The particular neckbeardy, fedora wearing, Sam Harris listening trend of atheism was a pretty clear reaction to the evangelical psychosis of the Bush administration.
Other geriatrics here can attest that the character of Christianity at the time was way different than it is now. These days, the fascists are more “culturally Christian” and avoid overt bible apologism. But back in the day, these people were constantly on TV spewing young earth creationism and other shit, and they were largely taken seriously. It’s hard to believe now how much time was spent “debating” evolution back then. The atheist backlash at least affected discourse aesthetically for some time, making these views laughable, which deplatformed a lot of evangelicals or made them hide their power levels on TV.
Some argue that this brand of atheism justifies imperialism. It does so really only in theory. There really is no material basis for atheists in the US to justify an invasion anywhere in the world. The truth is that Christianity is still a far more powerful force for imperialism. Bush said that God told him to invade Iraq. I don’t see any president saying anytime soon that the US needs to secularize a country through force.
If fundamentalist and political religiosity were defeated, then belligerent atheism would dissolve, but the reverse is not true.
Overall, it really does seem like people over emphasize this group of internet no-lifers because of the cultural cringe they manifested.
I think I could have easily been a full on New Atheist, if things had gone a little differently (which is impossible because everything is predetermined but the hallucination of free will thinks it’s fun to speculate). I was already an atheist by 5th grade, despite catholic education. I definitely listened to a lot of the shitty atheists, like Harris and Dawkins, but only on atheist issues and dunking on Christian fundamentalists. But I luckily never, ever looked to them for foreign policy lol. I was lucky enough to see The Power of Nightmares within like a year of getting political, so whenever I heard one of their dumbass geopolitical takes it was so easy to write it off as another Western intervention which would inevitably make things worse and cause Blowback(: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire - a good book I happened upon around the same time). It still took a couple years to get some context though, because Blowback lacks class analysis, so that I could ditch Ron Paul.
ha, honestly I don’t think I ever did any religious trolling beyond a interactions in Counter-Strike or Battlefield 2. I’d never get into determinism/fatalism with someone outside of Web forums. I’d just sound nuts, like yeah imagine those Mandelbrot renders where you keep zooming in and there’s more detail - some of that’s humans and our brains, it’s just matter and energy from whenever everything began…
