this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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Well, it seems the same ding-a-lings claiming agnosticism and atheism are religions are also prone to claiming science is a "religion", following evidence is a "religion", and so on...
By lumping them all into the same category, it gives credibility to "religion".
When you have a panel where "A priest, a rabbi, and a mullah discus spirituality", it's a level playing field, everyone is just there to compare notes on their LARPing rules.
If an atheist or a scientist join the panel, you now have an emperors new clothes situation, "Yeah, I don't have all the answers, but more importantly, neither do they, and I'm not claiming to. Here are the facts and evidence as it is currently understood, and what that might mean".
When you call atheism or science or woke a religion, they are trying to trap you by saying "ha! Your belief is just as meaningless as I mine is! We're all equal and subjective rules apply".
I try to refer to things as simply dogmatic. Some people have replaced religion with other things, but that doesn't make them a religion. People beg for authority.
New Atheism is insanely dogmatic, but it's not the same as Atheism, and has been criticized by Atheists who classify "New Atheism" as being akin to a hate-group
and Scientism is a school of philosophy, albeit one that's mocked relentlessly (Basically, the philosophy that everything that is real can be measured, and if it can't be measured it isn't real)
But... that's as close as I'd get to describing Science or Atheism as religions....
I say this as an agnostic person for the record.
I'd like to understand what the definition of what "New Atheism" is. I know there have been a few tempest in a teapots over certain individuals [1] and their behavior; nothing about atheism - new or otherwise - seems to require them to behave like some individuals have, as far as I know. I also have no idea how this set of (non) beliefs would make them a hate group.
[1] thunderf00t, for example. I also know plenty of people that go crazy over the mere mention of, say, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens. Not sure if those guys are who we are talking about here.
Basically anyone who tries to militarize rationalism as a movement or tries to use science as a religion... very often these turn into misogyny, bigotry, and pseudoscience
Those three are specifically infamous as Sam Harris uses pseudoscience to justify a lack of belief in free will as straight up fact and white washes Buddhism to be "Like Atheism, but you meditate!"... but his open hostility to the religious is concerning as he literally writes in his book The End of Faith that the world would only be safe if a preemptive nuke was dropped on the middle east.
Sam Harris also parrots the talking points of Jordan Peterson and features him regularly on his podcast
Richard Dawkins is a transphobic asshole who compared transpeople to black face, shrugged off a woman being sexually assaulted at his conference as "She should be grateful, a muslim would have done worse" (a scandal known as Elevatorgate) also engages in pseudoscience to push his "Memetics" nonsense
Hitchens is the least horrible of the three, but that's only because he was dead long before Dawkins and Harris went fully radical.
Christopher Hitchens mainly wrote a bunch of books painting Christianity in a bad light.. that itself is fine.. the issue is he'd often fabricate evidence. One well known case of this; claiming Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher famous for coming up with what many theist still believe is the best evidence for god, was a "man of one book" and using cherry picked qoutes to justify it.. even though Aquinas actually warned against zealots and the full version of the original qoute was actually telling people to be wary of men of "only one book" for there was more to understand the world and God than simply the bible.
Hitchens is also responsible for the clickbait articles claiming Mother Theresa was a monster, making various accusations of her laundering money from charity with no evidence, taking quotes from her on suffering out of context to make her look like a masochist, berating her for refusing to use morphine (despite operating in India, a
ountry where morphine was illegal even for medical use) and bizzarely claimed her hospices were actually hospitals. When not only were they hospices but she basically invented the concept at a time when bedside manner was basically unheard of in professional medicine.
Many of these bogus and heavily debunked claims are from the book "Hell's Angel" which Hitchens wrote.
The cherry on top was Hitchens actually claimed the Catholic Church was trying to stop him from bad-mouthing Mother Theresa out of fear he would "give away their game".. when the opposite was true, they literally invited him to the Vatican to speak out against her canonization as it is tradition that critics and skeptics of potiential saints be given a chance to make their case before anything final is decided.
While there are many great arguments for not believing in God or really any supernatural phenomena of any kind... these three are infamous for fabricating and weaponizing such arguments for personal gain.
What are the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) that require someone advocate for any of these things, though? You are saying these individuals behaved/are behaving badly - okay, let's assume that is true. What about irreligion would lead to any of that?
When you say they "militarize" rationalism, how have any of these people done that? All of them are still proponents of liberal democracies.
I was a new monasticist Christian who deconstructed during this whole atheism thing and can vouch for all of this. We read some of these atheism books in Bible studies because they were both prevalent and quite lazily written, like these "four horsemen" just didn't have a good grasp on philosophy. I even had an agnostic philosophy prof come to a Christian Bible study and explain some of the mainstream and competing views in philosophy about these subjects and it kind of validated how they weren't serious as philosophers. After I lost my whole social group when I lost my faith I decided to check out an atheist group, which I attended for a time, but there were always these people who loved these terrible arguments for atheism and even wanted to go evangelize door to door about atheism. The group split in to culture war factions and died shortly after I stopped attending in 2012. It was worth it because I met a few very dear friends from this endeavor, but we all agreed this whole thing was trash.
The fact that we actually have peopel trying to "Spread the good word of Atheism" and coming up with arguments so bad it almost makes God sound... likely... shows the problem was never faith, it was always man. If Religion never existed, humans would be just as awful, they'd just find different reasons to be just as horrible.
Yeah basically, concepts like "civil/civic religion" describe this well. It's like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, "the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest." Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.
The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that's how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of "religion" and cleave it away, because they think it's this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn't yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.
I wanna give you a medal for this write up