askchapo

Lots of good conversation in a thread I made recently: https://hexbear.net/post/3699050 I also didn't fully understand the distinction between "Reddit" Atheism (aka New Atheism) and "Classical" Atheism (aka Atheism). The short of it is that the brand of Atheism you find on Reddit is soaked in post-9/11 Islamophobia and Western Chauvinism due to a group of reactionary "thinkers" in the early 2010s making a killing on repackaging both Islamophobia and Atheism together into a kind of "Intellectuals Islamophobia" that allows you to be Islamophobic and xenophobic while falling back to your Atheism as a defense of your reactionary world view.

"I have nothing against Arabs! They're just brainwashed by the inherently violent religion of Islam."

"I have nothing against Black People! It's their culture that is the problem."

"I have nothing against the Chinese People! I just hate their government."

It's just a dog whistle at the end of the day.

It's called New Atheism

i honestly think atheism is silly in general. the distinction is meaningless. reddit is just a suitable pejorative to apply to the more annoying ones. being completely sure that god isn't real is a faith/vibes based belief and they act like it's rational and enlightened constantly, even act like it doesn't need to be justified or is somehow self evident which I find really hypocritical. they're often annoying online (like 1000x more than religious people at least in spaces like this which are already largely secular so like just stop) and can't seem to resist high horsing about religion. often vulgar materialists too. also saying shit like all religions are equally bad basically downplays the unique level of damage Christianity has done and is like an islamophobic dog whistle a lot of the time. honestly if you're an atheist just pipe down about it lol. it's plain that agnostic is the less tainted term anyway, if you're not in the category of totally sure God doesn't exist just call yourself that. the well is so poisoned when it comes to atheism that anyone who starts on about it in more than passing depth i kinda just assume to be an asshole.

won't be making any more replies, clearly touched a nerve with some guy who started putting words in my mouth and upset me. I admit my comment was incendiary so I shouldn't be too surprised lol. i have made some edits based on some good faith criticism from another user. still, atheists not beating the annoying allegations. sorry but your "belief system" isn't one I'm under any obligation to respect, the damage of new atheism is far from being undone and more pushback is still needed, yes even in spaces like this one. my concern mainly is how naturally it seems to lead to islamophobia in anglo/culturally christian spaces, which was running rampant in the thread linked in OP and is clearly a problem on this website.

Redit atheists is about embracing your white privilege and realizing you don't need a church to survive.

Regular atheism is about not believing is a religion for moral or scientific reasons.

snobbishness. real ones simply vow to murder priests, we don't make a show of it

Regular atheism is just not believing in higher powers, Reddit atheism is thinking that makes you better than those who do believe

Summed up by some professional quote maker "In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence."

i am a militant agnostic. i don't know if there is a god, and neither do you. its crazy to me to fully believe in any specific spiritual lore without like direct personal experience, like maybe there is 'a god' but maybe its completely inhuman and incomprehensible, maybe its a giant fish, maybe its mind is composed of the EM activity of stars, idfk why people assume our language or our thought could capture something like that, if it even exists. believing that there is Definitely No God or Anything Else Humans Don't/Can't Understand seems epistemologically invalid. like yeah, i'm not going to decide how to live my life based on some bronze age account of some Sky Warlord who wants me to sacrifice my children and cut off parts of my penis and beat my slaves and never do anything thats Too Fun, idfk why people would assume bronze age patriarchical slave-owning mysoginists would have the FInal Say on stuff like that, but i'm also not going to just assume that reality is completely pointless and that we are all meaningless meat computers waiting for our homeostatic processes to fizzle out. I agree with 'materialism' in the sense that i think there are parts of reality that are outside my personal mind, but strict physicalist realism is metaphysically and existentially and semiotically barren as an ideology, why should i care if i or anyone else has healthcare/rights/life if our existence is pointless nonsense, lifeless particles knocking into each other deterministically, human consciousness an evolutionary spandrel, an information-processing fluke that only makes us suffer from our knowledge of the universe's meaninglessness. I have to believe that there might possibly be some reason for me to keep collecting new experiences or i would simply stop. i have to believe that , under better conditions such as communism, humans could spend more time on the questions and ideas that matter on a more fundamental level, instead of constantly struggling just to physically survive, and that there might be semiotically interesting paradigms to discover. i have to believe that conscious experience matters, or should matter, to me, that there really is something that differentiates living thinking beings from lifeless particles and the unconscious information processing of a calculator. otherwise there is nothing to distinguish humanity from a cancerous growth or mold, if 'nothing' is the beginning and the end i'd rather just cut out the middleman and get back to it and save myself and everyone else a whole heck of a lot of trouble and misery.

I myself am nonreligious. While saying I am atheist is also technically correct, the word's been tarnished severely for me primarily because of the followers of the so-called "Four Horsemen" and the reactionary, bigoted, even misanthropic fandoms that those "Four Horsemen" have drummed up over time, especially Sam Harris, whose Islamophobia and smug assholishness in general continues to inspire the most toxic and repulsive takes that continue to entrench religious people in religion in opposition to such assholishness.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/New_Atheism#.22The_Four_Horsemen.22

This isn't the best source, but the attempt to make atheism into a humanistic political movement, and the backlash that attempt received, is worth a read as well.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Atheism_Plus

First sub to ban me, my offense: saying we should take anti-atheiests at their word and get them before they get us.

Proof once again that the only good emoji is the struggle session emoji.