Permanently Deleted
“culturally Christian” (which means lots of tradwife craving and authoritarian and colonial aspirations, minus the inconvenient deity part)
It’s funny. I’ve got a cousin who is a die-hard Christian. She had a surprisingly difficult time finding guys to date, despite being both drop-dead gorgeous and a doctor. The physical personification of the Tradwife meme, but any guy she met up with was either a creepy loser or totally insecure incel. These guys literally did not know how to handle themselves around a woman.
On that note, I’d like make an observation as someone who’s not a cis anglo saxon. I wasn’t raised Christian and so I’m pretty much ignorant of that entire world, so please bear with me. I’ve always been atheist but I always saw an incredibly aggressive and vile undercurrent of hate within the ‘New Atheist’ movement and it’s lead me to realize that I’ve met way more tolerant religious people in the US than I have met nonshit-head ‘fundamental’ atheists/agnostics. I think the Atheist movement in the country is way past the point of being a sort of revolt against oppression coming from religious entities in the country. The New Atheists were a reaction to something else, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.
I just genuinely trust religious people more to not be complete pieces of shit with regards to class, gender, and race. Maybe I’m crazy and don’t know enough about the world.
I grew up Catholic down in Texas, so I was in a bit of a weird place. I don’t know that I’d say I would trust religious people more. But there’s definitely a generational gap in the attitudes of religious Boomers and religious Millennials. Cultural conservatism is a hell of a drug, but once you kick that habit you just end up with normal people who have a few eclectic superstitions and beliefs.
I’ve always seen the New Atheists as a kind of very thin intellectual cover to spread Islamophobia. It wasn’t a reaction to something oppressive so much as a lurching, malformed twisted response to 9/11 as a way to get the fundamentalist Christians and the more cosmopolitan liberal types in the same side. New Atheism was the by product. They spent so much focus on Christianity because that’s who they were around, but their main focus of hatred was always Islam. Now so many of these same people are overt reactionaries I’d say the intellectual cover worked well. It did what it was supposed to do.
Also there is genuine oppression perpetrated by religious groups in the USA, largely cults and evangelical groups brainwashing LGBTQ kids or destroying their lives. You’ll notice that was hardly ever the focus for the new atheist currents. They were more focused on wacky creationists or justifying imperialist invasions.
I was super into new atheism. As a kid who went to a fundamentalist Christian school where I had an Israeli convert for a social studies teacher it was honestly really cathartic to loudly and proudly proclaim “there is no god you losers!!!” Still identify as one today.
I specifically remember the part when I finally pushed back and starting questioning the movement on a personal level though: the Zeitgeist documentary. Specifically the popularization and online proliferation of said documentary. For those who haven’t seen it: it was fairly prominent in new atheist circles and was a multipart documentary that was sort of a poor man’s Joseph Campbell meets Adam Curtis flim flam that tried to provide a sort of ‘monomyth’ expination for the christian deity with its foundation coming from the cycle of the Sun, and also how this somehow led to the new world order and the 9/11 conspiracies.
Now Campbell has plenty of critics who have pointed out that he kind of stretches things and forces square pegs in round holes for his theories but I assure you he had nothing on the people behind Zeitgeist (one of my favorites is how they try to explain how Jesus and the virgin birth is basically the same story as other deities like Dionysus or Horus, lol). I remember specifically groaning in Bill Maher’s religulous when he actually sites several things that I’m certain he actually got from it which are basically made up as far as I was able to tell.
All of this is to say: I was never really surprised when all the “skeptics” and enlightened atheists started following Peterson and his “feminine chaotic dragon” nonsense or Q anon or any of the other silly stuff because if you really followed the movement they were always getting primed and conditioned to do so.
I think that’s a really really insightful take to be honest. Its interesting because I specifically remember before I stopped watching TJ Kirk/Amazing Atheist he kinda admitted that exact thing in a video. To paraphrase: he got tired of dunking on creationists and lampooning them because, basically, they “won”…or at least as much as they could in the purely online space. You basically couldn’t make an creationist argument anywhere online without getting completely blown up and it had a boring stale circle jerk…and thus a new target was needed.
Isn’t New Athiesm just Pepes with turtlenecks?
