this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
118 points (100.0% liked)
Beehaw Support
2796 readers
1 users here now
Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.
A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.
Our September 2024 financial update is here.
For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Anti religious was(is?) pretty fundamental to the "New Atheist movement" from the latter aughts and early teens from this century. They don't represent atheism as a whole but a decade ago they were highly visible and did a lot to screw up the connotation of the word "atheism." I think it's possible to argue in good faith that religion is ultimately a net harm (which I wouldn't), but there is also a bigoted and ignorant way to do that which was far more common. While the "a" in atheism means "without," there used to be quite a significant presence of those who manifested the belief that it meant "against." I'm sure they're still around, but they don't seem to be as constant an annoyance as they used to be and many of their figureheads moved on to support right-wing politics targeting the religions they hate the most.
Your point is important. I was once part of that movement. There is a crucial piece missing:
In the US atheism has come to specifically challenge the assumed Christian majority that influences US society in subtle ways. For instance, Christmas, or the fact that we have “under God” on US currency. It wasn’t anti-religious as much as anti-Christian, and contextually that point of view is warranted.
Since that movement, I’ve noticed that theologists have labeled atheists as “strong” and “weak” in (my interpretation) an attempt to discredit “agnostic atheists”.
I think there will always be a “war” between mindsets so long as humanity survives. The important part is allowing diverse religious or non-religious backgrounds which means one religion can’t be imposing values onto everyone else.