During yesterday's sick day - the reason I didn't post - I went back and emptied out the Spam file of this blog, I don't know how many thousands of rejected attempted posts that was, I'd guess at least 10,000, most of them from self-identified lefties of one kind or another, but I did get it emptied. I went back and read some of them and my posts some of them were attached to. It was mildly interesting to see how often I've answered questions from right wingers and pseudo-lefties and how similar they are when you go to the bother of fact-checking and critiquing them. The secular (you can almost always safely read that "atheist") pseudo-left has way more in common with the vulgar materialist based right than they'd ever want to know. In fact I used to not know it, myself.
One of the things you will hear such atheists trumpet is that the internet has made the triumph of atheism inevitable. Well, that's not my experience. When I started out online I was a fairly wishy-washy, semi-agnostic lefty who had bought into the lines about the character of the atheist left which was a product of generations of secondary writers, journalists, opinion scribblers, academics, doing a massive cover-up on the actual character of Marxists and anarchists, of people like Bertrand Russell and the other materialist pantheon which, for me, reading them in more than the clipped and cleansed snatches available outside of a university library were what I knew of such thinking. I mean, if you took the atheist saint Emma Goldman on the basis of what she was quoted as saying you would never guess she was an elitist snob who disdained the very working class she claimed to represent, she wasn't especially interested in womens' suffrage - she was a friggin' anarchist, she wasn't interested in anything which would improve womens' lives if it involved something as realistic as voting. At bottom she was an amoralist who loved the exciting and degenerate violence of "propaganda of the deed," someone who read Nietzsche and loved him as much as any depraved proto-Nazi of her time did because he destroyed morality. She was, in a word, a self-indulgent asshole who never did a thing that benefited anyone but those who used her to discredit the real left. As I found out, in her old age, in the 1930s, as she watched the rise of fascism and Nazism, she plaintively asked people if she'd wasted her life on anarchism, something that only a total idiot wouldn't have figured out about fifteen minutes into thinking about anarchism. And she was far from the only one.
Virtually every atheist hero I had seen touted in the lefty media, in academic scribbling, especially when it got to the tertiary and more remote regions from the primary sources turned out to either be jerks or to have feet of clay or, in many an instance, not to have been the atheists or opponents of Christianity the atheist establishment claimed they were. Lots of those "atheists" who atheist non-profits list and clip were not atheists at all and said they weren't. Though you've got to read them to know that because atheists have no inhibition about lying about such things.
Having enormously more abundant primary documentation available in free, easily searched online form, from places like Archive.org, from Project Gutenberg, in often more truncated versions from Googlebooks, even that is more than you got from the filters of the atheist propaganda of the print era, has been an enormous education in what the actual character of the atheist - so-called "secular" sector is. I can directly attribute my early and now complete skepticism as to the reformative power of cultural secularism to reading the primary documentation available online. That and having to face the complete and utter failure of the secular legal regime which the Supreme Court put into place during the 20th century has driven me way, way farther to the left than reading lefty propaganda ever did. I mean, I don't think I'd have ever really realized that one modestly leftish bill which become law and improves lives is entirely more radical than the fevered dreams of the Nation, Progressive magazine, In These Times play lefties if I hadn't been so thoroughly disillusioned by reading the Great Thinkers of the officially secular left online and been so disgusted at what they really said and thought.
I have decided to stop sending stuff to the Spam file, it gets deleted. I'm tired of answering the same lines over and over again. They never learn, they don't want to.
Update: Oooh, I just deleted one, it was fun.
Interesting what an increase in stories about religion there have been on websites like Daily Beast and Slate. News coverage, not proselytizing; but then the atheist stories on similar sites in days gone by were, pretty much, proselytizing. I don't take it as a victory, but I find it interesting that didn't last long. One thing I've figured out is that revolutions are much harder than they look, and much less likely to be revolutionary, in the long run. The American Revolution seems to have taken more root in France than here, for example. The Russian Revolution really changed nothing. The "revolution" of the '60's brought out the injustice of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc; but it didn't uproot those things. Worthwhile change, but radical expulsion? Nah. And religion isn't as cultural a a matter as racism or sexism or homophobia.
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