this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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To dissent from most people, I don't see any real separation between the two, or more accurately, I don't see a real separation between Reddit atheism and Western atheism, as in atheism as understood and adopted by Westerners. This becomes very obvious when you talk to and observe Chinese atheists. Pretty much the only thing your average Chinese atheist and your average Western atheist have in common is that they don't believe in any gods. That's pretty much it.
But your average Chinese atheist believes in the concept of luck on par with any religious belief. The concept of auspicious days or finding some fortune teller that will give their newborn a name that brings good fortune or diving into numerology isn't something that Western atheists would do. Feng shui, which many Chinese people believe on some level, boils down to how much luck you could generate by optimizing the arrangement of your home and the location of your building (funny aside, there was some Taiwanese politician who apparently bought some house and did everything he could to maximize the amount of luck it would bring to him through feng shui except he didn't even live in the fucking house. And it wasn't an empty house either. It was filled with like statues and other random shit that apparently brings good luck.)
Would your average Western atheist even consider them atheist? I honestly don't think so because there's a lot of additional beliefs baked into Western atheism just like there's additional beliefs baked into Eastern atheism. Western atheism espouses a materialist reality, the disbelief in an afterlife or a soul, an empiricist/skeptic view of the world, confidence in science as the best methodology to understand reality, confidence that there's almost nothing conceptually out of reach of the human intellect, a strict separation between religious belief and religious practice, and centering religious belief over religious practice. None of these have anything to do with the belief or disbelief in a god.
This comment isn't incorrect, but the context that you're speaking of is a bit categorically different than what OP's question seems to be getting at.
What I mean by this is that the difference between so-called "Reddit atheism" and "regular old atheism" is being observed here less as how both group's views as atheists differs from Eastern atheism and more as a sociopolitical difference instead, with the former being seen as far more reactionary, smug, and what people would even call a more "militant" form of atheism, depending on how you use that word. The latter, on the other hand, may refer to "I really just don't give a shit" kind of atheism or, seeing as how we are on Hexbear, atheism applied to leftist, more specifically Marxist and materialist, schools of thought.
To give a goofy analogy, I find that this would be like a person asking, "What's the difference between vegetarianism and veganism?" and someone responding, "I don't see a real separation between those two because if you compare it to something like fruitarianism [a fringe diet only consisting of fruit], both vegetarians and vegans still allow for the consumption of things that aren't fruit, so there's no real difference between the two."
I suppose the point of my comment was to say that when people here say "atheism," they don't just mean "disbelief in gods," and that a lot of the extra stuff is related to Western epistemology in general. I didn't even go over various Indigenous belief systems, which could be seen or is at least compatible with atheism-as-in-disbelief-in-gods-and-disbelief-in-gods-only that is dissimilar to Western or Eastern atheism. A lot of their so-called deities aren't actually deities as understood by Western religion but purposeful mistranslations by Christian missionaries who tried to shove their creation myths and cosmology into a Christian hole. When some Indigenous elder say something like "Creation gives us mouths to speak the truth" and characterizes Creation-with-a-capital-C as a self-directed process instead of a Creator god, is his religious and spiritual beliefs compatible with atheism-as-in-disbelief-in-gods-and-disbelief-in-gods-only?
It's like how when people here say "philosophy," they're not actually talking about the entire sum of philosophy that encompasses very different philosophical traditions like Chinese philosophy or Islamic philosophy but more specifically Western philosophy or even more specifically, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Western philosophy because no one has time to deal with Christian apologia by some French bishop from the 10th century. And I don't think it's a coincidence that on one hand, you have people who think atheism fits in a particular Western box and on the other hand, you have Western chauvinists who think Muslims are savages who must be civilized by their Western superiors.