RECENTLY, I'VE COME TO think that the new atheist fad of the 00s was largely about affluent white people pretending that they had suffered some terrible oppression at the hands of Christianity and Judaism and Islam. While there may be some isolated places where Christianity has that kind of power, though I'd need to have those named and proved in the 21st century, and large parts of the world where Islam can take oppressive forms, mostly it was play-time for the college credentialed and those who wanted to be mistaken as part of that kewel-crowd.
I've never denied that in Ireland up to living memory there were terrible oppressive institutions, a legacy of pre-Vatican II Catholicism gut those are largely over, a product of the revelations of the sex abuse scandal revelations in the early years of this century. I would certainly admit that the residential schools, both church administered and those which were quite secular, in the United States and Canada are within the living memory of those who were victimized by it. And there is the already mentioned child sexual abuse scandal which is, I will point out, hardly an exclusively religious thing and which, in its secular form in the sex industry is a current and terrible thing which, oddly enough, has gotten little of the coverage of the part of it that had a religious connection. Much of the most exigent criticism of that within religion has come FROM WITHIN RELIGION.
And in pointing those out I will not pretend that those were ever 1. any manifestation of the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings of Paul and the other writers of Christian Scripture, 2. that they were solely a product of religious institutions and hierarchies but had their secular governmental components and permission for them to occur, 3. that in many instances the secular aspects of them were and still are terrible. The same Hollywood that will issue a Spotlight movie is constantly in the business of sexualizing even very young children, itself.
But the people I'm talking about, those who delighted and relished their fashionable atheism starting with the readers of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, others on the fringes of science and on to the likes of Daniel Dennett and the Brit-trot turned Bush II warmonger-Neo-con, Christopher Hitchens. Most of those I ever knew of, read, heard, etc. were affluent white guys and gals who had little to nothing to complain about in line with the crimes and sins of the kind I noted above. Most of their whined of oppression was never something they experienced. Certainly those four "horsemen" of neo-atheism (though they mostly were just nags) had little in the way to complain about. In fact on one occasion the always-putting-his-tender-foot-in-it Dawkins said a little sexual abuse of boys in Public Schools was innocuous. That would go along with the fact that within organized atheism in the late 20th century, you could advocate for pedophile rape of children on the pretense that even very young children can give adult level consent and still become a "Humanist of the Year." I have never, once, read an internal criticism by organized atheism of that fact, nor the fact that there was quite a bit of evidence that at least one of the most renowned of such atheists, James Randi, had some pretty shady past he was never made to answer for, much.
Most of those who hated on religion online were entirely comfortable, middle-class to affluent white guys and gals, most of them college credentialed but not really skilled at critical reading and fact checking, most of atheist polemics are riddled with shoddy scholarship, outright fabrication and misattribution, etc. Lies, in short. One of the early conclusions I came to in that addressing of it was that if you don't believe in sin you don't believe it's a sin to tell a lie and your only inhibitions against that were either a vestigial habit of feeling it wasn't nice to lie or that you were afraid you couldn't get away with it. And in that milieu, truth telling was far more likely to get you into a jam than going along with the common received mythology and lies. Just as when I researched the history of natural selection I was constantly finding confirmation of my hypotheses that it was the motivation of eugenics and the most infamous of that, the Nazi genocidal eugenics, I was constantly finding out that atheist lore and literature lied constantly, everything from the near ubiquitous falsification of what James Madison said in his Memorial and Remonstrance, to the supposed atheism of the earliest recorded laws of Hammurabi and Confucius, to the alleged atheism of Mozart, to the almost certainly forged letters of Jefferson to Tom Paine that no one ever saw except one early atheist polemicist, and onward. I quickly came to the conclusion that everything about modern ideological atheism was constructed of lies and myths - many of those myths found in stuff taught in universities and colleges and, more seriously, in pop-historical bull-shit in shows and movies and BBC-PBS TV costume drama stuff. The mythologies surrounding the trial and sentence of Galileo, the Scopes Trial, the Huxley-Wilberforce "debate," the burning of Bruno, the Mortara kidnapping, etc. could fill volumes of correction of the common received wisdom.
So many other links to researched, documented, posts on these and similar topics over the past ten years here and many in the years before that elsewhere could be given. I haven't rejected atheism and its . . . um. . . "intellectual foundations" without looking at those, seriously.
I hold that there is little in religion that should be sacrosanct and above questioning, though I would certainly put The Golden Rule and some other such universal commandments of good to everyone in a special category. I see a critique of and I smell evil intent, especially when such stuff is published as "science." I think anyone who sets themselves up or allows themselves to be set up in a hierarchy of authority and power opens themselves up to entirely justified skepticism and criticism, no mere human being or their ideas is rightly held up to be above those. It's dangerous to do that. But I have always noted that "religion" considered as a category has always practiced a high level of internal criticism, even within one denomination there is bound to be continual disagreement and criticism, the fracturing of denominations and parting of the ways over differences of that sort are a hall mark of every religious tradition I'm aware of. And even when there is not a fracturing and parting, religious denominations are continually changing due to that kind of internal criticism. Even during the much maligned scholastic period, there was a serious and lively history of some very extensive and often quite high quality internal criticism and disagreement. As could be pointed out, even some of the worst artifacts of the late medieval period presented subject matter in a form which included extensive internal criticism of what the authors were supporting. Modern scholarship and even science is seldom if ever so extensively honest about the weaknesses within what they are asserting. If the claims of those scribblings of the new atheists of the 00s which I've read ever got such a treatment they would have fallen apart like the lore of PZ Myers and his "Great Desecration" fraud when I casually examined the claims which caused a sensation across the internet.
Like all fads, sooner or later those get old and the generally stupid and superficial tots who grasp onto those move on to whatever next big thing put in front of them. I was confident the new atheism would get old, especially as its biggest mast heads were such a bunch of flaming assholes. I think the Covid pandemic did more damage to organized religion than the new atheism did, the moral and necessary closing of churches and People getting out of the habit of going to church. In Catholicism, I think the consequences of the child sexual abuse scandal mixed with the all-unmarried-male priesthood not attracting enough candidates for priesthood to make ex-Catholics one of the largest religious groups - according to the polls - a real thing. I'd add in the United States, the fact that a majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are still JPII-Benedict XVI era thugs and assholes to what caused that.
I don't really worry much about the new atheism except in so far as they dupe People into believing lies and giving them permission to be "spiritual but not religious." I'm not much impressed with the "spiritual but not religious," because I've seen nothing much good coming of that flaccid, meaningless self-labeling. I haven't seen anything like the Catholic Relief Services which a Republican-fascist member of Congress recently advocated an armed attack on. I haven't seen anything like the many Protestant charitable efforts, nor others in other branches of religion. I haven't seen much in the way of those self-labeled "spirituals" doing much of anything that gets anything done at a personal cost and a real effort. But, then again, I don't see much of that in much of what gets to call itself "religion" either. A good part of that goes right back to that sacrosanct entity which no one is supposed to question or criticize, the First Amendment which is stupidly unspecific about what a "religion" is. Which leads to all kinds of abuses, including the creation of an American neo-Nazi "religion" which was created to get tax breaks - it joins many another such "religions" and "churches" which clearly were never religious unless you call Mammon worship a religion. I'll include the many, many atheist organizations which seem to have getting a tax exemption for donations as one of their first acts, in that. Atheism is, honestly considered, a religious position. Generally a naive, rather simplistic and even stupid set of faith holdings, little considered and little tested. As I've recently pointed out, it even posits all manner of creator gods, as human beings seem to always need to find those even when they deny the reality of God the Creator. Even the religion-reluctant Thomas Jefferson was forced into that when he had to write the "founders" excuse for breaking away from Britain. I don't think human beings can really think hard about things like that without finding they need God or, at least, some temporarily, henotheistically raised up "god." Most often some idolatrously considered part of materialist-atheistic-scientism. If not that then money.
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