guys but like…not every vocal atheist is an m.r.a dudebro with a goatee and a fedora and a hard-on for richard dawkins. plenty of people have a legitimate reason for mistrusting and criticising religion and religious practices (i.e. abuse survivors, lgbt people, people from former or current colonies, many women all over the world) and atheism might actually be important to some people as a space for resistance. which is not to say i advocate black and white thinking and i think all criticism of religion should be sensitive and placed within careful consideration of context (i.e. people not using “atheism” as an excuse to be islamophobic, anti-semitic etc.) but religions are social institutions that still exert a lot of power and we should let oppressed people have safe spaces in which to criticise them
I’m still trying to understand how the Left started hating atheists, associating Atheism with being anti women’s rights, and consider religious people as a morally superior group?
Like, what the fuck? What happened to the god-hating liberals my (abusive) Christian parents despised?
You may try to resist religion, but know that God resists back.
Atheism had some pretty dreadful internal politics disasters. Honestly, the big issue was the one that has plagued revolutionaries since Satan himself: Once they had finished throwing off obedience to Christ, they argued over who the next target should be. The internal inability to banish sexual abusers was also a problem.
Ultimately, it kind of split, between the partisans of Pride and Vanity and those of Perfidy and Rebellion. The latter faction no longer emphasizes their atheism.
The lack of Leftists converting to anything in any noticable numbers, to my knowledge, rather disadvantages that explanation, as much as I find a certain emotional resonance to it.
does literally anyone at all remember the early internet fights? late 90s, early 00s? they were literally all about religion. one recurring argument was that basically atheists are cowards bc they mainly make fun of Christianity, rather than of Islam, which is clearly more dangerous to do. Guess what atheists started doing after being told to do so. Guess what happened as a result.
I definitely remember that era of Discourse. Interesting theory about the causes of the passing of that era, although I suspect this is a very reductionist view of those events.
9/11 happened. The West as a whole suddenly remembered that Islam existed. I don’t think the shift was from athiests decided to grow a pair and attack Islam on their blogs and chat boards.
I don’t think it’s 9/11 specifically (people made that argument in early 00s), but actually the Iraq war being drawn out forever, the Bush era coming to an end, and stuff like that. The alliance between beer'n'tits liberals and pink hair'n'harry potter fan fiction liberals was always an uncertain and shaky one, facilitated by the ills of the Bush era being different from the ills now.
You can also see a shift from “free speech zones” being horrifying to freeze peach being a tool of the oppressor, and from patriot act being creepy to surveillance being Good Actually, and many more.