turnover obviously exist but at some point you might be talking Theseus's ship.
I meany this isn't talking about atheism in general, it's talking about new atheism specifically.
If the original ideologues and the original people both went off to other things then other people most likely aren't quite within the same space.
E: Especially of you have reason to believe that the new people do not share the same traits as the original ones, the onus of it being a real continuation would be on actually sharing ideas or whatever with the original.
Yes, when we’re talking about people who can come and go and trends over many years, it often is a “Theseus’s ship” situation. This is true of other social groups too.
Yes, when we’re talking about people who can come and go and trends over many years, it often is a “Theseus’s ship” situation. This is true of other social groups too.
I mean, most other references (in this context, both the paper and the upper comments preceding that astral essay) refer to "New Atheism" as a snapshot in time, in particular basing it off certain...
I mean, most other references (in this context, both the paper and the upper comments preceding that astral essay) refer to "New Atheism" as a snapshot in time, in particular basing it off certain core personalities.
And then looking from there at the development of these personalities and their followers is essentially the exact opposite.
It is a specific social group and what may have been their motivations, based on multiple positions held.
Vs what is effectively (at least in potential) multiple groups who have had a (partially) shared position during differing points in time.
They have gone a similar route before, just with misogyny. The problem with trying to build a community around atheism is that it is a shared negation - not a shared set of values or shared...
I used to be a big fan of the New Atheists, but man did they all go crazy with their trans hatred and "anti-woke" stuff. Only a few (e.g. Matt Dillahunty) avoided it.
They have gone a similar route before, just with misogyny.
The problem with trying to build a community around atheism is that it is a shared negation - not a shared set of values or shared interests. That leaves them with the problem of what to talk about and bond over. In the absence of everything else that leads to bonding over what/who they don't like.
While I agree with the misogyny (see Dear Muslima), I have to strongly disagree about your thoughts on community based on negation. Atheism, especially with Scientific Skepticism and Secular...
While I agree with the misogyny (see Dear Muslima), I have to strongly disagree about your thoughts on community based on negation. Atheism, especially with Scientific Skepticism and Secular Humanism, can absolutely be a community. Lots of non-hateful atheist groups around!
Religion also is a "positive" (i.e. not built on negation) community that, extremely frequently, is significantly worse around feminism and LGBTQ+ right than the New Atheists have ever been.
I don't believe your assertion that the New Atheist were destined to be terrible, they just became terrible.
I haven't really participated in one of these secular communities myself, but I presume they talk about all the stuff people talk about at church besides religion. They socialize, talk about...
I haven't really participated in one of these secular communities myself, but I presume they talk about all the stuff people talk about at church besides religion. They socialize, talk about current events in both their lives and the world. Most interactions at my church growing up, outside of the sermon itself, were like this. Even prayer -- any Christian comedian will have a bit about using group prayer to essentially gossip.
As for replacing any religious aspects to make it more than just a social club, I haven't ever attended one but I can think of some ideas. Maybe they discuss philosophy some -- there's plenty to talk about there without it necessarily being a "this is why everyone else is wrong" fest. Maybe they talk more generally about what they think they should do to improve the world or become better people -- these are things people who aren't religious still often want to do, and discussing with other atheists avoids people trying to push religion on you while you're earnestly seeking purpose. Maybe they organize charity and acts of service for their community. There's really a lot of potential there.
Here's a suggestion to check out one of the big names in the minor leagues of the New Atheist movement who has held to the progressive and humanist ethos with emphasis on biology/evolution, PZ...
Only a few avoided it
Here's a suggestion to check out one of the big names in the minor leagues of the New Atheist movement who has held to the progressive and humanist ethos with emphasis on biology/evolution, PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog. Bonus if you like spiders.
I haven't read the paper yet, but as an anti-theist scientist that heavily dislikes New Atheism, I have my two cents to share. I think New Atheism is a kind of modernist reactionarism. It has the...
I haven't read the paper yet, but as an anti-theist scientist that heavily dislikes New Atheism, I have my two cents to share.
I think New Atheism is a kind of modernist reactionarism. It has the old, modernist ways of thinking about the world. It has a point in the sense that modernism was kind of right about certain things. It was right that religious way of looking at the world was epistemologically wrong and encouraged bad ways of thinking, and it was right that religion has a lot to play in unnecessary conflicts. But modernism was wrong in a lot of other aspects. It didn't really critically consider the questions of racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc. In fact, it very, very often amplified these.
Think of all those secular and nationalist movements in 19th-20th century that overcame religious systems, and built new systems based on "science". These provided an improvement in some ways, because they were built on empirical thinking. However, the "science" generally included stuff like eugenics and phrenology. In addition, positivists were strong back then, and they thought everything was explainable by "science". They built this false, historicist narrative about the great struggle between """science""" and religion. It was basically a grand narrative that claimed to explain the entirety of human history. Everything was reducible to a struggle between enlightened skeptic seculars and ignorant, religious reactionaries. It claimed to explain the "progress" of humanity.
This was, of course, wrong. Furthermore, what they called "science" was often bullshit, conservative, and even fascistic ideologies. Among other things this ideology enabled and fed colonialism, because the "primitives" were obviously not enlightened like the modernists. Therefore, it was ok to "push them toward progress". This, of course, meant dehumanizing and exploiting them.
I think New Atheism is very similar in this regard. It blames almost every bad thing on religion; it follows the same grand narrative about society; it doesn't consider the conservative, reactionary, and fascistic elements in secular ideologies; it perverts science into something it's not—a mouthpiece for conservative backlash. At times it even defends positivist arguments (e.g. Sam Harris).
I think it just doesn't go far enough. Despite all its claims about being superior, courageous, etc, New Atheism is very conservative and timid. It doesn't encourage people to examine their own ideological limitations, it doesn't push people toward facing their own shitty and unjust ideas. Instead of critical thinking, it encourages conservative ignorance in these issues. And wailing on less privileged groups, like women and minorities, is not courageous—it's the opposite.
I think it’s a bit much to say this is just false. It’s diminishing a real conflict. It really was illegal to teach evolution in schools in some states. The Scopes trial did happen. There are...
In addition, positivists were strong back then, and they thought everything was explainable by "science". They built this false, historicist narrative about the great struggle between """science""" and religion.
I think it’s a bit much to say this is just false. It’s diminishing a real conflict. It really was illegal to teach evolution in schools in some states. The Scopes trial did happen. There are still young-earth creationists.
"From 1985 to 2010, there was a statistical dead heat between acceptance and rejection of evolution," said lead researcher Jon D. Miller of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
“But acceptance then surged, becoming the majority position in 2016."
And apparently there are still over a hundred million Americans who aren’t entirely on board:
Polling released this week by Suffolk University for USA Today indicates that this comports with the views of nearly 4 in 10 Americans — more than say either that human evolution was steered by God or that humans evolved without any divine intervention.
It’s not fashionable anymore, but this was a noisy conflict that’s been active since the 19th century and is still not over in the US.
I think there's a bit of misunderstanding. Oppression and obstruction of science by religion are real and still exist. It's a very serious issue a lot of religious people and western liberals...
I think there's a bit of misunderstanding. Oppression and obstruction of science by religion are real and still exist. It's a very serious issue a lot of religious people and western liberals downplay in order to wave off criticism of religion. I think they want to ignore the conflict between science and religion. I seriously disagree with that, and it's one of the reasons I'm anti-theist.
However, history is not reducible to a battle between science and religion, and certainly not "science" and religion. The positivist narrative I mentioned does this, and tries to explain away a great deal of different and complicated conflicts.
Perhaps an example is the framing of Galileo's persecution by the Church? While the Copernican model was a "problem" as far as some elements of the Church went, he had the backing of the Pope (and...
Perhaps an example is the framing of Galileo's persecution by the Church? While the Copernican model was a "problem" as far as some elements of the Church went, he had the backing of the Pope (and the Jesuits) until he basically wrote a defense that the Pope thought was a personal attack. So he lost his biggest ally and then, despite arguing for heliocentrism went to Church court and said "I never did that, nope not me" and was sentenced to house arrest.
I'm not arguing this was a good situation but that it was far more about the politics than it was about the science. The Pope was being convinced of enemies in his midst and Galileo was portrayed as one of those. There would have been very little difference in this case had it occurred with a secular ruler who felt they were being undermined IMO.
But the common framing of Galileo is Religion vs Science and part of this larger narrative.
That's an interesting example, but for modern stuff, I generally mean more like colonialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, queerphobia, xenophobia, capitalism, etc. Religion often plays a role in...
That's an interesting example, but for modern stuff, I generally mean more like colonialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, queerphobia, xenophobia, capitalism, etc. Religion often plays a role in these, but even then none of these are reducible to just religion. They also do happen without religious motivation too.
The narrative I mentioned tries to reduce these to a conflict between enlightened seculars and religious reactionaries. That's how it constructs a narrative of "progress" for humanity.
That's fair, I went historical since it's so widely known. But I do agree that reducing any of the above to religion vs secularism is ignoring so much actual history.
That's fair, I went historical since it's so widely known.
But I do agree that reducing any of the above to religion vs secularism is ignoring so much actual history.
That’s not really “science” vs. “religion” though that’s more like “a specific mythic literalist fundamentalist movement.” Plenty of religious people also think Young Earth Creationists are stupid...
That’s not really “science” vs. “religion” though that’s more like “a specific mythic literalist fundamentalist movement.” Plenty of religious people also think Young Earth Creationists are stupid and/or heretical.
Yes, but that’s true of a lot of religious disputes. People aren’t going to defend all religion, they’re going to defend their own religion - beliefs they actually have. Normally, people aren’t...
Yes, but that’s true of a lot of religious disputes. People aren’t going to defend all religion, they’re going to defend their own religion - beliefs they actually have. Normally, people aren’t going to defend someone else’s religious beliefs. As you say, they think they’re heretical.
There are sometimes coalitions though, and historically, a widespread consensus that religious tolerance is a good thing has put a stop to hundreds of years of religious wars.
Also, historically, one of the things many religions could agree on is that atheists are bad. I guess that’s changed, though? Also, opposing evolution is no longer something you can build a broad political coalition around, in the US, anyway.
It really depends on the religion whether they thought atheism was bad or not. Ancient Romans (maybe Greeks as well, but they were less unified) as a rule didn't care what you believed. Orthodoxy...
It really depends on the religion whether they thought atheism was bad or not. Ancient Romans (maybe Greeks as well, but they were less unified) as a rule didn't care what you believed. Orthodoxy was unnecessary, orthopraxy was required. Jews and early Christians were perceived as basically atheist by the Romans for only worshiping one god rather than merging all of them into their system.
But Buddhism and Hinduism both have non-theistic/atheistic schools of thought. Jainism is entirely atheistic I believe. Although I'm not any of those faiths and so I may misunderstand nuances.
It's rarely so black and white - religious or not/theistic or not. Deism and panentheism are much fuzzier on that a/theistic divide. If there was a god that made us, but then walked off, does it really vary much from atheism?
Jainism isn’t atheistic so much as indifferent. Jains believe Gods exist, but they’re secondary and subject to the fundamental laws of the universe rather than above them. (Hindus also believe...
Jainism isn’t atheistic so much as indifferent. Jains believe Gods exist, but they’re secondary and subject to the fundamental laws of the universe rather than above them. (Hindus also believe this but the fundamental laws are rolled up into Brahman and the arguments are whether Brahman does or does not have attributes and whether Brahman IS the substance of universe or separate from it.)
For most non-monotheistic religions historically there were many different types of divinities of varying levels of influence or power.
Also the lines between these different religions in premodern times were mostly theoretical. Nobody but monks and priests were strictly identified as one or the other. Most people in society would tend to blend the different belief systems that made sense to them.
Got it, I figured what I was reading was likely fairly simplistic! Much appreciated. And yeah the blending is definitely a pattern from any place/time where faiths overlapped. It's all cut and dry...
Got it, I figured what I was reading was likely fairly simplistic! Much appreciated. And yeah the blending is definitely a pattern from any place/time where faiths overlapped. It's all cut and dry until you actually look at it.
Even today! I meet a lot of people who call themselves Christian and talk about past lives and karma. I have to fight the urge to push my glasses up and “Well ackshually theologically speaking. . .”
Even today! I meet a lot of people who call themselves Christian and talk about past lives and karma. I have to fight the urge to push my glasses up and “Well ackshually theologically speaking. . .”
Haha yes I've had my share of those moments, especially as a former Catholic. Like "well no so here's what the actual dogma is... whether that's what everyone does, at the least the dogma is...
Haha yes I've had my share of those moments, especially as a former Catholic. Like "well no so here's what the actual dogma is... whether that's what everyone does, at the least the dogma is consistent there."
Yes, you’re right, there’s a lot of diversity. As I understand it, Romans did have a state religion, but it was more about making the right sacrifices to their gods as well as your own. They...
Yes, you’re right, there’s a lot of diversity. As I understand it, Romans did have a state religion, but it was more about making the right sacrifices to their gods as well as your own. They expected cities to have their own gods. So, while religious tolerance wasn’t really invented yet, it was sorta built-in. This was somewhat empirical - they did things because they thought it worked for them, much like a city might send gifts to a stronger neighbor to keep them happy. Their sacrifices seemed to be working pretty well in getting the gods on their side and they were pretty proud of their piety. But if someone else did something that seemed to work, why not let them sacrifice to that god, too?
Christianity was… not that. Things changed pretty drastically when the empire became Christian and it became a state religion. After that there were bitter disputes about what you believed rather than what you did, to a ridiculous extent. (It’s thought that these were proxies for power struggles based on other things, but theology was the excuse.)
This claim to be a universal religion is with us to this day in other ways. Most obviously, Islam is also a monotheistic, universal religion, but also in other things we think should be universal, like ethics, sometimes. And maybe the underlying assumption that despite obvious diversity, things can be universal inspired some investigations into universal scientific laws?
But when we’re talking about the US in the nineteenth and twentieth century, this is mostly disputes among Christians, so it’s just assumed that what you believe is really important, often tempered by the truce of religious tolerance, but still resulting in thousands of independent churches because people don’t quite agree about what to believe.
Claims about supposedly universal beliefs and practices often lead to conflict, because this is saying everyone needs to think the same way, or they’re just wrong. And, certainly, militant atheists believe that everyone would benefit from being an atheist, too, so while it’s an ideology, not a religion, there is perhaps some influence.
Maybe a belief in diversity can temper this a bit, though? You can just look around and see all the differences, and decide that maybe it’s not a problem?
There are also obvious benefits to standardization, though. It might not always result in a universal standard because there are going to be holdouts, but it can create a lot of uniformity in certain ways.
Very little is known of Muhammad’s early life but one of the prevailing theories is that he came from a tribe of Arab Christians that had been extremely isolated from the broader Christian world...
Most obviously, Islam is also a monotheistic, universal religion, but also in other things we think should be universal, like ethics, sometimes
Very little is known of Muhammad’s early life but one of the prevailing theories is that he came from a tribe of Arab Christians that had been extremely isolated from the broader Christian world since the very earliest days of the religion and evolved in its own extremely idiosyncratic direction. For most of the Byzantine Empires early days Islam was regarded as a weird, culty Christian heresy sort of like we would view the Branch Davidians.
You’re still operating on this model that separates “religions” from other baskets of beliefs and worldviews that people have, but I’m arguing that this model is itself flawed. I don’t view...
Yes, but that’s true of a lot of religious disputes.
You’re still operating on this model that separates “religions” from other baskets of beliefs and worldviews that people have, but I’m arguing that this model is itself flawed. I don’t view worldviews that stem from a belief in God as being different from any other worldviews. The secular assumption that as soon as you mention God it goes in a special box is analogous to the Christian assumption that if you’re not on board with the Gospel then you go in the “pagan” box.
It’s a model that specifically arose in Europe in reaction to the wars between Catholics and Protestants as a result of the Church having a firmly enforced doctrine and a near monopoly on scholastics. That “hundreds of years of religious wars” was largely a Christendom thing. Most of the rest of the world had their wars about competing ideas about how states should be structured because they didn’t have the separation between state and ecclesiastical bureaucracies with administrative authority over different areas of life. The head of state WAS the head of church, like what England developed into after Henry VIII.
But in most other traditions there never was any philosophical tension between these disciplines, they were all viewed as various kinds of investigation into the nature of the universe.
Also, historically, one of the things many religions could agree on is that atheists are bad.
Atheism is a religious belief so when you say this you’re just saying the thing religions agree on is that another religion is bad. The idea of the world being divided into physical/scientific and religious spheres is an idea rooted in Christian theology.
Yes, I said "many religions" but I was thinking of the US, rather than other countries where things are different. in the US, atheism is (or at least was) sufficiently unpopular that most...
Yes, I said "many religions" but I was thinking of the US, rather than other countries where things are different. in the US, atheism is (or at least was) sufficiently unpopular that most politicians aren't going to openly admit that they're atheists. Presidents would make a big deal out of going to church. Negative political talk about atheists used to be common. It was used as a boilerplate reason why "godless Communism" was bad.
That's a lagging indicator, though. In most situations today, at least in the places I'm familiar with, it doesn't matter.
I think this feeling of persecution, rhetorically if not often actively, gave atheism as a movement more political energy than it has now.
You will definitely like the paper once you get a chance to read it, bc this is very much what he's describing as "scientism" wrt New Atheism (though he focuses on its rejection of non-scientific...
In addition, positivists were strong back then, and they thought everything was explainable by "science". They built this false, historicist narrative about the great struggle between """science""" and religion.
You will definitely like the paper once you get a chance to read it, bc this is very much what he's describing as "scientism" wrt New Atheism (though he focuses on its rejection of non-scientific disciplines like philosophy rather than the perceived science vs. religion conflict). Based on this comment I think you and the author would get along very well.
I wrote an essay before on how skeptical movements, especially new atheism, become reactionary [1]. Skepticism is inherently a reactionary process: it is a negative project focused on attacking...
I wrote an essay before on how skeptical movements, especially new atheism, become reactionary [1]. Skepticism is inherently a reactionary process: it is a negative project focused on attacking positive projects.
There's a decent essay here that unpicks how New Atheism minus philosophy loses the ability to go from "is" to "ought". The example chosen, eugenics, starts from an apparently empirically derived...
There's a decent essay here that unpicks how New Atheism minus philosophy loses the ability to go from "is" to "ought". The example chosen, eugenics, starts from an apparently empirically derived Darwinian good, optimizing humanity for some "fitness" goals, and gets to the ethically abhorrent in a hurry.
Regardless of whether various superiority claims concerning gender, race, beliefs, etc. can be proven, we need philosophy to keep science honest about the values and ethics of various courses of action.
I really like Massimo Pigliucci, he's always been a good critic (generally with positive and constructive criticism) of the stupid stuff New Atheism and the Scientific Skepticism movements have done. I think his approach is a lot better than others who have attacked these movements. It's something that is really good and can help these movements a lot.
I used to be a big fan of the New Atheists, but man did they all go crazy with their trans hatred and "anti-woke" stuff. Only a few (e.g. Matt Dillahunty) avoided it.
Yeah, the 'new atheists' really went off the rails. While they were an integral part of my journey out of my faith, the ones that went anti-trans/anti-woke, islamophobic, etc. and all that lost all my respect.
I no longer really need to partake in most of the media (debates, etc) associated with atheism, but it was disheartening to see all of that happen. Especially from voices I had once respected.
Thankfully Seth Andrews (The Thinking Atheist podcast, etc) is another that avoided those pitfalls, and has even posted about his disappointment in the others
I'm feeling really out of the loop at the moment. I grew up in an extremely religious household and the online community of atheist debates really helped me come to terms with my life-long doubts and be willing to outwardly say that I do not believe. This was about 20 years ago, which felt like a heyday of the atheist movement with some really awesome content being created. The quality seemed to go downhill about 10 years ago, so I stopped watching -- didn't really need it anymore.
So.... that leaves me wondering... what's going on? Which creators have gone down that path? What do you think has caused that?
I'd argue that the reactionaries of the New Atheist movement have started to abandon it; Christianity is too useful tool for reactionary politics.
Peter Boghossian says that new atheism was misguided; that Christianity is far preferable to what he calls the religion of "Wokeism." Richard Dawkins now calls himself a cultural Christian. Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently converted to Christianity, naming political considerations as her motivation.
Cultural Christian isn't an unreasonable label - most of us in the US for example are subsumed in Christian culture and unconsciously carry the biases of it. It's a way to check ourselves on something we think is "neutral" but is actually Christian oriented (like stores being closed on Sundays still, or meatless options being available specifically on Fridays or celebrating Carnival)
But I'm going to assume he's using it differently since that doesn't seem to be the vibe, nor is it an identity label I'd use rather than a descriptive one.
I had kind of an epiphany last year and got really, deeply annoyed at just how pervasive Christian default is in our culture. Absolutely everywhere, from business hours to language to laws to holidays to traditions to idioms...
What’s would an alternative default cultural substrate? Because from where I’m sitting the prevailing options are either the vague ceremonial deistic Protestant Christianity we have or the hedonistic hyper-consumerism that exists in tension with it.
Remove one and the other takes over, which isn’t ideal but at least as long as they’re duking it out there can be some space in the middle where there can be sanity.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which they're in conflict, for one (the Protestant work ethic contributes to both imo), but also it's very easy to look at other parts of the world where Christianity is not the dominant cultural paradigm to see that it is indeed possible for society to exist in that state.
The key word there in Protestant work ethic is “Protestant.” I think there are some basic theological ideas embedded in Protestantism that underlie a lot of modernist thought that operate above the specific theological claims of Christianity. But they presume a certain Christian sort of worldview.
Even societies that aren’t dominated by Christianity are dominated by interpretations of the indigenous religious customs that are irrevocably tied to Protestantism, primarily the insistence on doctrine over practice and tradition as well as the insistence on scriptural originalism as the truest representation of a religion’s truth.
These schools of Islam, for example, that we view as backwards and wanting to take society back to the Middle Ages are actually extremely modern schools of jurisprudence. It was only in the late 19th century that Islamic jurisprudence took this hard turn towards strict scripturalism and that was due in part to the Islamic world’s conquest by the British. Even the most commonly attested form of Hinduism among educated English speakers is a school of thought that is most amenable to a sort of Deistic worldview that they absorbed through English medium education.
I brought up the Protestant work ethic to dispute your claim that generic US cultural Christianity is somehow in tension with rampant consumerism. I don't think these things are remotely in conflict and I think much of modern American Protestantism actually synergizes with the rampant consumerism you describe as being in tension with it.
I do think Christianity's position as the dominant cultural hegemony in the most powerful countries right now means it inevitably influences even parts of the world that are not majority Christian, but I think it's farcical to claim that this means Christianity (and specifically Protestantism) is thus necessarily the default cultural hegemony in those other parts of the world. It would be absurd to claim that Christianity is the dominant cultural force in China, for instance, and it would also be absurd to claim Protestantism specifically is that force huge swaths even of the Christian world.
I definitely don't dispute Christianity's pervasive cultural influence. I live in a country where stores have to close on Sundays. But I think responding to that with a rhetorical "what's the alternative?" implies that you believe this state of affairs is necessary and/or unchangeable, and I think that's just wrong.
You’re viewing these as a single basket of goods but I’m talking specifically about a set of beliefs about what the world IS and how it works that comes from Protestantism that has become generalized into the conventional secular worldview and, mostly, remains unexamined. In the same way Protestantism was an outgrowth of Catholicism which was an outgrowth of Roman state religion the worldview of sort of utilitarian physicalism evolves out of that same lineage.
I didn’t say it was unchangeable I said what the change will be unless something big changes in how society is organized and how people view themselves. If the stores don’t close on Sundays that means the store will never close because we will be living in a hyper-capitalist dystopia that doesn’t respect anything as sacred except money. I say, as a non-Christian, that I would largely be more comfortable living under a hegemonic cultural framework of sort of vaguely deistic Christianity in an otherwise secular system than I would living under avowed Atheists in that same system. This has nothing to do with theological beliefs, as theologically I’m much more in line with where soft atheist/agnostics are, but more to do with our ideas about personal values and what is actually compatible with human flourishing.
That's insane -- hard to believe.
You picked a good time to leave, lol. It was right around then that the bottom really dropped out and the majority of the big names in that cultural sphere became regressive anti-feminists if not outright white nationalists. It turns out Christians don't have a monopoly on reactionary regressive politics.
Wow, that's crazy -- I had no idea what had happened in the interim.
Here's one take on it from five years ago:
New Atheism: The godlessness that failed (Scott Alexander)
...
So the claim is that many people don't need atheism anymore, because anti-racism fills that role. I don't think that will be true for the people who are genuinely still struggling with religion, but maybe it's true for a lot of people.
I absolutely would not put much stock in a take that frames anti-racism as more or less a religion and claims it displaced atheism to describe the fall of New Atheism. Especially given that so many prominent New Atheist figures became vocal far-right reactionaries during the early to mid 2010s and remain so to this day. The excerpt you quote here reads like it's from an "anti-woke" screed.
It's true that he's describing "wokism" from an outside point of view, but it's deliberately parallel to how he describes atheism, and he's an atheist. I don't think he said either atheism or anti-racism is a religion. An ideology isn't the same as a religion, though there are some similarities if you go about it in an ideological way.
I simply see no validity in a claim that "wokism" replaced New Atheism when the observable reality was that New Atheism developed into an extremely racist and misogynistic reactionary right-wing movement -- the opposite of the "wokism" he claims replaced it. As @rng pointed out in their earlier comment, some have remained part of this reactionary far right political movement while abandoning atheism itself.
Also... A lot of "woke" people are religious. They didn't leave atheism or New Atheism for wokeness, they were and are religious people with anti-racist principles.
Personally I'm agnostic but briefly found that brand of atheism interesting - but found it immediately misogynistic and really fucking annoying. Like, I was an annoying, smart-ass teenager/young adult and I couldn't handle it. It's really not surprising where the ideology has ended up, because I think it was always defined in opposition.
And when the "Blue Tribe" wasn't on board with them, they pivoted the PR to oppose the Blue Tribe's "new religion" or whatever. But the only one who believes that conservatism began in Jamestown is that author.
Edit: Oh, I've gone down a Scott Alexander rabbit hole and I would not consider his opinions on race and gender to be valid as he does seem to believe in the genetic superiority of white people. He explicitly states his belief that this theory is really "or at best not provably not true" and that calling tech people racist "retards their growth" and that we only got rid of IQ tests because of race (but he means it in a bad way.)
Also women just aren't biologically interested in things like computers and there's no harassment based reason why there are fewer women in the field.
No thanks. ಠ_ʖಠ
Ah yeah I had my suspicions that someone writing about anti-racism like this would have some other bad takes, but I didn't want to bother digging in and looking. Thank you for your service going down that rabbit hole for me.
Racialism getting laundered as Human Biodiversity (HBD) by Stormfront and the like is my new least favorite piece of knowledge. But the more you know™...I guess.
Being able to argue yourself into the position that “We must commit genocide in order to improve the biodiversity of the human race” is honestly a pretty impressive feat of pretzel logic.
oh christ that's bad. guess I know that now.
Sharing is caring? ¯\_ಠ_ಠ_/¯
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Source
...slandering Stormfront? I think we're fine.
Also since it's in print, it would be libel.
I probably shouldn’t be at this point, but I’m often surprised by how often people on Tildes will wildly misread Scott Alexander. They’re very often seeing things that he didn’t actually write and accusing him of believing things that, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t actually believe.
And I have to think that it’s a problem with the writing that people get such different vibes. Maybe it’s the use of hyperbole?
I don’t want to get into it though, because he’s written a lot, I haven’t read everything, and we’d be here all day. Also, I don’t really want to defend it all; I have criticisms too.
But I will warn you not to trust anything people say on Tildes about Scott Alexander that’s based on a brief skim. It’s the blind leading the blind.
I thought it was an okay article, but I regret linking to it, because people have misread him again.
As I have no way of knowing how much or how deeply someone else has read someone's work, I think based on this instruction I should also not trust what you have to say here about Scott Alexander. ;D
People disagreeing with you on someone's work may well be misreading him. But they just as well may understand the text just as well as you but disagree on its quality and implications. I'll freely admit I haven't read his stuff, but at least some of the people on Tildes who criticize his work are people whose readings of other work I have read have generally been trustworthy and well-founded. You're free to disagree, but I think if its so common for people to read his work and come to the same negative conclusions about what he's saying, it's worth considering that either they're right or he's wildly bad at conveying what he actually does mean.
Fwiw I won't claim to be an expert on the man, I absolutely feel similar about him as I do to Jordan Peterson. Though JP has made himself much louder in recent years, I don't feel compelled to read all of his work to identify the concerning things I find in it. And if I go do research on him and find others also identifying concerning things, well, that's concerning.
He's a "walks like a duck, quacks like a duck" for me. It'll take me a lot to believe he's a flamingo instead. I'm always open to evidence to the contrary though.
I haven’t read and don’t remember everything, but I’ve been reading Scott Alexander for maybe a decade, so I think I can beat a brief skim.
Screenshots of Emails from Scott Alexander to Topher Brennan
Perhaps you may not agree with the conclusions I have drawn. But I don't actually see any particularly strong evidence to the contrary. I found other comments of his that I believe support eugenics.
Find him however you like, but my genuine opinion on his remarks is not slander nor libel. I have neither malice nor am I spouting a known falsehood.
Yes, Scott Alexander has enemies and they’ve made certain emails easy to find.
I’m going to delete my comment rather than continuing to misuse legal terms, but the part I really object to is associating Scott Alexander with Stormfront. I don’t actually know much about what Stormfront believes, but I assume they are rather different things. (“Not entirely false” doesn’t mean they believe the same things.)
I think by making vague associations like that, you are at least being pretty reckless about spreading gossip.
Scott Alexander does have an interest in genetics - he’s written about it a fair bit. Regarding eugenics, people like to throw that word around to make their opponents seem like Nazis. I think we should make a distinction between state coercion (things like anti-abortion laws, forced sterilization, China’s one-child policy) and reproductive freedom, which I think should include things like birth control, IVF and pre-natal genetics tests. This is all about giving parents choices, so they don’t have to, say, have a child with Down’s syndrome if they don’t want to.
(Parents of a child with Down’s syndrome will insist that they love their child and it all worked out for the best, and of course we should do whatever we can to help people who already exist, but I don’t think that’s an argument for future parents not getting a choice about it.)
If someone says I agree with Stormfront because I think air is useful for breathing, that would be certainly some questionable comparison and probably some logical fallacy or another.
If someone says I agree with Stormfront for saying I'm on board with a specific racist/eugenic ideology that they espouse, that's another.
I do think that the people with Downs syndrome who voice an opinion should perhaps be given weight here as you dismiss their parents, but regardless I don't want to get into a separate ableism discussion or even a eugenics discussion. It's very off topic and we won't agree.
"HBD" is explicitly a racist ideology. If I talked about genetics I'd probably try to be quite clear that I wasn't on board with that ideology. If I'm doing the complete opposite it's not unreasonable to point that out. If I don't want Stormfront to be my bedfellows, I should probably not agree with them on racist ideologies.
... (From the previously linked wiki article on the Human Biodiversity Institute)
If you don't want Stephen Miller, Richard Spencer, and the like to be your counterparts, don't sign up for their newsletters.
You’re still doing it. Cut it out.
“Human biodiversity” might have a particular meaning, but “some parts” of it does not. We simply don’t know what Scott Alexander’s opinions were at the time, because he didn’t share them, not even in that leaked private email that his enemies like to point to.
And now you’re quoting things he didn’t write as evidence of his opinions. Going from “some (unsuspecified) parts of biodiversity” to “therefore, he believes all the same things that these other people believe” is a leap of logic that only makes sense if you’ve already decided to be suspicious of him.
The reason I’m fairly confident that he’s not into the bad stuff that I imagine Stormfront is into is that he has a lot of libertarian opinions and has discussed them at length, so advocating for state coercion or violence against minorities would be out of character.
Although, fair warning, Steven Sailer does show up occasionally in the comments section. He never posts about anything harmful that I could see, once I started recognizing the name. (He’s boring.) My guess is it’s because Scott has banned him before. And the comments section wouldn’t be evidence of Scott Alexander’s opinions either, although it does show what he puts up with.
No. I'm expressing my thoughts and providing sources.
It is a racist ideology. You don't say "I believe in some parts of white supremacy." and expect no criticism because you might have meant the "good parts." I'm not familiar with any "good parts" of racialism or HBD. Remove the racism and it isn't HBD.
I'm quoting the Wikipedia article on the "far-right" org full of "pseudoscientific race theories" that created the euphemism "HBD" or "human biodiversity". It is not unfair to provide details on that ideology. I only "decided" to be suspicious after reading his words.
Human Biodiversity is one of the bad things Stormfront is into. I'm going to listen to his words on that rather than assume he's misrepresenting himself.
Him permitting far right racists in his comments would actually be further evidence of his tolerance of racism, IMO.
But I cannot say what he believes, only that he's willing to align himself with a racist ideology, and now tolerates a major white supremacist, the person that popularized the term in question, in his comments.
I don't understand defending someone who's perfectly capable of defending himself. If he's addressed these allegations elsewhere since they're public I'm open to reading it. But I'm also not going to disbelieve his private words.
This isn’t really about Scott. He doesn’t have to defend an opinion he didn’t make public. Besides, he’s not on Tildes.
The behavior I object to is that I can’t share a link to an article that I thought was pretty good without someone spreading innuendo that the author is Nazi-adjacent. I’m pretty sure it’s not true and It’s very annoying.
I cannot promise not to look up the person that you post an article from and find him espousing his support of racist ideology. It was relevant to the quotes you posted. I'm not spreading innuendo. He espoused support for an explicitly racist ideology, full stop. If he appears Nazi-adjacent it's because he's standing next to the Nazis.
He doesn't have to defend the opinion, but I see no reason to believe your opinion of him above his own words. I understand you like him. The frustration you feel about him being associated with white supremacist viewpoints is as far as I can tell because he's associated himself with those viewpoints. If you're only mad because it's being pointed out, then idk what to say to that.
People are going to have different opinions than you about various public figures, and they're perfectly entitled to bring them up when you post an article by such a figure. There are lots of situations where people disagreeing with you can feel annoying, but that doesn't make them expressing their opinions about an article you posted or its author objectionable behavior.
I shared two small quotes from a longer article, which has more evidence, if you’re interested. It’s not something I know a lot about and I’m not entirely convinced, but it seems like a plausible argument to me:
There are fewer people writing about New Atheism than before, when it was more popular. So the question is what did people do who stopped writing about it? Maybe some were conservative all along, but it doesn’t sound like it was everyone? Is it unreasonable that some people might have ended up in another popular movement?
It’s a theory. I don’t see why people are dismissive. What have you done to try to answer this question?
If a theory absolutely fails to address what I observed happening as the New Atheism movement decayed into a misogynistic racist alt right reactionary movement and blames the movement's decline on something that is fundamentally ideologically opposed to that, I will dismiss that theory because it does not account for the facts as I see them. I am especially likely to be skeptical of claims that lay the decline of New Atheism at the feet of "wokism" when the author is himself a racist and misogynistic atheist.
I think as Evangelical Christianity lost political salience the urgency of needing to argue about atheism went away too. Political Evangelicals themselves seem to have lost the plot on their own religion and seem largely preoccupied with some sort of culty nationalist civic religion instead. The relationship with God is secondary.
Then the people who would have been drawn to it went off in different directions to inflect that sort of strident dogmatism I associate with the New Atheist movement into whatever other causes they glommed onto instead, be it philanthropy (turning it into effective altruism), or the whole “rationalist” movement and their flirtation with eugenics, or one of the many fractally intricate subfactions of Marxist politics.
Sure, and you could add Black Rights Matter, LGBT activism, and other causes that many young, enthusiastic people are attracted to.
Not having answered the question differently doesn't mean I don't have valid grounds to state why one suggested answer is bad.
I'm not the people above, but essentially that article (or rather, for fairness sake, the excerpts you quoted) imply a development that is counter to my understanding of many of the "leading lights" of the new atheist movement.
Those figures primarily (again, to the extent of my own familiarity) didn't get subsumed into the woke anti-racist crowd but rather in the anti-woke (racist) crowd.
To suggest then that wokeism is the replacement/continuation of the new atheism movement seems ludicrous.
One could easily reframe the second half into the anti-woke movement, making the french revolution or whatever the beginning or liberalism and the opponents be driven by "fanatic egalitarianism and cultural Marxism" (replacing prejudice and such in the quote) or whatever.
I don't think that would be exactly right either, but at least that would be consistent with the actual overlap of major figures from one movement to the other.
I think you’re talking about different people - the most famous or notorious ones versus all the people who were interested in new atheism at the time.
That writer and me?
Maybe. Not sure his point holds up then either, though.
Unless many of these major figures had a quasi-complete replacement of audiences they will have had a number of people join them.
Those alone would serve as a basic counter to the writer versus what this thread initially discussed.
I think a lot of people who were interested in new atheism have moved on? Also, turnover is pretty normal for any movement. Today’s college students weren’t in college before.
It seems pretty plausible that among newcomers, the demographics of who is attracted to atheism might have changed?
I mean, turnover obviously exist but at some point you might be talking Theseus's ship.
I meany this isn't talking about atheism in general, it's talking about new atheism specifically.
If the original ideologues and the original people both went off to other things then other people most likely aren't quite within the same space.
E: Especially of you have reason to believe that the new people do not share the same traits as the original ones, the onus of it being a real continuation would be on actually sharing ideas or whatever with the original.
Yes, when we’re talking about people who can come and go and trends over many years, it often is a “Theseus’s ship” situation. This is true of other social groups too.
I mean, most other references (in this context, both the paper and the upper comments preceding that astral essay) refer to "New Atheism" as a snapshot in time, in particular basing it off certain core personalities.
And then looking from there at the development of these personalities and their followers is essentially the exact opposite.
It is a specific social group and what may have been their motivations, based on multiple positions held.
Vs what is effectively (at least in potential) multiple groups who have had a (partially) shared position during differing points in time.
They have gone a similar route before, just with misogyny.
The problem with trying to build a community around atheism is that it is a shared negation - not a shared set of values or shared interests. That leaves them with the problem of what to talk about and bond over. In the absence of everything else that leads to bonding over what/who they don't like.
While I agree with the misogyny (see Dear Muslima), I have to strongly disagree about your thoughts on community based on negation. Atheism, especially with Scientific Skepticism and Secular Humanism, can absolutely be a community. Lots of non-hateful atheist groups around!
Religion also is a "positive" (i.e. not built on negation) community that, extremely frequently, is significantly worse around feminism and LGBTQ+ right than the New Atheists have ever been.
I don't believe your assertion that the New Atheist were destined to be terrible, they just became terrible.
No sarcasm meant with this question, but what do they talk about? How wrong everyone else is?
I haven't really participated in one of these secular communities myself, but I presume they talk about all the stuff people talk about at church besides religion. They socialize, talk about current events in both their lives and the world. Most interactions at my church growing up, outside of the sermon itself, were like this. Even prayer -- any Christian comedian will have a bit about using group prayer to essentially gossip.
As for replacing any religious aspects to make it more than just a social club, I haven't ever attended one but I can think of some ideas. Maybe they discuss philosophy some -- there's plenty to talk about there without it necessarily being a "this is why everyone else is wrong" fest. Maybe they talk more generally about what they think they should do to improve the world or become better people -- these are things people who aren't religious still often want to do, and discussing with other atheists avoids people trying to push religion on you while you're earnestly seeking purpose. Maybe they organize charity and acts of service for their community. There's really a lot of potential there.
Here's a suggestion to check out one of the big names in the minor leagues of the New Atheist movement who has held to the progressive and humanist ethos with emphasis on biology/evolution, PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog. Bonus if you like spiders.
I haven't read the paper yet, but as an anti-theist scientist that heavily dislikes New Atheism, I have my two cents to share.
I think New Atheism is a kind of modernist reactionarism. It has the old, modernist ways of thinking about the world. It has a point in the sense that modernism was kind of right about certain things. It was right that religious way of looking at the world was epistemologically wrong and encouraged bad ways of thinking, and it was right that religion has a lot to play in unnecessary conflicts. But modernism was wrong in a lot of other aspects. It didn't really critically consider the questions of racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc. In fact, it very, very often amplified these.
Think of all those secular and nationalist movements in 19th-20th century that overcame religious systems, and built new systems based on "science". These provided an improvement in some ways, because they were built on empirical thinking. However, the "science" generally included stuff like eugenics and phrenology. In addition, positivists were strong back then, and they thought everything was explainable by "science". They built this false, historicist narrative about the great struggle between """science""" and religion. It was basically a grand narrative that claimed to explain the entirety of human history. Everything was reducible to a struggle between enlightened skeptic seculars and ignorant, religious reactionaries. It claimed to explain the "progress" of humanity.
This was, of course, wrong. Furthermore, what they called "science" was often bullshit, conservative, and even fascistic ideologies. Among other things this ideology enabled and fed colonialism, because the "primitives" were obviously not enlightened like the modernists. Therefore, it was ok to "push them toward progress". This, of course, meant dehumanizing and exploiting them.
I think New Atheism is very similar in this regard. It blames almost every bad thing on religion; it follows the same grand narrative about society; it doesn't consider the conservative, reactionary, and fascistic elements in secular ideologies; it perverts science into something it's not—a mouthpiece for conservative backlash. At times it even defends positivist arguments (e.g. Sam Harris).
I think it just doesn't go far enough. Despite all its claims about being superior, courageous, etc, New Atheism is very conservative and timid. It doesn't encourage people to examine their own ideological limitations, it doesn't push people toward facing their own shitty and unjust ideas. Instead of critical thinking, it encourages conservative ignorance in these issues. And wailing on less privileged groups, like women and minorities, is not courageous—it's the opposite.
I think it’s a bit much to say this is just false. It’s diminishing a real conflict. It really was illegal to teach evolution in schools in some states. The Scopes trial did happen. There are still young-earth creationists.
Here’s an article from 2021:
Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans:
And apparently there are still over a hundred million Americans who aren’t entirely on board:
A plurality of Americans believe God created humans without evolution (Washington Post)
It’s not fashionable anymore, but this was a noisy conflict that’s been active since the 19th century and is still not over in the US.
I think there's a bit of misunderstanding. Oppression and obstruction of science by religion are real and still exist. It's a very serious issue a lot of religious people and western liberals downplay in order to wave off criticism of religion. I think they want to ignore the conflict between science and religion. I seriously disagree with that, and it's one of the reasons I'm anti-theist.
However, history is not reducible to a battle between science and religion, and certainly not "science" and religion. The positivist narrative I mentioned does this, and tries to explain away a great deal of different and complicated conflicts.
Perhaps an example is the framing of Galileo's persecution by the Church? While the Copernican model was a "problem" as far as some elements of the Church went, he had the backing of the Pope (and the Jesuits) until he basically wrote a defense that the Pope thought was a personal attack. So he lost his biggest ally and then, despite arguing for heliocentrism went to Church court and said "I never did that, nope not me" and was sentenced to house arrest.
I'm not arguing this was a good situation but that it was far more about the politics than it was about the science. The Pope was being convinced of enemies in his midst and Galileo was portrayed as one of those. There would have been very little difference in this case had it occurred with a secular ruler who felt they were being undermined IMO.
But the common framing of Galileo is Religion vs Science and part of this larger narrative.
That's an interesting example, but for modern stuff, I generally mean more like colonialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, queerphobia, xenophobia, capitalism, etc. Religion often plays a role in these, but even then none of these are reducible to just religion. They also do happen without religious motivation too.
The narrative I mentioned tries to reduce these to a conflict between enlightened seculars and religious reactionaries. That's how it constructs a narrative of "progress" for humanity.
That's fair, I went historical since it's so widely known.
But I do agree that reducing any of the above to religion vs secularism is ignoring so much actual history.
That’s not really “science” vs. “religion” though that’s more like “a specific mythic literalist fundamentalist movement.” Plenty of religious people also think Young Earth Creationists are stupid and/or heretical.
Yes, but that’s true of a lot of religious disputes. People aren’t going to defend all religion, they’re going to defend their own religion - beliefs they actually have. Normally, people aren’t going to defend someone else’s religious beliefs. As you say, they think they’re heretical.
There are sometimes coalitions though, and historically, a widespread consensus that religious tolerance is a good thing has put a stop to hundreds of years of religious wars.
Also, historically, one of the things many religions could agree on is that atheists are bad. I guess that’s changed, though? Also, opposing evolution is no longer something you can build a broad political coalition around, in the US, anyway.
It really depends on the religion whether they thought atheism was bad or not. Ancient Romans (maybe Greeks as well, but they were less unified) as a rule didn't care what you believed. Orthodoxy was unnecessary, orthopraxy was required. Jews and early Christians were perceived as basically atheist by the Romans for only worshiping one god rather than merging all of them into their system.
But Buddhism and Hinduism both have non-theistic/atheistic schools of thought. Jainism is entirely atheistic I believe. Although I'm not any of those faiths and so I may misunderstand nuances.
It's rarely so black and white - religious or not/theistic or not. Deism and panentheism are much fuzzier on that a/theistic divide. If there was a god that made us, but then walked off, does it really vary much from atheism?
Jainism isn’t atheistic so much as indifferent. Jains believe Gods exist, but they’re secondary and subject to the fundamental laws of the universe rather than above them. (Hindus also believe this but the fundamental laws are rolled up into Brahman and the arguments are whether Brahman does or does not have attributes and whether Brahman IS the substance of universe or separate from it.)
For most non-monotheistic religions historically there were many different types of divinities of varying levels of influence or power.
Also the lines between these different religions in premodern times were mostly theoretical. Nobody but monks and priests were strictly identified as one or the other. Most people in society would tend to blend the different belief systems that made sense to them.
Got it, I figured what I was reading was likely fairly simplistic! Much appreciated. And yeah the blending is definitely a pattern from any place/time where faiths overlapped. It's all cut and dry until you actually look at it.
Even today! I meet a lot of people who call themselves Christian and talk about past lives and karma. I have to fight the urge to push my glasses up and “Well ackshually theologically speaking. . .”
Haha yes I've had my share of those moments, especially as a former Catholic. Like "well no so here's what the actual dogma is... whether that's what everyone does, at the least the dogma is consistent there."
Yes, you’re right, there’s a lot of diversity. As I understand it, Romans did have a state religion, but it was more about making the right sacrifices to their gods as well as your own. They expected cities to have their own gods. So, while religious tolerance wasn’t really invented yet, it was sorta built-in. This was somewhat empirical - they did things because they thought it worked for them, much like a city might send gifts to a stronger neighbor to keep them happy. Their sacrifices seemed to be working pretty well in getting the gods on their side and they were pretty proud of their piety. But if someone else did something that seemed to work, why not let them sacrifice to that god, too?
Christianity was… not that. Things changed pretty drastically when the empire became Christian and it became a state religion. After that there were bitter disputes about what you believed rather than what you did, to a ridiculous extent. (It’s thought that these were proxies for power struggles based on other things, but theology was the excuse.)
This claim to be a universal religion is with us to this day in other ways. Most obviously, Islam is also a monotheistic, universal religion, but also in other things we think should be universal, like ethics, sometimes. And maybe the underlying assumption that despite obvious diversity, things can be universal inspired some investigations into universal scientific laws?
But when we’re talking about the US in the nineteenth and twentieth century, this is mostly disputes among Christians, so it’s just assumed that what you believe is really important, often tempered by the truce of religious tolerance, but still resulting in thousands of independent churches because people don’t quite agree about what to believe.
Claims about supposedly universal beliefs and practices often lead to conflict, because this is saying everyone needs to think the same way, or they’re just wrong. And, certainly, militant atheists believe that everyone would benefit from being an atheist, too, so while it’s an ideology, not a religion, there is perhaps some influence.
Maybe a belief in diversity can temper this a bit, though? You can just look around and see all the differences, and decide that maybe it’s not a problem?
There are also obvious benefits to standardization, though. It might not always result in a universal standard because there are going to be holdouts, but it can create a lot of uniformity in certain ways.
Very little is known of Muhammad’s early life but one of the prevailing theories is that he came from a tribe of Arab Christians that had been extremely isolated from the broader Christian world since the very earliest days of the religion and evolved in its own extremely idiosyncratic direction. For most of the Byzantine Empires early days Islam was regarded as a weird, culty Christian heresy sort of like we would view the Branch Davidians.
You’re still operating on this model that separates “religions” from other baskets of beliefs and worldviews that people have, but I’m arguing that this model is itself flawed. I don’t view worldviews that stem from a belief in God as being different from any other worldviews. The secular assumption that as soon as you mention God it goes in a special box is analogous to the Christian assumption that if you’re not on board with the Gospel then you go in the “pagan” box.
It’s a model that specifically arose in Europe in reaction to the wars between Catholics and Protestants as a result of the Church having a firmly enforced doctrine and a near monopoly on scholastics. That “hundreds of years of religious wars” was largely a Christendom thing. Most of the rest of the world had their wars about competing ideas about how states should be structured because they didn’t have the separation between state and ecclesiastical bureaucracies with administrative authority over different areas of life. The head of state WAS the head of church, like what England developed into after Henry VIII.
But in most other traditions there never was any philosophical tension between these disciplines, they were all viewed as various kinds of investigation into the nature of the universe.
Atheism is a religious belief so when you say this you’re just saying the thing religions agree on is that another religion is bad. The idea of the world being divided into physical/scientific and religious spheres is an idea rooted in Christian theology.
Yes, I said "many religions" but I was thinking of the US, rather than other countries where things are different. in the US, atheism is (or at least was) sufficiently unpopular that most politicians aren't going to openly admit that they're atheists. Presidents would make a big deal out of going to church. Negative political talk about atheists used to be common. It was used as a boilerplate reason why "godless Communism" was bad.
That's a lagging indicator, though. In most situations today, at least in the places I'm familiar with, it doesn't matter.
I think this feeling of persecution, rhetorically if not often actively, gave atheism as a movement more political energy than it has now.
You will definitely like the paper once you get a chance to read it, bc this is very much what he's describing as "scientism" wrt New Atheism (though he focuses on its rejection of non-scientific disciplines like philosophy rather than the perceived science vs. religion conflict). Based on this comment I think you and the author would get along very well.
I wrote an essay before on how skeptical movements, especially new atheism, become reactionary [1]. Skepticism is inherently a reactionary process: it is a negative project focused on attacking positive projects.
[1] https://tildes.net/~humanities/1bko/right_wing_skeptics_and_the_new_new_atheism
There's a decent essay here that unpicks how New Atheism minus philosophy loses the ability to go from "is" to "ought". The example chosen, eugenics, starts from an apparently empirically derived Darwinian good, optimizing humanity for some "fitness" goals, and gets to the ethically abhorrent in a hurry.
Regardless of whether various superiority claims concerning gender, race, beliefs, etc. can be proven, we need philosophy to keep science honest about the values and ethics of various courses of action.