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.
After some reflection, I feel like a big pivot from “anti-bush-religious-majority” atheism to “anti-muslim” atheism was the surge in refugees from Syria, Charlie Hebdo, and the Paris terror attacks? (and, presumably, Bush no longer being president). The Western Chauvinism was always there in a South Park/Fukuyama kinda way, but those events switched the focus away from your local school board to minority muslim populations in Europe. At least, online, in the spaces I was inhabiting at the time.
This is alongside the implicit anti-feminism of the proto-manosphere nice-guy dating advice to the explicit anti-feminism of elevatorgate and gamergate (which were like 3 years apart, so also a slow burn).
I think it’s that and also the movement kind of succeeding in it’s smear campaign on Christianity.
It’s why a lot of the movement moved into the “Intellectual Dark Web.” After Christianity was made to look wacky, Muslims were next on the list. When people spoke up and said “maybe we shouldn’t be picking on these imperialized people”, the retort was, “oh, we aren’t allowed to criticize them because they’re non-white? Nobody is beyond criticism.” They really needed a sacred cow to slay, and it was provided to them by “manic idpol SJWs” who would push back against their rhetoric"
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…
As a reaction, I think its underlying impetus is islamophobic renaissance broughy to the forefront by 9/11 and the associated media and political response. Angloids latched on, in part, to Christianity because it was proximal, but in terms of the material changes that were happening, and what consent needed to br manufactured, it really revolved around the question of how to dehumanize muslims and make them deserving targets of violence.
Some of the new atheists were pretty explicit that islam was their primary enemy and doubler and tripled and quadrupled down on islamophobic rhetoric even as people stopped caring about atheist stuff. That crowd is the same one that also went down the misogynist path.
Some argue that this brand of atheism justifies imperialism. It does so really only in theory.
Except it also did in practice, making this claim categorically false.
New Atheism was a deeply, deeply liberal movement in the way that it worshiped uncritical ideas of “rationality” and “science”, which just like classical liberalism can only produce a farce as the ruling ideology increasingly casts itself as “rational” and thereby wins the approval of the self-satisfied chauvinists who were always the base of New Atheism. See Neil DeGrass Tyson’s “Rationalia” for an even more recent example of this flimsy approach to values.
It is also the natural and inevitable development of any “movement” so concerned with castigating backwater rural populations and promoting their “universal” values that they would seek to impose these values on other places they saw as backwater. The Islamophobia was therefore not a change in ideology but a change in focus.
Well said. It is not “in theory” if it was the sentiment that was trotted around by everyone from atheists to secular americans to Christians who don’t seem to realize they themselves are partisan religious followers in order to dehumanize Muslims. I would say the same sentiment with the same train of thought is shared between a lot of the weird crusader guys pushing for war with Afghanistan and Iraq as with nu-atheist people. I don’t seem it as a coalescence, but the same strain between the two “look at these savage people with their moon god” shit. They didn’t come to the same conclusion, they both built their worldviews around justifying their imperial expansion
The western chauvinism was always there, but my memory of the day to day posting was largely Kent Hovind, “look at this bad take on christian-mom-forum.org”, and proto-manosphere dating advice.
At least when I was doing the rounds in the mid-2000s (so post 9/11 and during the main Iraq occupation). I was definitely after the heyday of Usenet channels.
It was always just assumed that Western culture produced superior values to the hyper religious middle East, as can be shown by how we just beat them in a war, but it rarely actually produced that much discussion.
