Seriously, reading this has ruined my morning. The SJWs have
to be blamed for everything, including atheism not being as popular a
topic for internet flamewars as it was a decade ago.
“Hamartiology” is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of
sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. … Most movement
atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the
hamartiology. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had
settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological
impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist
bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers.
Dude’s about six months away from being locked in a padded room,
writing anti-SJW screeds on the walls in his own shit.
(edit) Argh, and his evidence for this is literally just: “here’s a
few cherry-picked atheism blogs that post more about racism/sexism now!
Also: google searches for atheism have gone down and racism/sexism
searches have gone up! COINCIDENCE!?”
Gee, I wonder what event could have caused people to worry more about
sexism/racism starting around the time of the last presidential election
cycle? Must be atheist bloggers turning into SJWs because of
“hamartiology”, that’s a sane fucking answer!
He's actually not wrong that New Atheism fell apart because the topic of sexism was divisive. Where he's laughably wrong is that it "seamlessly" merged into the "modern social justice movement". Oh boy were there ever seams.
It's even right there in one of his blockquotes:
> Last week, Jen McCreight announced that she was fed up with sexism in the atheist movement
Hmm, it sounds more like she was responding to something specific than just randomly declaring SJW. What could it be?
The obvious glaring watershed event that anyone with any familiarity could have told Scott Alexander if he'd bothered to ask is [Elevatorgate](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/elevatorgate). tl;dr a woman in the New Atheist movement (already a very rare thing) gave a brief bit of public advice about how to make women less uncomfortable, and it ignited a powderkeg of tension about sexism and tone and the scale of grievances, into which fire Richard Dawkins himself clumsily poured a giant tank of jet fuel. The atheist blogosphere (which was its main discourse at the time) just kept ratcheting up the stakes until people had separated neatly into different camps (perhaps "how is this even controversial?" vs. "why won't you stop complaining about it?") and Atheism Plus was one attempt to unify and codify one side of it.
The other camp also "seamlessly" merged into the opposite movement. Having realized how much ~~being polite to women~~ feminism threatened their way of life, atheists also branched out into questioning other issues in ~~being a decent human being~~ social justice, such as race. Dawkins was always more oblivious than mean-spirited but another Horseman, Sam Harris, is now one of the main figureheads in the Intellectual Dark Web, especially by repopularizing Charles Murray's 1994 speculation about race and IQ. Phil Mason ran the YouTube channel "Thunderf00t", which was as much of a breakout hit as PZ Myers's blog "Pharyngula" back in the day, but he moved very "seamlessly" from videos criticizing religion and creationism to videos criticizing (his made-up version of) feminism. He jumped straight into Gamergate (which actually came a year or two *after* it was all presaged by Elevatorgate) as one of Anita Sarkeesian's shrillest, rudest critics, to the point of attacking her appearance and spreading conspiracy theories about her death threats. He got himself kicked out of not just Freethought Blogs but even Twitter.
Oh and it wasn't really part of the New Atheism movement per se, but [Faces of Atheism](https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/38i8se/the_faces_of_atheism/) probably killed any remaining interest in the topic among the internet-going public.
---
Anyway, all of this is painfully obvious to anyone who was around at the time, but of course Scott Alexander didn't ask. As a good Rationalist, he diligently avoids using other people's knowledge and reconstructs it all from first principles and his own foggy memory and agenda. Fortunately this is more of a(nother) vague anti-SJW screed from him than even a serious attempt at a revisionist history, so I doubt anyone is going to cite this in the future as a retelling of events.
Honestly, I think a bigger reason New Atheism fizzled out was that the atheist stereotype went from being "intelligent asshole" in 2007 to "fedora-wearing neckbeard" in 2014.
Lots of people want to be Dr House, nobody wants to be Comic Book Guy. Once it was uncool it was doomed to the fringes.
Yeah, Faces of Atheism might have been the final nail in that ~~cross~~ coffin more than the watershed, but that's definitely a big part of the story. The people on the inside grew to hate each other, and the people on the outside grew to hate the people on the inside too.
Theres also the fact that a movement based on *not* being something -- something which is waning in popularity to begin with -- is entirely unsustainable.
Atheism is still a positive claim about the nature of the universe, strictly speaking it is about being something, that something being a believer in there not being something. Pedantic I know, but agnostics are the folks who are specifically not anything, which is why there's virtually no movement at all associated with them.
> there's virtually no movement at all associated with [agnosticism].
lol
this so far from the truth I imagine you must be a creation of the internet becoming conscious of itself
Poptart, I'm not saying there aren't a lot of agnostics, but I'm not really aware of much of a "movement" proselytizing theological uncertainty. Unless you want to count like, Science, but that's not so explicit.
I know it's a flimsy metric, but r/agnostic has about 20k subscribers vs. 2.5M for r/athiesm. Feel free to disabuse me of this notion by means other than condescension.
Going beyond reddit, it is possible to meet a whole host of people who publish on radio, television, and even in print about their agnosticism. One of the most powerful people on Radio 4 - and therefore in British politics - 12 years ago published a bestseller affirming the agnostic zeitgeist which has characterised British politics since the 1990s, and after [We don't do God](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1429109/Campbell-interrupted-Blair-as-he-spoke-of-his-faith-We-dont-do-God.html). Perhaps the UK isn't a fair example, although most people I've spoken to and stats I've seen from elsewhere continue to make the point I'm making, but it is also a country of about 65 million people, and therefore one of the most populous countries in the world, and has a storied tradition of wishy-washy "culturally Christian" agnosticism.
It would be a mistake to characterise such a "movement" as proselytizing, because it's a movement pregnant in much of secular society (look at Ireland), and yet a movement nonetheless. Religious doubt is, for many polities, fundamentally the name of the game, and contributes strongly to the body politic to the extent that religious institutions such as the Church of England (say the same for e.g. Lutherans in Germany) constantly fret about and bend to the will of those who *doubt* vis-a-vis theological matters...to say nothing of the Catholic Church.
If there is any movement to speak of that seriously threatens the primacy of religion it's agnosticism: atheism, especially New Atheism, is a media loud but minor player in religious politics in the 21st century.
Well my view is admittedly very Americentric, and from what limited exposure I have, you Brits are much more advanced in your agnosticism. America's stubbornly-ingrained puritanical/evangelical values and laws probably leads to a much more reactionary and loud atheist community, and a general disdain for admitting uncertainty or lack of knowledge probably plays a role too.
I think we're still operating under different definitions of the word "movement" though, I think you need at least loosely defined goals to be a movement. The fact that there are a lot of people disenfranchised with (or too busy to be arsed about) religion to the point where religious leaders try to cater to them is reminiscent to me of a company trying new marketing tactics to recapture customers who have lost interest--the actions you refer to them taking are all descriptive of what the Christian movement is doing to sustain itself, agnostics of course being an easier target than atheists or adherents of competing faiths.
The "We Don't Do God" quote is an odd choice, as Alastair Campbell is an atheist, so that was incontrovertibly the atheist movement asserting itself. Although I can see how politically-savvy agnostics and Christians alike might get on board with removing faith language from political messages, so as to cater to a growing non-affiliated demographic.
I do agree that agnosticism threatens religion in a way that atheism cannot, but disagree that it's much due to concerted effort of the agnostics themselves, at least explicitly in the name of agnosticism, at least in the US. Which is why I wouldn't use the word "movement" to describe them/us. But hey sounds like the Brits are doing a bang-up job.
> The "We Don't Do God" quote is an odd choice, as Alastair Campbell is an atheist, so that was incontrovertibly the atheist movement asserting itself.
This is completely ahistorical. It was absolutely *not* the atheist movement asserting itself, it was the spin doctor - knowledgeable that Tony Blair was a man of faith - should not answer questions about God because it would be politically divisive. It had absolutely nothing, *nothing*, to do with his own personal beliefs.
I think there is a one word explanation for that: Obama.
Being an atheist was relatively easy in the bush years. It provided the perfect outlet for people to be nominally anti-Bush and pro-wars in the Middle East. However, once Obama came in people were no longer concerned about evangelicals because they had been taken out of power and it did not seem they would return to the cultural dominance they enjoyed under Bush. Plus after the disaster in Iraq (coupled with a wide use of torture) a hatred of Muslims was not as acceptable as it had been only a few years before.
Accordingly, the new atheists found their constant refrains from the Bush years were not working during the Obama years. The fact that many of them were relatively shallow thinkers prevented them from changing their talking points and they ended up becoming uncool Islamophobes.
> Being an atheist was relatively easy in the bush years. It provided the perfect outlet for people to be nominally anti-Bush and pro-wars in the Middle East. However, once Obama came in people were no longer concerned about evangelicals because they had been taken out of power and it did not seem they would return to the cultural dominance they enjoyed under Bush. Plus after the disaster in Iraq (coupled with a wide use of torture) a hatred of Muslims was not as acceptable as it had been only a few years before.
> Accordingly, the new atheists found their constant refrains from the Bush years were not working during the Obama years.
Your timeline is all kinds of messed up.
The early years of new atheism date to Bush's second term and the end of his first term. Harris's *The End of Faith* was published in 2004. Dawkins's *The God Delusion* was published in 2006. It was 2004 when Abu Ghraib and the torture memos leak were in the news. And while the American public overwhelming supported the war in Iraq in its early years, the tide had begun to change as early as 2004, and by 2006 polls were consistently finding that a strong majority of Americans opposed the war. So you can't point to opposition to the war in Iraq and war crimes carried out by the USA as being why new atheism waned in popularity, since new atheism was actually growing in popularity at the time of the backlash.
Moreover, new atheism continued to have a significant presence well into the Obama years. For example, Elevatorgate was in 2011 and Harris published *The Moral Landscape* in 2010. So it's not the case that once Obama came into power that people were no longer into new atheism.
Frankly, it's embarrassing that in a post about Scott Alexander's shoddy history of new atheism that this shoddy history of new atheism is enjoying upvotes.
I think the failure of the New Atheists to properly analyse the Iraq war is certainly part of the story of their downfall. I would always be careful using polling numbers about American "opposition" to war; Americans are basically sore losers and their 'backlash' to fighting war usually stems from that. If you pressed a lot of those people about their supposed opposition I can guarantee popular suggestions would be things like "they should have sent more troops" or "they should nuke Iraq".
Sorry you're so mad. But anyone who took the [moral landscape](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxalrwPNkNI) seriously is either a sycophant or an idiot (but if you're a sycophant of Harris the idiocy can generally be assumed). Also the moral landscape was in part Harris' move away from solely being defined as a new atheist, so the timing of its release helps bolster my argument.
Also what makes you think the people who were joining the new atheist group were ever part of the same group who opposed the war. Some new atheists may have been against the war but I would imagine many of those were anti-war on libertarian principles, not because they were anti-the killing of Muslims. Sorry but the new atheist movement eventually adopted Sargon and his Ilk as their thought leaders. So I'm not exactly convinced that new atheist made up the majority of Code Pink activists.
You are admitting that both of the big new atheist books came out in Bush's presidency and elevatorgate was in Obama's first term. So it seems like there is a good reason to believe my timeline isn't as off as you are arguing. I would argue elevatorgate couldn't have taken down the movement if it was not already on the decline.
The history of social movements is not going to map neatly on to political history but I think there is a valid argument that the broader political trends may have impacted the public perception of the new atheist movement.
>Sorry you're so mad. But anyone who took the moral landscape seriously is either a sycophant or an idiot (but if you're a sycophant of Harris the idiocy can generally be assumed).
Banned for being a dumbass.
> As a good Rationalist, he diligently avoids using other people's knowledge and reconstructs it all from first principles and his own foggy memory and agenda.
That's a flair!
It's quite insane that he didn't even mention how much of the anti-feminist movement grew out of the atheist/skeptic movement, especially on places like youtube. Nevermind the current "new athiests" that are closer to anti-muslim bigots.
The truth is, what really happened is that *everybody got bored* with atheism once the fundamentalists christians lost their power. The more progressively inclined then realised that social justice matters were way more important than mopping up the remnants of the fundies, while those who disliked feminism turned to the opposite side of the culture war because they felt that the new feminist movement was the bigger threat to them personally.
I mean, they certainly lost *some* power ( There was no longer a fundamentalist in the white house, the tide of gay marriage slowly turned, etc).
More importantly for the development of atheism, the *perception* of fundies as a threat dropped around the new decade. There was a ton of coverage of evolution vs creation, stem cell research, etc in the bush era, but way less as obama took over. In places like youtube the skeptic community was pretty much king, but without the sense of threat debunking creationism for the 50th time just feels kinda pointless.
When people got bored and started looking for a new issue to care about, the spread of feminism on the internet provided candidates. The sane atheists realised that sexism and racism were still a thing and joined on, and stopped bothering as much with pushing atheism as they decided it doesn't really matter if someone is religious as long as they fight for justice. The other atheists saw feminism as the real threat and made 500 videos about how anita sarkessian was going to personally arrest them for playing videogames with boobs. They similarly decided that it doesn't matter if someone is religious as long as they can own the sjws together.
I'm aware they were talking about the Obama years, and I really strongly disagree with this: "The truth is, what really happened is that everybody got bored with atheism once the fundamentalists christians lost their power."
No, they made a really strong statement about the power of fundamentalist Christians that is not warranted, Obama or no Obama. Those fundies put Trump in the White House as retaliation, in what sense have they lost any power?
> And yes, American public opinion on same-sex marriage has changed significantly over the past decade or so.
Doesn't matter, America is not a representative democracy and evangelicals continue to sit at the top.
edit:
And as /u/completely-ineffable points out, New Atheism was still going strong even into the Obama years!
Yeah, atheism/skepticism/humanism/secularism (naming was a big part of the internal debate) in that era was a resistance movement more than anything else. It had built up some serious momentum during the W years that managed to sustain it until Elevatorgate, but even before that some people were trickling out toward activism that seemed more timely, like #Occupy.
EDIT: also, this is after I had already wandered back out so I can only speculate, but there was always this tension in the movement between activists and trolls, so if all the activists gradually left...
Pretty much. Really he more inadvertently showed that trying to build a political movement on atheism was a fundamentally incoherent endeavor on either side. It was held together by Bush-era politics in addition to the positive political pronouncements of the figureheads being often vague enough to satisfy everyone from the tepid social democrats to the Resonoid libertarians, which seems to have been the Overton window for their politics early on. Or as Eagleton said in his [review](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching): "The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes." Once people started realizing that their political movement actually was political, that started falling apart. The rightward shift among many to the IDW shouldn't have been too surprising given the long-term trend in atheist/secular activism, where any whiffs of socialistic language were removed from Humanist Manifesto III and Paul Kurtz (already having moved from socialism to liberalism) was ousted.
I don't know if this is better or worse but I identified with the atheist movement before it became New, and got bored of it and gradually left before this stuff really heated up.
I started to get bored with the (New) Atheist movement when they became more concerned with browbeating theists rather than creating a positive image for atheists.
Then when I started to see a lot of their rhetoric merely being a snobbier version of the same campus preachers we'd rally around to mock, I realized that I don't need to be part of an organized body to not believe in a god.
I remember, especially in the south, we used to talk about how persecuted we were for our beliefs. We weren't persecuted, we were just needlessly antagonistic and getting justified pushback from people who thought we were being giant fucking knobs about it.
I mean, there is a lot of real anti-atheist sentiment in the US, it's fair to say that some degree of atheist persecution exists.
I think the main difference between anti-atheist sentiment and other types of prejudice is that atheists don't actually need to actually *do* anything. Muslims have many rules to follow that mark them out as targets for bigotry, women and minorities can't hide, etc. Atheists just have to... *not believe* in something. So most atheists don't really get persecuted because it's pathetically easy to hide it, and theres generally not a huge desire to go out and convert other people.
Yeah I was being hyperbolic but you get what I'm saying. Calling atheists persecuted/discriminated against in the US is generally a way to position yourself *as persecuted as* black people, LGBTQ people, Muslim people, etc which is fundamentally bullshit.
When I started out on a graduate degree one motherfucker insisted on asking a table of us at the pub who were just meeting up with each other what our opinions were on religion.
Most people said "atheist", a handful said something along the lines of "pantheist" or "agnostic", and another handful gave various answers of "Christian", "Jewish", and "Muslim".
I was close to the last and gave the only answer that didn't fit into those categories which was, roughly but as close as possible to what I remember, "I don't really have any room in my life for God": I just don't especially care, because I have a lot of other stuff going on which isn't especially relevant to religion. Seems like you have a similar view.
At this point the concept is so foreign to me and the culture I live in now that I'd have to think for a second before I could even remember my answer, and that's after spending years as a fairly high-ranking activist in the atheist movement, if I may say so as my pseudonymous self.
The thing about a career in psychiatry is you've always got at least one person who will have your back if the men in white coasts threaten you with the padded cell and at least one person willing and able to have you sectioned at the first opportunity
Edit: I'm leaving "white coasts" in as a typo because it's very funny to me to picture Bay Area fascists declaring Northern California a white nationalist state to keep out the under-IQ-endowed from their precious technocratic ~~ethno-state~~ [Atomically Communitarian Archipelago](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/)
I mean basically that's Oregon in the 19th century but you get my point.
Maybe they should just move to Oregon, it seems like a sufficiently annoying place.
> They were in it for the hamartiology
This is a classic example of people going for slightly unintuitive explanations in order to wow their readers. The much more obvious explanation is that there were some atheists who were just in it for the lulz (people like TAA) and other atheists who were in it because they actually had *some* skin in the game and opposed religion not just for abstract metaphysical reasons (which are the worst reasons to oppose religion on seeing as how malleable it is) but for the actual damage caused by certain beliefs.
But no, if you argued like this, you couldnt go "BOOM (SJW) atheists are the *real* christians. Mind. Blown." It's not even a novel comparison to make and yet so many authors are willing to butcher their own text *just* so they can put that in there.
I thought it was interesting he raised the subject of "hamartiology" because it sort of undermines his own thesis to do so. Implicitly, by raising it, he's endorsing the idea that New Atheists *had* a hamartiology, which is entirely out of line with the "morals don't real because science" strain of New Atheism which so characterised the 'movement' that Sam Harris published a whole book saying "morals actually do real because science" (as bad as that book was). Moreover, those New Atheists who endorsed Harris in that ridiculous endeavour went on - and still go on - to deny any notion of "sin" as out line with their quasi-utilitarian philosophy of ethics as a dispassionate *science*.
That isn't to say that he's wrong in that New Atheists (including Harris) really did and *do* have a sort of millenarian concept of justice-as-eschaton reframed for a Godless world, but characterising it in terms of a Christian theology makes a mess of his point: in his specific framing of that hamartiology he's saying that a group he closely identifies with, a group that includes him, always had pregnant in it a resentful Christian ethic (thanks Nietzsche) that demanded punishment against transgressors.
That doesn't make a mess of his point by itself except rhetorically, to be fair, but frequent readers of Alexander's own stuff will also immediately notice that this *exactly* characterises his views of the "SJW" or "Social Justice" movements he is so permanently angry with. See for example his notorious "untitled", or his cowardly defences of Trump against the charge of racism. Or better yet, his ridiculous paean to abject fearfulness (and fearfully self-interested fascism) in [Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/)
What a man, eh?
It’s not even novel for *him*. Over the summer, he argued in complete seriousness that Pride had become the new American civic religion, because Pride parades look like 4th of July parades.
What struck me is that his "hamartiology" idea is just the MRA anti feminist idea, 'feminism just puts the original sin on men and not women!' targeted at SJWs and with more words.
Yes, there was always a tension between the trolling and the activism, and although most people really possessed both natures in varying degrees, the big fight about sexism (which Scott Alexander somehow forgot about) finally ripped them apart and destroyed the movement.
There also were a lot of people very angry about all the pedo coverups in the 2001-2010s which seems to have died down a lot. This might have also be a reason why people searching for atheism has died down. (As searching for a subject is what you do when you want to know more about a subject, which makes SA's usage of google trends weird. Hammer nail i guess)
Argh forgot to mention this was about the catholic church. Which kinda was important information. Sorry about that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases
Ah, okay, I’m aware of a LOT of Catholic Church abuses but thought there might have been creepy shit in the NuAtheist circles as well-then again, I think the Epstein thing makes it apparent that child abuse rings don’t have to be Religious.
No it is totally my bad. I was referring to the catholic abuse scandals which in my limited exp a lot of people became aware of during that era (with a highlight during the end of the naughties (i think that is the term) when a lot of Dutch people actually took the step of officially getting out of the church. (There is some administrative bs going on which means that if you were ever baptized or more you count as a catholic forever, you need to send them several (iirc) letter to unsub. There is a reason im a catholic, it is sloth ;) )). I was referring to this happening, of course i can only speak for my exp as a dutchman. So I have no clue about the rest of the world. Being an atheist never seemed like a big problem during my lifetime here at least.
E: btw because getting out of the church is hard, as hard as cancelling a subscription to a gym, the church can count more people as members than actually are members, so if you ever see stats about religion in the Netherlands, check where the numbers come from.
Im not saying that people who were into atheism+ had no theoretical gripes with religion, but its obviously nonsense to say that "metaphysical reasons were equally important" when the entire point is that no, for this group of atheists, abstract worries about whether the cosmological argument goes through are decidedly less important than actual harm caused by religious beliefs.
But I am impressed at how uncharitable you managed to be.
>Im not saying that people who were into atheism+ had no theoretical gripes with religion, but its obviously nonsense to say that "metaphysical reasons were equally important" when the entire point is that no, for this group of atheists, abstract worries about whether the cosmological argument goes through are decidedly less important than actual harm caused by religious beliefs.
I mean *you* are the one who said that they are the worst reasons to oppose religion; I was addressing your point. Someone might have "skin in the game" when opposing religion but they also might be critical of the metaphysics of religion in a way that's related (i.e "why is this ridiculous thing the reason I'm oppressed, it doesn't make any sense.")
>But I am impressed at how uncharitable you managed to be.
Ain't this sneerclub? lmao
>that they are the worst reasons to oppose religion
Actually I fully stand by that, what I rejected (somewhat rudely, I admit) is the implication that I was saying that, say, LGBT people or people who care about LGBT rights oppose religion *solely* on those grounds.
As for the claim that metaphysical reasons are ultimately bad reasons to oppose religion on, I think this will become clear to anyone who spends time seriously trying to do this. First off, nonphilosophers vastly underestimate just how subtle people like Aquinas or, worse, Duns Scotus can be. These arguments are about as bulletproof as they get. A refutation of their versions of the cosmological argument (not the cliffnotes version) would basically amount to a refutation of the entire edifice of aristotelian philosophy, which is quite a tall order indeed. These kinds of definite refutations are basically unheard of in the history of philosophy and have generally very little to do with what becomes and ceases to be popular in philosophy.
But this is still assuming that religion (and really weve just been talking about christianity) is necessarily wedded to one or two particular versions of thomism. What do we do with people who conceptualize their deity differently? What about maniacs like John Caputo who use Heidegger and Derrida to make sense of their god's way of being? How are you gonna argue against that? A rejection of Christianity on metaphysical grounds is a nonstarter for the simple reason that Christianity isn't wedded to any particular metaphysical assumption.
So you might bite the bullet on this one and go sure, there's a vast number of philosophies of christianity but that doesn't faze me, no, I can simply refute all of them! Really consider whether at this point, you're *simply* standing in for good and proper, nonideological philosophy, or whether you've started out with the assumption that christianity in *all* its guises simply *must* be false. Is that a very advantageous position to be in? That's why I think that this line of argument is probably the worst one. It only gets worse when you include other religions.
>Ain't this sneerclub? lmao
The things that are posted here tend to be bad enough that you don't have to artificially make them worse to poke fun at them, in my experience.
> A rejection of Christianity on metaphysical grounds is a nonstarter for the simple reason that Christianity isn't wedded to any particular metaphysical assumption.
That seems overstated to me: it seems to me there are significant metaphysical disputes at stake in the difference between Thomas and Hume->Kant->Schopenhauer->Comte->Nietzsche, etc. Caputo requires *a different set of disputes*, but I wouldn't put the matter *beyond* dispute.
Though I think you're right that it's a nonstarter--certainly, or close enough to certainly for practical purposes--for any random selected redditor, or someone like this, into atheism+, or something like this. They don't even know what any of this means; they don't even know that there is any space in which anything on this point might mean anything.
>>A rejection of Christianity on metaphysical grounds is a nonstarter for the simple reason that Christianity isn't wedded to any particular metaphysical assumption.
>That seems overstated to me: it seems to me there are significant metaphysical disputes at stake in the difference between Thomas and Hume->Kant->Schopenhauer->Comte->Nietzsche, etc. Caputo requires a different set of disputes, but I wouldn't put the matter beyond dispute.
I think both of your comments are compatible with each other.
1.
A *general* refutation of Christianity as an ontological proposal, which seeks to overcome all possible metaphysical (or indeed anti-metaphysical) arguments for Christianity in all its forms *does* seem like an insurmountably difficult task.
2.
A piecemeal rejection of some of the key players in the dispute is more a plausibly less Quixotic endeavour. For example, we can clear just clear out some of the scrubs on grounds of parsimony ("ignore the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses"). Concurrently, we can identify key weaknesses which we think are at least roughly part of the metaphysical scaffold that *some significant number* of otherwise disparate theologies otherwise share.
Still, (1) remains a forbiddingly over-the-top exercise to set as a task for the philosopher, whilst (2) doesn't answer the challenge (1) sets the philosopher.
I think both of these are consistent with your and /u/DieLichtung's claims and serve as fairly representative of what you're both getting at at the same time.
> A piecemeal rejection of some of the key players in the dispute is more a plausibly less Quixotic endeavour.
Idk, it seems even simpler to me. There's no need to get into any metaphysics at all. Was there a guy who healed the sick, raised the dead, walked on water, fed hundreds with a few fish and some bread, and topped it off by coming back from the dead? No cuz magic don't real, and therefore the Christianity of the vast majority of Christians is wrong.
Now this doesn't rescue our would-be sneerer, since upthread they are explicitly talking about metaphysics. But I think we can charity them into a more reasonable position. They [said](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/dq3x2i/sa_just_wrote_a_history_of_new_atheism_and_its/f6ew4v4/) (emphasis mine):
>Someone might have "skin in the game" when opposing religion but they also might be critical of the metaphysics of religion in a way that's related (**i.e "why is this ridiculous thing the reason I'm oppressed, it doesn't make any sense."**)
This ridiculous thing could be Aquinas's philosophy—in which case it's far from clear that it's actually ridiculous. But it could instead be something like "a New York farmboy found some golden plates in a hill containing a lost history" or "after he came back from the dead Jesus gave his favorite followers the authority to run his church". In my experience, these are the primary things atheists are thinking of when they say "why is this ridiculous thing the reason I'm oppressed", and it's only later that they get fooled into thinking they can debunk all of philosophy of religion. If we avoid this foolish move, I think we still have plenty of ground for our atheist to complain about ridiculous things in religion.
I don't disagree, and perhaps I should have made clearer that I'm not responding directly to our would-be here, so much as attempting to reconcile /u/wokeupabug and /u/DieLichtung on the question of whether philosophical argument can finalise these things if done properly.
> No cuz magic don't real
But you haven’t stepped outside metaphysics with this answer though. And I get it, you’re being deliberately flippant here and blah blah blah, but it speaks to a broader point I’d defend. You’re 100% right in focusing on the historical claims Christianity makes rather than the massive theological apparatuses Christians have made over the millennia to make sense of those claims. But, in examining the veracity of those for-really-real empirical claims, we still bring with us an implicit understanding of what counts as a good explanation. If we want to write off (a certain account of) miracles because causal closure, then we’re doing metaphysics. If we want to be source critical of writings that some people think is scripture, then we’re doing epistemology. I don’t think Mormons are mistaken because of any non-philosophical reason(s). I think they’re mistaken exactly because believing the story of Joseph Smith requires some pretty terrible epistemology.
This might open us back up to the charge of having to answer Aquinas, Scotus, whoever, but I actually don’t think it exposes us that much. I think even among the schoolmen we'd be surprised to find just how much of their defenses of Christianity rest on dogmatic premises and can be (and in many cases are explicitly) divorced from their broader philosophical projects.
And all this might be obvious to you; I don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence here. I mostly wanted to get my thoughts straight after I read what I took to be a reasonably provocative post (within a reasonably provocative discussion).
>>Idk, it seems even simpler to me. There's no need to get into any metaphysics at all. Was there a guy who healed the sick, raised the dead, walked on water, fed hundreds with a few fish and some bread, and topped it off by coming back from the dead?
No cuz magic don't real, and therefore the Christianity of the vast majority of Christians is wrong.
>But you haven’t stepped outside metaphysics with this answer though.
This is fundamentally what I was getting at. "Magic isn't real" is a simple (yet still metaphysical) claim that an atheist can make without attempting to counter every argument made by theologians over millennia. To me, it seemed like u/DieLichtung was saying that this reason is..
not as valid? It seems he interpreted "metaphysical reasons" as "taking issue with the entire Western theological tradition" instead of "not believing in magic" which is what u/completely-ineffable correctly guessed I was trying to talk about.
> "Magic isn't real" is a simple (yet still metaphysical) claim that an atheist can make without attempting to counter every argument made by theologians over millennia.
Let’s be clear about what ’magic isnt real’ is standing in for here. If what we mean by it is: “ad hoc phenomena indescribable through covering laws (or something like this) aren’t possible, even in principle” -then yes, they would. Because Aquinas et al. give accounts of how such phenomena are or might be possible. And I think it stands to reason that someone who wants to defend the former should seek out the best cases for the latter, just as an intellectual integrity thing.
And I think dielichtung’s right here in claiming that all these metaphysical excursions on the part of our atheist+ have been downstream from a first order concern about religion’s place in the moral sphere. At least their presence on reddit over the years that I’ve seen would seem to make that claim pretty unarguable. And I also think the decision to assume the kind of position that atheists+ do is also a confession of a particular moral stance. One that values self-assertion and mundane human achievement and yadda yadda yadda; everyone should read *A Secular Age*, it’s really good.
> Let’s be clear about what ’magic isnt real’ is standing in for here. If what we mean by it is: “ad hoc phenomena indescribable through covering laws (or something like this) aren’t possible, even in principle” -then yes, they would. Because Aquinas et al. give accounts of how such phenomena are or might be possible. And I think it stands to reason that someone who wants to defend the former should seek out the best cases for the latter, just as an intellectual integrity thing.
I think you make a good point, but it idea that questioning the existence of the supernatural requires rigorously debunking every theologian since Aquinas kinda...feels off? I mean, of course a person saying "magic isn't real" and all that implies will be challenging major bits of theology, but is that really much of a problem that any attempt is a bust? Theological claims may not all be *obviously* false, but they do have valid criticisms; a lot of atheist/agnostic philosophers walked so we could run, haha.
My hypothesis is that Scott wants to think "SJWs" are ruining everything and so whenever he writes about virtually anything at all he hunts for that angle.
Also, Scott isn't going to end up in a psych ward going on a rant about this, no see he is the psych ward so he'll be able to know how to convince the other psychologists that he isn't crazy.
I read that and was going ‘citation needed’ and ‘bad faith/you would
delete this comment if somebody else made it’ a lot. But of course, the
ssc’ers love the article.
I even mentioned on the ssc sub that my exp with gaming forums was
different and i cant recall ever seeing a ‘atheism vs theism’ subforum.
But that just got downvoted. (At -1 now). E; deleted the post btw, I
didn’t want to participate in SSC anymore, so I shouldn’t
participate.
Also he used to have something about the band ‘bad religion’ in the
article. But he removed it after people told him this was an 80s band.
(Another one of the weird SA doesnt know certain obvious things, things.
Like him not knowing the creator of the proud boys was from vice
magazine, or being 25 when he heard of social justice).
E: also ‘it got 60.000 emails!’ So now the 60k number is significant?
But when we talk about the number of alt-right redditors/4channers 50k
is ‘But it’s still 0.02% of the US population’?
lol he didn't know Gavin McInnes was at Vice? Like you didn't have to be an edgy teenage fan of it back when it was edgy (nervously raises hand) to know it was in the news that Shane Smith outed him because it was bad optics when they became a massive international organisation, and that was *before* McInnes fully came out as a fascist. No but seriously somebody give me a source on Alexander being unaware of this, that's hilarious.
He learned this last month. It was in one of the monthly [linkdumps](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/07/links-10-19/).
Edit: edited in the link.
> Am I the last person to realize that Gavin McInnes, the founder of the “Proud Boys” hate group, also founded Vice Magazine?
Bonus points: ssc commenters are defending the proud boys and saying it isn't a hate group.
And nobody says 'wtf vice isnt a hate group'. Because needless bs pedantic shit is only for defending the right.
E: also pretty dissapointing that the 'truth seekers' of ssc can recognize a brown shirt paramilitary group when it is standing right in front of them shouting about cereals and beating up protesters [which the proud boys initiated btw, the proudboys are lying about this].
Feedly saving the post as it was originally published keeps coming up handy with SSC posts. "If you liked music, there were atheist bands like [Bad Religion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religion) (classy logo [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religion#/media/File:Crossbuster_symbol.svg))." was in the paragraph about atheist media between TV shows and quotes.
Links reproduced as in the original text. Please note that the first goddamn sentence in that Wikipedia article states the band was formed in 1980, but apparently Scott didn't read quite that far.
At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.
>Feedly saving the post as it was originally published keeps coming up handy with SSC posts.
When I first read SSC I remember being impressed that he kept a prominent list of his mistakes to demonstrate his intellectual honesty.
...I am less impressed now that I know that 99.99% of his mistakes are quietly corrected without any acknowledgement.
Come on this isn't nice it isn't done quietly, you just need to read the 700+ comments under each article to see if he corrected anything. Not like it is hidden or anything. /s
(I share your disappointment btw)
Come on deicide was a way better band. ['Deicide - once upon the cross' (1995) (content warning: you are about to listen to a death metal band called Deicide singing about Jesus, what do you expect?)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9NESceABdA) opening lyric 'father?! Why have you abandoned me?'. *heavy riffs start*
(As a metalhead seeying somebody go : we had such good discussions on the internet about religion in the early phases of the internet is quite funny).
E: thanks for the info btw, my reader had not saved the post as originally published.
At least one commenter at the main sub has their head on
straight:
here’s a far simpler theory that makes better sense of the timing,
that makes testable predictions, and that doesn’t need support from
wooey 50¢ words from theology to blinker folk into thinking they’ve
understood something they really haven’t:
It was just politics.
Five short paragraphs later…
(Earlier, when Clinton was president, the incentives pointed toward
defending him against impeachment. They settled on the story that it was
about sex, rather than about lying under oath. Consequently US liberals
shifted to be much more sexually permissive during that time. The LGBT
movement rode that wave and then the next wave of atheism as well.)
So I had to jump out when I got to the bit about the “blue tribe”
experimenting with atheism as their identity. Very few Democrats were
ever atheists, and it’s really a heavily Republican stereotype that it
was ever otherwise:
fwiw, PZ Myers thought
the article was mostly-OK, except the failure to mention
Elevatorgate. Lots more comments than you usually see on a Pharyngula
post these days, too.
I really think just comes down to religion having progressively less
influence on public policy over time. Once upon a time, the assumption
was that everyone was Christian and anything outside that norm was
challenging and you were probably powerless to change it. This was
followed by the Bush years, when Christianity was no longer the default
by evangelicals could still wield political power. At this point,
atheism was normal enough for “New Atheism” to form, but not strong
enough to do much. But now, in the Obama and Trump years, religion is
mainly found clinging on to its last vestiges of political influence via
appointed judges and culture war wedge points. Religion struggles to
make a dent on either party’s agenda (abortion and wedding cakes
excepted), so there’s not much point in announcing your atheism.
> religion is mainly found clinging on to its last vestiges of political influence via appointed judges and culture war wedge points
The phrases "clinging on to" and "last vestiges" are in something of a massive contradiction to Trump's - and more broadly the Republican Party's - base, who are both extremely powerful in any real sense and intensely religious.
Really? White evangelicals are the most loyal segment of Trump’s base, and are the subset of the GOP that strongly favors of him.
https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/evangelical-protestants-and-evangelicalism/
https://amp.axios.com/white-evangelicals-support-trump-2020-voters-demography-bc92ed44-1601-4928-af9c-96f72e77f562.html
https://www.prri.org/spotlight/white-evangelical-support-for-donald-trump-at-all-time-high/
I don't know where you live, but in most of the U.S., atheism is still definitely "outside the norm" and announcing it will get you nasty glances and negative reactions.
Seriously, reading this has ruined my morning. The SJWs have to be blamed for everything, including atheism not being as popular a topic for internet flamewars as it was a decade ago.
Dude’s about six months away from being locked in a padded room, writing anti-SJW screeds on the walls in his own shit.
(edit) Argh, and his evidence for this is literally just: “here’s a few cherry-picked atheism blogs that post more about racism/sexism now! Also: google searches for atheism have gone down and racism/sexism searches have gone up! COINCIDENCE!?”
Gee, I wonder what event could have caused people to worry more about sexism/racism starting around the time of the last presidential election cycle? Must be atheist bloggers turning into SJWs because of “hamartiology”, that’s a sane fucking answer!
I read that and was going ‘citation needed’ and ‘bad faith/you would delete this comment if somebody else made it’ a lot. But of course, the ssc’ers love the article.
I even mentioned on the ssc sub that my exp with gaming forums was different and i cant recall ever seeing a ‘atheism vs theism’ subforum. But that just got downvoted. (At -1 now). E; deleted the post btw, I didn’t want to participate in SSC anymore, so I shouldn’t participate.
Also he used to have something about the band ‘bad religion’ in the article. But he removed it after people told him this was an 80s band. (Another one of the weird SA doesnt know certain obvious things, things. Like him not knowing the creator of the proud boys was from vice magazine, or being 25 when he heard of social justice).
E: also ‘it got 60.000 emails!’ So now the 60k number is significant? But when we talk about the number of alt-right redditors/4channers 50k is ‘But it’s still 0.02% of the US population’?
Kicking off with that Thucydides prediction and comparing Sparta as such to your target is weird in the era of the 300 movies
He isn’t a very good stylist is he?
At least one commenter at the main sub has their head on straight:
Five short paragraphs later…
Ah, well, nevertheless.
So I had to jump out when I got to the bit about the “blue tribe” experimenting with atheism as their identity. Very few Democrats were ever atheists, and it’s really a heavily Republican stereotype that it was ever otherwise:
https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:610195/datastream/PDF/download/citation.pdf
fwiw, PZ Myers thought the article was mostly-OK, except the failure to mention Elevatorgate. Lots more comments than you usually see on a Pharyngula post these days, too.
I really think just comes down to religion having progressively less influence on public policy over time. Once upon a time, the assumption was that everyone was Christian and anything outside that norm was challenging and you were probably powerless to change it. This was followed by the Bush years, when Christianity was no longer the default by evangelicals could still wield political power. At this point, atheism was normal enough for “New Atheism” to form, but not strong enough to do much. But now, in the Obama and Trump years, religion is mainly found clinging on to its last vestiges of political influence via appointed judges and culture war wedge points. Religion struggles to make a dent on either party’s agenda (abortion and wedding cakes excepted), so there’s not much point in announcing your atheism.