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chat @hexbear.net RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

Western New-Atheism disgusts me.

(I have amended the title of this post based on feedback and critique, to more acutely reflect the target of my grievance)

This could be a bad take, but, hear me out.

I was once a subscriber to r/atheism a long time ago. I was absolutely a smug ass fucking atheist. I'm not sure what it was that caused this world view I held to change, but as time marched on I've grown incredibly suspect of anyone who willingly identifies themselves as an "atheist".

I grew up going to church every week. That slowed as I got older. I remember my grandmother telling me I needed to cut my hair at church, and telling her "I have hair like Jesus, you think Jesus should cut his hair?" I learned later we stopped going to church because they started preaching about antiabortion and my mother wanted nothing to do with that.

So I was at least fairly indifferent about religion by the time I was in highschool. I remember Atheism giving me a sense of superiority that was deeply rooted in "facts and logic" despite being a severely under read dipshit in highschool. I'm sure I spent countless amounts of time debating people in comments, being a general idiot on the internet. Probably passively consumed a bunch of Hitchens work/ideas without having read any of his books.

At some point I stopped putting a lot of thought into it, and this smug sensibility was pushed into the back of my brain. Then in 2020, like a lot of people, I was swept up in this rise in socialist thinking, leading me to change my entire perspective on the world.

I think it wasn't until recently, when I was having a conversation with someone I knew and the topic of Islam came up that I realized how much I had distances myself from this smug atheist perspective. They said something about Islam being an "inherently violent religion", and my gut, instinctual reaction was to blurt out "What? What makes you think that's true?" They responded with something being in the Quran, and again, like water from a faucet the words "Listen, maybe that's true, maybe its not, but Islamic people are not a monolith." poured out of me and the conversation kind of died on the vine.

The reason I'm even thinking about this today is because, of all things, I watched the Asmongold "apology" video he published today. He attributes his shit ass takes about Palestinians being an inferior culture and thus worthy of genocide to his "hatred for religious extremism of all kinds". He goes on to say that he was or is a "r/atheist enjoyer" and a self professed "atheist". It really confirmed a lot of assumptions I have about atheism that I guess have been lingering in my skull.

Those assumptions being that Atheism is, on it's face, a religion in and of itself. It's belief is in that of non-belief. It has missionaries like most other religious belief systems, seeking to secularize communities and cultures. It believes it is the one true religion and that all other religions are false religions with false gods. It demonizes all other practitioners of these false religions indiscriminately, believing that they are either upholding their wicked systems of oppression, or are directly complicit in them. Countless books have been written about the its theology and the logic of its faith. It is a fully fledged faith, in that you have to believe in this non-belief, on faith that you will be proven correct when you die.

Not only all this but its clear to me now that Atheism is the western liberal religious belief system. Its fully compatible with western chauvinism, as it demonizes the wests enemies on the grounds of their systems of belief, which are regularly the reason for the wests interventions. Western wars are "secular" wars and as such they are atheist colonial projects as well. The idea that modernizing a backwards 3rd world country would bring about liberal democracy and with it liberal values. Atheism is liberal values.

Now this isn't to say that religious violence doesn't exist or that religious extremism is also a fable, but instead that Atheism and its ideas are a form of religious persecution, it breeds the same phobic believes that other religions develop about the ones they are attempting to conquer. The Atheist believes that through the abolition of religion, via changing hearts and minds, a entire form of violence will be removed as well. It completely denies the material realities and conditions that cause religious extremism to begin with. Because of this, it doesn't recognize that to achieve a secular world, it will only be done so through violence.

Somehow the atheist believes that religion and culture are all somehow disconnected and isolated phenomenon. That somehow you can remove religion from the equation without damaging or altering culture. That some how this secularization will happen quietly and without conflict.

When I'm asked if I'm religious I say no. if asked if I'm an atheist, I say no. The only thing I would identify as in this context is as a materialist. It matters not to me what lays beyond the vale of life, but what does matter to me is what is happening here and now. Pain and suffering exists here in this conscious reality. Happiness can be achieved here in this conscious reality. That happiness can include religious and spiritual belief.

I have no conclusions here. This is just the ramblings of an old wizard. If I'm off base here please tell me. Interested in your perspectives as always comrades.

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49 comments

  • You're mad about settler colonialism and patriarchy, and rightfully so. Reddit atheism is one of the many faces of the white patriarchy and a particularly annoying one. It does not represent the vast majority of atheists who mostly just say "oh yeah I don't do that stuff" and live the rest of their lives as normal.

  • You basically just told my life story. I was one of those capital 'A' Atheists, made it part of my identity, for lack of an ideology. I was an obnoxious little shit. I read Dawkins and Hitchens. Religion was my enemy. Then I went to Japan, and visited Shinto and Buddhist shrines and temples, studied Islamic history and architecture in college. I learned to see great beauty in these cultures and religions, that religion wasn't inherently evil. When I found communism, I understood what my true enemy was. I still lack any faith in a god or follow any specific religion, but I do not like the atheist label any more. While I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist, I have found great passion in learning about it and incorporating aspects of it into my life. As the situation in Palestine has progressed, I have found myself having a lot of respect for Islam as I have been exposed to and learning about the resistance. On the day Lebanon was invaded, I found myself listening to a prayer that someone posted in the news thread, it brought me great comfort, and moved me to tears. I don't think I'm an atheist any longer, or rather feel completely alienated by that new-atheist community. It's frustrating, my new-atheist family member who was instrumental in forming my early beliefs, who taught me to "question everything" has stuck with it all these years, and has become quite reactionary and complains about woke and cheers on US imperialsm. emilie-shrug

    I would burn my Dawkins and Hitchens if I didn't think burning books was a crime. I keep them, they were an important part of my past, they started me questioning our society and beliefs, but they will gather dust. Those 2 creeps sicken me now, and I don't know how I ever swallowed so much of their crap for so long.

  • Those assumptions being that Atheism is, on it's face, a religion in and of itself. It's belief is in that of non-belief. It has missionaries like most other religious belief systems, seeking to secularize communities and cultures. It believes it is the one true religion and that all other religions are false religions with false gods. It demonizes all other practitioners of these false religions indiscriminately, believing that they are either upholding their wicked systems of oppression, or are directly complicit in them. Countless books have been written about the its theology and the logic of its faith. [and they're universally poorly reasoned sophistry -ed]. It is a fully fledged faith, in that you have to believe in this non-belief, on faith that you will be proven correct when you die.

    Bad take imo. Atheism isn't a religion; unbelief is not a belief, and this tired chestnut that "Atheism requires just as much faith as a belief system that posits a supernatural omnipotent creator, physics-defying miracles, and an afterlife for which there is neither plausible physical justification nor any hard evidence" has its source in Christian apologetics.

    Atheism does have one element in common with religion, and that is that it is an identity, one that often immediately cuts you off from participation in your local community, which still revolves around the church in a lot of the world. And choosing to take on that identity knowing you might end up a local pariah can be more appealing to the already privileged or the socially incorrigible, among which groups I think we find most of movement atheism's bad actors.

    Ideally we live in a world where atheism is unremarkable because it's the default. I used to be a live-and-let-live religious pluralist but I'm now more convinced by Engels' argument that atheism is a precondition to communism because you can't dismantle hierarchies when a bunch of people believe in a unaccountable ruler who only issues judgments after death and whose laws are so up for interpretation people have fought wars over theological disagreements. Yeah, you can be religious and keep it to yourself but it's still a gateway to bad thinking and social factionalism.

  • The growing religious sentiment in the US really concerns me, I wish we had an atheist movement that was actually good.

  • I will always call myself an atheist, even if new atheists suck a shit ton.

    I'm an atheist, an antitheist even, as a black Marxist and a materialist, not an atheist as a white, American/British chud who thinks that transphobia and Zionism are an extension of my bubble of "rational" thoughts I've conjured up using FACTS and LOGIC.

    In essence, I agree with a ton of what you said, and I'm glad comrades were able to get you to realize that generalizing atheists because of terminally online Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens fans on Reddit is a bit myopic.

  • I think you just have a problem with new atheists. If I remember things correctly, the original meaning of the prefix of "new" came from not being socialist and left-wing, but still being atheists. Since, traditionally atheism was associated with the left-wing (e.g. godless communists, godless socialists, etc.).

    I do identify as an atheist, but always found myself hating the reddit/new atheists very highly. Obviously due to Islamophobia, but also because I had a lot of experience with what in my opinion were "good Christians" even if I still didn't believe in God. The most devout people I knew were my grandparents and a high school teacher. The grandparents were Lutherans and despite otherwise being white liberals, they did actually take their beliefs seriously enough that their reaction to MLK was "this guy is correct, all people are created equal and segregation and racism is wrong", and the activists that they met in the Civil Rights marches led them to follow it up by being in favor of activism for LGBTQ rights and for AIDs support during the 80s. And my high school Chemistry teacher became a teacher after being fired for heresy as a pastor. If I remember correctly, the last straw was officiating a gay marriage right after California started allowing gay marriage in the early 2000s. He believed that God giving humans sovereignty over the earth still meant that we had to take care of God's creation, so all true Christians should be radical environmentalists and firmly in favor of animal rights. He also believed that Christianity is anti-capitalist since they shouldn't strive for wealth, should make sure that everyone is looked after, and several parts of the New Testament call for a form of asceticism instead of indulging in luxury.

    This doesn't in any way prove God exists and again, there are material reasons for religious belief and expression. Just that I do think that the "Reddit Atheist" deeply misunderstands religion and gives atheism a bad name.

  • Once again I'll tap the sign

    citations-needed did a whole episode on it, and it basically hits the stuff you're talking about. One of their early bangers.

  • The increasing emphasis on how bad Islam is and the decline of it being used against homegrown evangelists was where it got pretty bad and that was still in the Bush years. I was kinda above that stuff when reddit atheism came about, seemed like how I felt when I was 12. By the time reddit was a thing I was at least 17 or 18 and had been a weed smoking teen who got was in the ap English and sociology classes. Theological NonCognitavism was already my jam by then. If there is a higher power we'd be as close to understanding it as a goldfish would be to understanding space travel, so fundamentally it's not worth worrying about. If there is a god, he's a fucking asshole and if that God imbued me with the ability to hate him then he's either so untouchable nothing we do matters and we should behave like there isn't a god or that God isn't powerful enough to call god. No matter what, it's useless for me to consider seriously so I don't. I don't give a shot about why we're here or if we were put here by anyone, it wouldn't affect my choices whatsoever, if there's no god, fine, if there is fuck that god and I'm gonna do what needs to be done in the here and now to improve conditions for things we know to exist and to suffer. Atheism is stupid cause they're still wasting their time caring about this shit. There's work to be done.

  • I agree with Marx on this one. Religion is a reflection of materialist conditions. To that end, any group cultures is going to be, in some way, a reflection of materialist conditions. Therefore, Atheist talking as a group will be somewhat identical to religion.

    For my honest beliefs, I will happily label myself as athiest; antithiest. Any "God" that treats it's children this way is in no way worthy of worship. And I would rather believe that I was just very unlucky than to believe that a consciousness in the universe chose to curse me with the afflictions I face.

  • I think you're tilting at a specific brand of Atheism, and that one of the problems here is that Atheism isn't cleanly divided into cults and offshoots the way that religions tend to be. For the specific brand of western chauvinist Atheism you're talking about, I propose the name "Hitchensism," after one of its founding thinkers in the modern world.

    • Yeah that's fair actually. Its really American Atheism, or Western Atheism I have a problem with. Encountering another nonbeliever in the west is a real dice roll.

  • Not that I'm trying to criticize this post or endorse an /r/atheism worldview, but I have to say that this site is in an ironic position as a bunch of avowed leftists, with a ton of us being some flavor of ML, and being against atheism. Marxism is traditionally atheist, ML states have often been officially atheist, because religion is opposed to a materialist worldview.

    It's always seemed to me that a lot of the the new/reddit atheist types were people who grew up in right wing Evangelical households and environment and broke out of it. They have a very understandable and correct hatred for that shit, but too many of them never really broke out of the pattern of thought they were taught. They kept the dogmatic, black-and-white worldview complete with smug superiority, just with a new dogma. Anecdotally I would sometimes argue with them against Jesus Mythicism and it was like banging my head against a wall. (Like, motherfucker I don't believe in the miracles or god shit either, but every piece of historical evidence points to there having been a dude who led a minor religious movement in Judea and got crucified by the authorities. Why is that so hard to admit? No one is asking you to believe anything else!)

    But even so, I'm still pretty much an atheist even if I share your distaste for that word and the people who usually self-apply it, because what the hell else am I supposed to be? What, you want me to be Christian? I'm not doing that shit.

    • Yeah the more comments I read the more I understand my specific grievance. Specifically the brand of Atheism pushed by the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, and others, sometimes called New-Atheism.

      I've amended my title to reflect this realization.

      Naturally in not advocating against being an atheist, but specifically this western chauvinistic brand of atheist. It's ironic that Hitchens called himself a Marxist.

  • At the end of the day all modern atheists who are not socialist are theists as much as any creationist or dominionist

    Capitalism is their religion and they worship it with a ferocity indistinguishable from any Spanish inquisitor

    They worship a machine god that actually is real, which in a terrifying sense makes them more dangerous than all the religionists who came before them

  • Congrats on overcoming your cultural programming and becoming a normal atheist.

  • As an atheist, I'd change the title of the post to "there's a type of atheist that disgusts me". I think religious beliefs are an expression of material conditions and the political culture, so those are what I focus on. And the material conditions and political culture breed all kinds of strange nonreligious belief systems that people should be more skeptical of. But I genuinely do not care what people believe as long as they do not use it to justify hating marginalized people, especially if they find meaning or peace in it. I don't think people find meaning or peace in QAnon, but I know Christians who are genuinely very good people and do not want them to stop believing if it makes them happy.

  • It sounds like you're judging reddit users and debate bros rather than the theological statement that there is no God.

    • Hitchens was a popular dude. I know people who are neither of those who still spit his ideas about religion and call themselves atheists. I think its a western centric perspective on western centric atheists, which is naturally lacking a greater perspective as a result.

  • It’s tough because i understand the necessity to dispel superstition and bigoted traditions. and yet, it is deeply uncool and antisocial to be so militantly against anyone believing in anything.

  • The more I look at the world the more “religions” I see.

    From the Disney adults and the potterheads to the atheists. The liberals and their parasocial relationships with politicians, the libertarians and the free market, conservatives and nationalism…even marxists and Marxism.

    I think this is the meaning of idol worship

  • I think my framework of looking at American counter cultures as being heavily biased towards being fundamentally just as chauvinist as and a little more treat-centric and libertine than the mainstream culture works well here. Like Atheism as a movement in America has fundamentally been comfortable straight white men who think all the performative stuff and cultural signifiers they have to do to join with the Evangelical power framework are cringe and dumb barriers in between them and their preferred treats: in their worldview all the cruelty and hate and domination and violence that the theocrats carry out are secondary bullet points to tack onto a powerpoint presentation in support of their real grievances, which are that the theocrats are cringe little weirdos who think silly things that are cringe and what's worse are standing between fun loving guys and yim yum tasty treats like drugs and porn and free access to women's bodies.

    Atheism itself is just disbelief, a rejection of mythology and magic as infeasible. It's not a ward against chauvinism or libertine treat-lust, and toxic sorts of self-interest and an alignment with American hegemony can make anything and everything toxic by association.

  • Atheism is just like religion in that the assholes are the loudest. If we're "Just another religion," then treat the reddit bro atheists like you would the pentacostal christians and target your hate accordingly.

    Most of us just don't talk about it because we don't really care what anyone else believes as long as they arent persecuting people

  • As someone who was once also a Reddit atheist and became a theist again, most atheists aren't like that. It's entirely possible to be a committed, even strident Atheist and still not be a smug asshole.

    Marx was one, and he combined a well justified hatred of how organised religion supported capitalist exploitation while acknowledging the deep emotions and humanity at the heart of religion.

    For all Communists, atheist and theist, religion is an important contradiction that we must struggle with and progress seriously.

    It is idealism, but one which directly touches the material world and how we engage with it. In many ways it turns historical materialism back on its head and shows it it's mirror image.

    I find this an incredibly productive tool to use, I admit that my beliefs in communism and religion don't meet neatly and that that is kind of the point. Without imbalance and contradictions there can be no motion.

  • Atheism is by no means western see, there are 'atheists' like Bill Maher who cite Bible to defend the existence of Israel. There is no text in atheism which says you have to hate Muslims etc.

    Personally, I would rather not believe there is a god because if they were real, I would love to 'kill' them.

  • Yeah, I also used to be part of that "skeptic" and "atheist" community. It's definitely not all atheists, just a big group of smug people who need a way of feeling superior

  • So, I still call myself an atheist if anyone asks. That being said, I will happily, all day every day, distance myself from the Dawkins/Hitchens kind of "atheism" (really, islamophobia). It sucks that most "atheists" are really just islamophobes with an acceptable coat of paint, but on the other hand, I've been an atheist my whole life, I'm not about to change how I conceptualize my lack of religious belief and what word I use to describe it just because some absolute assholes have decided to use that same word to describe their incredibly bigoted beliefs. I might be wrong to stick with the word, I really might be, but it's been part of who I am for so long that I'm just simply not going to stop using it for myself.

  • I grew up forced to go to church by one parent while the other showed no interest in church whatsoever and stayed home to watch Friday the 13th every Sunday.

    At one point I got really into church and truly believed it. Then one parent died and that really fucked my shit up and I began to realize how dumb religion really is.

    In college I worked with an absolutely militant atheist. He talked about 2 topics and only 2 topics, feminism and atheism, and would rip anyone's head off that dared try to debate any of his strongly held beliefs, while also trying to convert everyone else to his way of thought.

    He ripped me a new asshole one day when he asked if I was an atheist and I said no. He was incensed because he knew I didn't believe in god, or really any religious stuff at all, but I would deign to reject atheism too. Little did he know that he was the reason I wanted nothing to do with atheism. I did not want to be so against something that I spent all my time and energy fighting against something I didn't believe in in the first place. I don't care if someone else believes in whatever. I don't even care if someone is hardcore atheist. I just don't want anyone trying to tell me to label myself and act a certain way because thats what they believe and what they think I should be doing.

  • Just my perspective as a Catholic, I don't think it makes sense to dismiss atheism as a whole because of the islamophobic tilt it has gained since the Bush years. If your materialist analysis leads you to think that belief in God or some other religious system is inconsistent with reality, why should that be invalid? There's a big difference between not wanting to believe in the things you can only believe in by faith for yourself, and believing the crap people like Dawkins preach about religion holding humans back because some brown people say Allah Ackbar when they fire their RPGs at occupation tanks. You understand that material reality is the engine behind those behaviors (in that particular example a very positive behavior that would undoubtedly still get called "religious violence" by the atheists you talk about), not the inherent violence of any given belief system, so you can obviously dismiss the racist nonsense. That doesn't take away from your absence of faith. The two things are independent of each other.

  • Your take is a bold one, but for the most part I stand with it.

    I'm nonreligious; I don't say "atheist" anymore because of the sociopolitical baggage that the word entails and the subcultural implications that it often has, ranging from cult-of-the-self libertarianism to cult-of-the-computer "Singularity" prophecies to "RETVRN to Cultural Christianity" or even "oops I found religion again, bucko" over-correction because of either out of control 40k LARPing or "oh no I'm actually scared of dying and need to find a god that validates me being a hateful piece of shit before I go to heaven" failures of integrity.

    "ACKSHULLY ALL PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD ARE BECAUSE OF RELIGION" takes sometimes show up on Hexbear, and to me they're hard to tell apart from fundies that hand out Jack Chick tracts and say "do you know if everyone in the world was Christian, there would be no more war?" smuglord

    I think it wasn't until recently, when I was having a conversation with someone I knew and the topic of Islam came up that I realized how much I had distances myself from this smug atheist perspective. They said something about Islam being an "inherently violent religion

    Sam Harris cultists are among the worst New Atheists for exactly that. They openly speak of targeted precrime panpticons against Muslims and even "glass the Middle East" genocide power fantasies because they're fucking monsters that follow a monstrous (and fraudulent) cult leader.

    https://rhizzone.net/articles/sam-harris-fraud/

    • This is exactly what I'm railing against. I guess my perspective wasn't yet wide enough to understand how westernized my perspective on atheism had become. This thread really opened my eyes in a profound way. In s way that allows me to express my perspective on atheism with much more nuance then previously.

  • Those assumptions being that Atheism is, on it's face, a religion in and of itself. It's belief is in that of non-belief. It has missionaries like most other religious belief systems, seeking to secularize communities and cultures. It believes it is the one true religion and that all other religions are false religions with false gods. It demonizes all other practitioners of these false religions indiscriminately, believing that they are either upholding their wicked systems of oppression, or are directly complicit in them. Countless books have been written about the its theology and the logic of its faith.

    A lot of New Atheists will smugly say "ACKSHULLY I just believe in one less god than monotheists do" smuglord and claim they have an absence of beliefs the way that reactionaries and liberals claim they have an absence of political views, yet that was proven glaringly false after the over-reaction against "Atheism+" and its attempt for atheism to be about something other than smug self-superiority.

    Remember when those same "no beliefs" dipshits tried to get people to call them "brights?" I sure do. jagoff

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