Inspired by some of the discussion in this thread. I don’t think it’s appropriate place for that discussion there, but hey why not have a separate thread for it
If I think religion is not good in general, am I Reddit and cringe and basically Richard Dawkins?
Reddit atheism is white nationalism under the pretense of philosophy. Famous examples are Asmongold going on a rant about inferior cultures. Richard Dawkins recently said he is a cultural Christian and there is no genocide in Gaza.
What they meant was “we hate brown people” but they wrap it in a few layers of pretend.
It is largely a consequence of liberalism and the focus of trying to prove the white man is scientifically superior by figures such as Darwin.
Here is a large video addressing it https://youtu.be/xPgTeq8d8tg?t=31m25s
This is correct, reddit atheism is basically just islamophobia / western supremacy dressed in an atheist garb.
It’s basis comes from the 90s-2000s US imperialist wars on Iraq and the Middle East, and defenses of western imperialism from an anti-religious standpoint:
Hidden beneath a superficial rationalism, they provide a seemingly intellectual defense of imperialism, push islamophobia, and use it to create a smokescreen for the injustices of global capitalism. 2,3
I used to think so too but the actual past was far earlier than 90’s imperialism. It was at the core of the ‘enlightenment’.
Darwin was notoriously obsessed with proving the white man (not woman) was the ultimate specimen.
The video I linked covers quite a lot more history, I timestamped the colonial era but even figures such as Hegel which inspired Marx had some pretty edgy ideas about religion and race. That is discussed in a segment before it.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“Reddit” Atheism is when you’re stuck dunking on young earth creationists (who deserve it but are extremely low hanging fruit) while also being islamophobic.
I was raised YEC so reddit atheism was good for me to an extent, but then I had to shed the islamophobia. fortunately I also came down on the right side of “Atheism+” schism, which deserves its own writeup but I’m not doing that.
I feel confident saying I know, as a fact, that the Abrahamic god does not exist. That said, I don’t know how or why the universe exists. Life & consciousness seem to be phenomena which arise naturally out of laws of physics so I have no reason to believe in survival of the self beyond the physical body. It is literally true that we are “the universe experiencing itself” and not something separate from it. That idea is a form of monism which has a rich tradition in eastern religion, and even Marxism!
There are even forms of the idea of reincarnation which I find somewhat compatible with a materialist, monist view of the world. This is a powerful essay on the subject.
My atheism is just “I don’t care”
That is how far it goes.
Sincerely, unironically, I love that for you.
religion had a big impact on my life without my consent so I have strong feelings about it. fortunately it doesn’t come up much so I can also just vibe and not care most of the time.
I think it’s just that Reddit atheists are annoying and thinking too hard about the philosophy and whatnot just doesn’t make sense to me.
that’s totally reasonable. thinking about philosophy helped me grow a lot as a person as I unlearned YEC and learned the true history of the world so it’s stuck with me
I feel confident saying I know, as a fact, that the Abrahamic god does not exist.
There are few horror stories that could match how horrifying it would be if the vengeful bloodthirsty storm god of ancient times really was the creator of the universe.
I just can’t see anything that does. A possibility of eternal torture is pants shittingly horrifying even if the criteria to avoid it is clear cut.
Some of the rules, while mostly clear, are very petty and arbitrary, like mixing fabrics.
Hell some say based on which rules you break you get your own unique flavor of torture.
Yeah if you mix your fibres, you have to wear nylon+polyester blend underwear for eternity. And yeah hell is warm, so that lack of breathability and bacterial growth is gonna suck.
What kinda twisted torture is that
Hell jigoku hell has like 64,000 or so hells with unique tortures to them.
The time dilation parts of jogoku hell sound especially horrid.
deleted by creator
thank you. I don’t feel attacked.
it’s not based on faith it’s based on history. Worship of the Abrahamic god was also associated with polytheistic religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanite_religion. many times in the old testament a prophet chastises isrealites for worshipping other gods of the pantheon, like Ba’al or Asherah. First of the 10 commandments is “thou shalt have no other god before me” and there are a few times in the early stories that god refers to itself in the plural, or is clearly stated to not be all powerful. this is quite different from how we understand God today, how can we determine which view is correct?
There’s also the character of God which is nationalist, racist, abusive, murderous, extremely controlling, qualities that are far more consistent with being invented by a culture which had those same qualities than being the omnipotent creator of the entire cosmos.
Are all the gods of the Canaanite pantheon real or just this one? What about other pantheons? Can we assume he’s more likely to be real simply because a large number of people believe it? That’s not a good way of determining what is true. if an idea cannot be tested directly the next best thing is to trace its provenance.
my point here is that there’s nothing special about “God” any moreso than the deities of other cultures, yet Yahweh gets special treatment but has no more evidence for basis in material reality than Athena, Ganesha, or Nap Anya. I also feel confident saying Loki doesn’t exist and I doubt many would call that out as a belief based on faith.
Reddit atheism was called out at the time for being a veil for Western (and even Christian) chauvinism. It was mainly used as a justification of imperialist wars on Muslim countries.
This critique has born out, as Reddit atheist types (Dawkins, Elon) have since self identified themselves as Christian Chauvinists.
There’s a lot of answers here, but I think this is the most useful.
There’s lots of different ways to be atheist, but Reddit Atheism is a specifically Christian phenomenon; (typically) people who were raised in Protestant Christian culture, and stopped believing in God without really examining any of the other beliefs and underlying assumptions that came with it.
Being ex-religious in general seems to have some association with being especially toxic about religion. The most stereotypical New Atheist in this thread is declared to be ex-Muslim, for example.
and it’s never from any sort of principled stance or understanding of Islam, it’s just because for the last twenty years Muslims have been a socially accepted punching-bag in the english-speaking world.
Reddit atheism was just thinly veiled islamophobia. Everyone showed their ass after 9/11
To dissent from most people, I don’t see any real separation between the two, or more accurately, I don’t see a real separation between Reddit atheism and Western atheism, as in atheism as understood and adopted by Westerners. This becomes very obvious when you talk to and observe Chinese atheists. Pretty much the only thing your average Chinese atheist and your average Western atheist have in common is that they don’t believe in any gods. That’s pretty much it.
But your average Chinese atheist believes in the concept of luck on par with any religious belief. The concept of auspicious days or finding some fortune teller that will give their newborn a name that brings good fortune or diving into numerology isn’t something that Western atheists would do. Feng shui, which many Chinese people believe on some level, boils down to how much luck you could generate by optimizing the arrangement of your home and the location of your building (funny aside, there was some Taiwanese politician who apparently bought some house and did everything he could to maximize the amount of luck it would bring to him through feng shui except he didn’t even live in the fucking house. And it wasn’t an empty house either. It was filled with like statues and other random shit that apparently brings good luck.)
Would your average Western atheist even consider them atheist? I honestly don’t think so because there’s a lot of additional beliefs baked into Western atheism just like there’s additional beliefs baked into Eastern atheism. Western atheism espouses a materialist reality, the disbelief in an afterlife or a soul, an empiricist/skeptic view of the world, confidence in science as the best methodology to understand reality, confidence that there’s almost nothing conceptually out of reach of the human intellect, a strict separation between religious belief and religious practice, and centering religious belief over religious practice. None of these have anything to do with the belief or disbelief in a god.
This comment isn’t incorrect, but the context that you’re speaking of is a bit categorically different than what OP’s question seems to be getting at.
What I mean by this is that the difference between so-called “Reddit atheism” and “regular old atheism” is being observed here less as how both group’s views as atheists differs from Eastern atheism and more as a sociopolitical difference instead, with the former being seen as far more reactionary, smug, and what people would even call a more “militant” form of atheism, depending on how you use that word. The latter, on the other hand, may refer to “I really just don’t give a shit” kind of atheism or, seeing as how we are on Hexbear, atheism applied to leftist, more specifically Marxist and materialist, schools of thought.
To give a goofy analogy, I find that this would be like a person asking, “What’s the difference between vegetarianism and veganism?” and someone responding, “I don’t see a real separation between those two because if you compare it to something like fruitarianism [a fringe diet only consisting of fruit], both vegetarians and vegans still allow for the consumption of things that aren’t fruit, so there’s no real difference between the two.”
I suppose the point of my comment was to say that when people here say “atheism,” they don’t just mean “disbelief in gods,” and that a lot of the extra stuff is related to Western epistemology in general. I didn’t even go over various Indigenous belief systems, which could be seen or is at least compatible with atheism-as-in-disbelief-in-gods-and-disbelief-in-gods-only that is dissimilar to Western or Eastern atheism. A lot of their so-called deities aren’t actually deities as understood by Western religion but purposeful mistranslations by Christian missionaries who tried to shove their creation myths and cosmology into a Christian hole. When some Indigenous elder say something like “Creation gives us mouths to speak the truth” and characterizes Creation-with-a-capital-C as a self-directed process instead of a Creator god, is his religious and spiritual beliefs compatible with atheism-as-in-disbelief-in-gods-and-disbelief-in-gods-only?
It’s like how when people here say “philosophy,” they’re not actually talking about the entire sum of philosophy that encompasses very different philosophical traditions like Chinese philosophy or Islamic philosophy but more specifically Western philosophy or even more specifically, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Western philosophy because no one has time to deal with Christian apologia by some French bishop from the 10th century. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that on one hand, you have people who think atheism fits in a particular Western box and on the other hand, you have Western chauvinists who think Muslims are savages who must be civilized by their Western superiors.
While I agree with the other posters on here that “Reddit atheism” has become synonymous with a brand of cantankerous old white guy western chauvinism with godless characteristics, I take issue with the definitions that stop at “smug assholes about it” because that definition frequently gets wielded against users on this site, including in the linked thread.
Guys, gals, and enbies, I don’t know if you’ve read some of the things the rest of the fediverse has to say about us but we are frequently accused of being smug assholes because we refuse to mince words or follow liberal rules of politeness when calling out bad shit, and it shouldn’t be controversial here to acknowledge that religious institutions generally are responsible for some bad shit and apply the standard Hexbear irreverence.
I agree there’s a time and a place and said time and place is when the religion is a culturally dominant force enabling oppression as is absolutely the case with Islam and less so when it’s a cultural identity of a group fighting extermination, as with the Muslim Palestinians and the Rohingya, for that matter. I think certain users have trouble navigating that distinction but I’m not interested in going to the mat about it so I’m not calling anyone out specifically. Y’all can figure it out, look for the
Personally I take issue with fedoralords who were raised Christian constantly spewing hate about Muslims while having suspiciously Christian reactionary takes on everything.
when the religion is a culturally dominant force enabling oppression
Ok…we can all think of a few examples…
as is absolutely the case with Islam
Hmm…a Christian country and a Jewish ethnostate are committing Genocide against a Muslim populace, but yeah Islam is a good example of cultural domination and oppression.
Have there ever been any Muslim societies that weren’t super oppressive as a result? What happened to them?
“Reddit Atheism” is a type of “crusader atheism” (I’m pulling this term out of my ass). When atheism takes on the form of a “civilizational” project, that we, the enlightened, must impose on them, the backward superstitious hordes. As a social mechanism it isn’t much different from how Christianity was used as a justification to bulldoze indigenous cultures, to justify colonialism as a righteous project to “save” the nonbelievers.
White man’s
burdenatheism.I think this touches nicely on the inherently chauvinistic/eurocentric view of reddit atheists, who will excuse their chauvinism through the very thin veil of “progress is when all societies are western, and the more western you are, the more progressed the society is”.
First sub to ban me, my offense: saying we should take anti-atheiests at their word and get them before they get us.
BI (before internet) being an atheist meant being in complete ideological isolation. If you tried to discuss it with anyone you would be ridiculed and sometimes even physically threatened. Theists had complete domination. Atheist = devil worshiper/commie. These people developed a persecution complex that dates back at least to Giordana Bruno but probably much earlier. The first real online social networks were newsgroups which were almost entirely academic and darpa techie nerds. I got my first internet uni account around 1997 and gnu atheist rationalists were already controlling the online (newsgroup) narrative by then. For the first time in history they had an advantage and they kinda went mad with power. Reddit and other early social forums were just the graphical web extension of newsgroups.
Iirc there were some obscure social networks BI like Center for Inquiry and James Randii foundation and they quickly took control of the atheist/rationalist online narrative. People like Michael Shermer, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins etc. As a 90’s kid I was initially excited because I thought I found my people but I was also becoming a baby leftist and I noticed the far right influence. I believe the right/left split was already there ( Feynman/Randii vs Carl Sagan/Steven Gould) but there was a sense that control of the internet was at stake. A massive war for control raged during the naughts (some really funny shit happened lol) and finally came to a head around 2012 with ElevatorGate. The scorched earth take no prisoners nature of ElevatorGate pretty much destroyed whatever was left of the internet atheist power structure.
If you tried to discuss it with anyone you would be ridiculed and sometimes even physically threatened.
I don’t know if this is true. You can read plenty of early/mid 20th century books where characters will outright talk about how they don’t believe in a god. Sure certain areas you could get away with it more, but I think there has always been some prevailing strain of people just going along with the community aspect and not being a believer.
finally came to a head around 2012 with ElevatorGate. The scorched earth take no prisoners nature of ElevatorGate pretty much destroyed whatever was left of the internet atheist power structure.
fucking what is elevator gate
fucking what is elevator gate
“Sex positive” sex pestery among thirsty New Atheist convention goers, and a feeemale daring to state she felt uncomfortable being propositioned in a closed elevator at 4am far from home, lead to Dawkins’ notorious “Dear Muslima” letter.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate
I dare to suspect that the Youtube atheist fad of “debunking” creationists shifted gears to being really mad at feeemales and stayed there, only expanding the rage to SJWs/wokeness/DEI
after that moment.yikes
dare to suspect that the Youtube atheist fad of “debunking” creationists shifted gears to being really mad at feeemales and stayed there, only expanding the rage to SJWs/wokeness/DEI after that moment.
You’d suspect correctly. There was some base misogyny there to build on, see TheAmazingAtheist and the disgusting things he said about SA including to an actual SA victim.
I don’t want to repeat that vile piece of shit’s words, but I do remember them clearly.
Amazing atheist and several other atheists did wonders for the proliferation of garbage reactionary content on youtube
Wö-men. Men of wö.
Men of wö.
“Men of woe”
Insert boomer wife hatred jokes here
Avoid going down the elevatorgate rabbit hole if you value your sanity. The same people involved in elevatorgate started GamerGate.
I hear that thunderfoot (don’t look that up) broke his brain on Brexit and Covid so now he’s back on center-left but likely still a misogynist. Dawkins, Ham Sarris, Shermer, Jillete et al. just got old and feeble or outright ded like Randii and Dennett. They only pop in now and then to say something like “more jews won nobel prizes than muslims so we should exterminate all muslims” which they’ve been doing since GWOT
there were just a few good ones, like AronRa.
i understand everything now
The key difference is that there’s a certain type of atheist that is essentially Christian in every sense aside from actually believing in God. They tend to have a lot of racist ideas about any religion that isn’t Christianity and criticize them far more harshly than Christianity. I think these people are worse than your average religious person, and I would most accurately describe myself as a staunch anti-theist.
It’s interesting to read manifestos and stuff from the French Revolution; people like the Jacobins were fighting as much against the Church as the aristocracy.
Christianity has historically been a way of extracting rent for the church, and atheism therefore has been associated with left-wing movements that wanted to strangle kings with the entrails of priests and whatnot.
strangle kings with the entrails of priests
To me, “reddit atheism” is basically just another name for what was once called the “new-atheist” movement. The problem with that movement was that it was a rejection of religion, but not specifically of religion’s reactionary aspects.
Several of the figureheads of new-atheism would go on to become “cultural christians” and bullshit like that, because for too damn many of them, their only real issue with religion was that they thought religious people were annoying and stupid, and the rest was just dressing up their contempt as something more.
The new-atheist movement also served as a way for people with liberal / left affectations to mask their complete internalization of Bush-era war-on-terror rhetoric and islamophobia as a principled opposition to religion rather than bigotry and chauvinism.
smugness, islamophobia, these are the distasteful traits that gave reddit atheism its bad rep.
If you don’t do the dew them it’s not real reddit atheism, just being a sparkling gentleman
Only the strongest potions for the strongest of New Atheists going into battle, armed with only their logic and reason:
Reddit Atheism: I don’t believe in God/Religion and anybody that does is stupid and smells bad.
Atheism: I don’t have any particular need to find a God(s) or Religion to make my life feel meaningful.
I wouldn’t say religious people are stupid (or smelly) but I wouldn’t say that I think it’s a purely personal belief either. I want to push back against a view that the only kind of non-Reddit atheism is a wholesome “Well shucks, I don’t believe in god personally but religious people are all heckin valid.” I don’t think religion is a good thing. If I did I’d be religious!
Reddit Atheism: I don’t believe in God/Religion and anybody that does is stupid and smells bad.
Well, when I was going down the path of the New Atheist back in the early 00’s, this was both how I felt and the vibe that I got from all the online forums and videos I was watching. There was either a “aww, the poor stupid person might figure it out one day” or “these people are too stupid/evil to live” undertone to almost all discussions about religion/religious/belief in god(s) or when interacting with theists in forums. And I never messed around in the Reddit atheism stuff back then.
Started feeling a bit shitty about things when the IDW crowd started to feel more comfortable and go mask off about the misogyny and racism. I didn’t recant my atheism after this, I just realized that its not a personal identity marker and is literally just a word to describe my answer to a question.
I don’t think religion is a good thing either, but I also don’t think its a bad thing. Its just a thing. It happens, it exists. Nobody can know everything about everything before needing to make a decision about stuff. So, for some people, elevating some human thoughts or behaviors into a religion helps them get through life.
I try to make the distinction between religion in general, and belief in the supernatural affecting the universe. The former, as a collection of philosophies, traditions and cultural practices, is worth preserving. The latter in my opinion is a brain worm that leads to wrong thinking.
Reddit atheism requires you to be a smug asshole about it.
But doctor I am a smug asshole
This says a lot about theism
