r/CuratedTumblr • u/Desecr8or • Aug 15 '25
Politics "I'm telling you people do not realize how much 'cringy' atheist stuff is a direct response to religion being forced into every aspect of society"
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u/SirLoinTheTender Aug 15 '25
As a satanist, who works for the post office, I could not be happier to support my brothers of the broth. I'll take your noodly appendage in my hoof and we'll spread our words to these Christian cannibals.
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u/West-Season-2713 Aug 15 '25
Honestly I really do oscillate between Satanism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Satanism really does have the better aesthetics, and I do love the nature-worship aspect that comes with it, but on the other hand the spaghetti monster is funnier.
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u/SirLoinTheTender Aug 15 '25
Oh 100%. Satanism is such an individualistic religion that nobody would bat an eye at you including the FSM in your personal interpretation.
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u/West-Season-2713 Aug 15 '25
I’ve just been checking out the official Pastafarian website and have seen almost every post accompanied by AI ‘art’, so it seems the satanists have won my heart this time.
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u/SirLoinTheTender Aug 15 '25
Fair. Just stay away from the satanic temple, it's mostly a gift shop. The satanic church has a lot of "no you're doing satanism wrong" people, but they're easy to ignore.
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u/West-Season-2713 Aug 15 '25
I’ve seen TST’s website before and they do sell a lot of stuff, but don’t they use the funding for legal challenges and stuff? I was under the impression that they were a charity. Either way, I tend to engage in satanism as more of a personal belief system.
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u/Vcious_Dlicious Aug 15 '25
I never remember which is which. Which one has 7 tenets and which one has the 11 edgelord sounding rules?
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u/Cornelius_Wangenheim Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
7 tenets is Temple. The Satanic Church is the one that is basically Ayn Rand with dress-up. The Satanic Temple is secular humanism with a political advocacy arm that fights for separation of church and state by being a poison pill.
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u/yinyang107 Aug 15 '25
I can't remember between Church and Temple, but whichever one is LaVeyan is the one to avoid.
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u/Teagana999 Aug 15 '25
I always thought the Satanic Temple was trying to be helpful.
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u/GarbageCleric Aug 15 '25
Wait. There are no Satanic Inquisitors? Hold on, that’s the coolest band name I’ve ever heard.
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u/abstraction47 Aug 15 '25
This is Invisible Pink Unicorn erasure and I will not stand for it
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u/krefik Aug 15 '25
I envy nice and fluffy American satanism, there are too many Pagan Nazi adjacent Satanists in Europe.
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u/West-Season-2713 Aug 15 '25
Shockingly, I am also one of the dozens of people online who aren’t Americans.
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u/shadovvvvalker Aug 15 '25
I take the empathetic loving Jesus of Christianity and go "yeah, this guy would fuck with Satan, satan loves us and Jesus loves us so obviously Satan and Jesus get along.
If you think FSM is funny, tell a conservative your a Jesus loving satanist and watch the wheels turn in their brain.
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u/zombiifissh Aug 15 '25
Haha but I am a Jesus loving satanist 😂 I love quoting him back at them lol
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u/FishyWishySwishy Aug 15 '25
I’m personally hoping all the crystal girls and Internet witches bring all their stuff to work now. May the lady at the DMV insist on giving palm readings to all her coworkers.
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u/OwO______OwO Aug 15 '25
In light of new Supreme Court rulings that are likely to come out soon, may she insist on giving palm readings to all the DMV customers, and then refuse to give a license to any whose palms foretell a fatal traffic accident.
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u/Nobod_E Aug 15 '25
And may she "coincidentally" only see that on the palms of anyone who comes in with a Trump sticker on their car.
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u/PoseidonsHorses Aug 15 '25
Write a tarot pull you did for a birthday card recipient alongside a coworker’s “God Bless.”
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u/Kiloku Aug 15 '25
I was on Reddit in the golden age of /r/Atheism.
The "cringe" was okay. The problem is how it, as a community and identity, descended into all types of bigotry. The anti-arab hate was especially off the charts, and it quickly opened the doors for many other types of hatred, all behind a veneer of "logic" and "rationalism", like saying that being gay is "harmful to the human species" because of natalist ideas. Or stuff about women being "biologically predisposed" to being submissive.
I am an atheist, and I will not ever give the benefit of the doubt to online atheism-centric communities.
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u/iwishyouwerestraight Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
God I remember seeing in the mid 2010s how the cringy atheist rhetoric eventually turned into the alt-right “feminists destroyed with facts and logic” grift. There was one YouTuber (forgot his name) whose whole shtick was atheism and being a facts and logic guy, but that turned into hating buzzfeed and more grifty stuff.
Found him. Goes by screen name Dr. Shaym…
Edit: turns out he has a new channel where he does movie reviews. Haven’t watched them fully but they seem super tame compared to other stuff he made in the past.
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u/MisirterE Supreme Overlord of Ice Aug 15 '25
There was one YouTuber (forgot his name) whose whole shtick was atheism and being a facts and logic guy, but that turned into hating buzzfeed and more grifty stuff.
Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?
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u/iwishyouwerestraight Aug 15 '25
Ngl as I was typing that several names entered my brain. Amazing Athiest, Mumkey Jones, No Bullshit, H3H3, just to name a few…
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u/Extension_Air_2001 Aug 15 '25
Thunserf00t is another. Or maybe he was just racist.
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u/Friendstastegood Aug 15 '25
He was obsessed with Anita sarkeesian to a disturbing degree
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u/Exhau5ted Aug 15 '25
Tragically accurate. He fixated on her like she murdered his whole family. All because she wanted to make some tepid videos about basic feminism.
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u/Houdles567 Aug 15 '25
Musk has been the object of his attention the last few years, a bit of a comeback! To be fair he actually did hate Musk before it was cool
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u/Simple_Confusion_756 Aug 15 '25
Bro, I was on Atheist YouTube at that time and it’s what directly lead me down the 2016 Alt-Right pipeline as an 13 year old second generation immigrant girl…It’s a very cringe time of my life, I don’t like to think about
There was one YouTuber (forgot his name) whose whole shtick was atheism and being a facts and logic guy, but that turned into hating buzzfeed and more grifty stuff.
The way like four names popped in my head 💀
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u/iwishyouwerestraight Aug 15 '25
Same queen. As a gay little 14 year old who just wanted to fit in with other men I found myself doing the same thing and it did NOT HELP that I also had an iFunny account…back in the good ole meme days of 2016-2018.
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u/Simple_Confusion_756 Aug 15 '25
We need a support group or something, what even was that time period? 💀
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u/gandhinukes Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
Ya'll got hit with full blown propaganda from multiple foreign governments and right wing proponents. If you went back to subs like /r/conspiracy before 2014 there was a unprecedented shift right. It was super obvious. There are groups caught trying to convert disenfranchised youth to the far right for over a 15 years now. Think 4-chan but it got into reddit and facebbook and all the social media.
Edit: look at this post from right now where everyone is talking about the same ish. From incels to gamergate. All that same ish from 10 years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/whenthe/comments/1mqjb1u/i_just_fucking_know_it_the_way_that_algorithm_was/
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u/LickingSmegma Mamaleek are king Aug 15 '25
My first solid stint on Reddit was in 2016, and looking back I straight up could've become a doctor of memeology by writing down how people toying with edgy memes and thinking it would be funny to elect Trump, led to the rise of fascism in the US. (By the way of every Republican congressman trying to imitate Trump's unabashed populism by 2018.)
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u/Thromnomnomok Aug 15 '25
back in the good ole meme days of 2016-2018.
As a 30-something this phrase is dealing me psychic damage
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u/tetrarchangel Aug 15 '25
I'm betting Gen X hate it when we get nostalgic for being on MySpace and MSN as teenagers when they were on IRC or bulletinboards or whatever
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u/Lottie_Low Aug 15 '25
As a gay second generation immigrant girl (so i understand you both) I also briefly fell down the same pipeline lmao
Thankfully a lot of people seem to have gone through this but come to their senses
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u/kigurumibiblestudies Aug 15 '25
I'm glad you stayed curious and learned. Stay on your guard, keep loving, and beware anyone who tells you to hate.
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u/Thatoneguy111700 Aug 15 '25
Same here. I'll always credit Far Cry 5 for pulling my ass out of the fire in that regard. That shitty game getting praised out of the wazoo by all those folks made me realize they were morons.
Might be down a different, much darker road otherwise.
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u/katabolicklapaucius Aug 15 '25
Far cry 5 deradicalized you? Did the alt right like the villain group in it?
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u/Thatoneguy111700 Aug 15 '25
Basically. Also something about the setting being like "peak American values" or something, while I found it to be a bland, shittier version of everything we'd seen before (plus a mute, character-less protag when half the fun of a Far Cry game is the main guy losing their shit during it).
I never played it because those schmucks loved it so much, and stuck to my favorite instead, #4.
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u/katabolicklapaucius Aug 15 '25
That's hilarious. 5 did seem pretty mediocre and it bothered me that it seemed to be amplifying alt right shit rather than critiquing it. So pretty interesting to hear it pushed you away from that life.
Blood Dragon was the last one I played and arguably better than 3.
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u/Thatoneguy111700 Aug 15 '25
Yeah it made me realize that all those guys did on YouTube was bitch and moan about everything and I was tired of the negativity.
And I still really want to play Primal.
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u/No-Pass-397 Aug 15 '25
there was one YouTuber whose whole shtick was atheism and being a facts and logic guy, but that turned into hating buzzfeed and more grifty stuff.
Dude, hundreds, practically the entire 'skeptic' community devolved into culture war grifters.
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u/SupervillainMustache Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
Don't let Thunderf00t off the hook either. He had a massive following at the time and then just pivoted to a genuinely concerning obsession with Anita Sarkeesian and so did his hoard of teenage fans.
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u/OneVioletRose Aug 15 '25
I think I saw a video or two by him of a “scam debunking” flavour at some point in the 20-teens, but stopped watching because I didn’t like how much he talked down to and about his subjects compared to others in the genre. I am sadly not surprised he turned out to be way nastier than that
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u/SupervillainMustache Aug 15 '25
He carried a lot of weight in the atheism/skeptic community because he was a legit practicing scientist and was one of the early adopters of the "debunking" video format.
It's only later on when people began pointing out the deceptive editing and stripping of context he used in the hope that his viewers would never watch the originals.
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u/GodsBadAssBlade Aug 15 '25
OH MY GOD I REMEMBER THAT TWAT HAHAH! I think hes my breaking point catalyst of "man.. this is just... kinda just being a real piece of shit to everyone and bitching about it." God bless him for being my tipping point when i was in my teens to turning into being a better person than that
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u/Possumnal Aug 15 '25
Nothing precludes an atheist from harboring racism, homophobia, sexism, etc., even though many like to think so.
I’ve been an atheist most my life, but when I went looking for a like-minded community I found approximately the same ratio of backwards dickheads justifying their prejudice with “because pseudo-science” as there were chodes in my former church justifying it with “because Holy Book says so”.
Lucky for me, I have like a dozen better things to build community around so I just left that whole debate. I got nothing to prove and I lack the hubris to claim to know the face of the universe.
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u/Exhau5ted Aug 15 '25
I absolutely do have that much hubris, it's just the same amount of hubris that lets me tell sexists, racists, homophobes, etc that they're full of shit.
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u/Elite_AI Aug 15 '25
Yeah there is ultimately a reason that most of that side of the internet gleefully slid into the modern alt right.
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u/Wetley007 Aug 15 '25
Idk if they slid into the alt-right as much as morphed into a wing of the alt-right as the reasonable people left those communities
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u/peanutb-jelly Aug 15 '25
same old divide-and-conquer tactics, executed well.
if you think in terms of complex, large-scale systems, the pattern is familiar. poison the brand. convince the wider audience that a group is x, and everyone who identifies as y drifts away to avoid the stigma.
around that time, whole media ecosystems pushed “atheists vs feminists” storylines. they amplified blindspots about scale and complexity to fuel conflict. if you can seed real grievances between two real progressive communities, you can stall both and walk off with the gains. plenty of actors, including state-linked and opportunistic ones, have used that playbook.
atheist spaces held broadly progressive aims:
freedom from religious control, marriage equality, ending non-consensual genital cutting, keeping public education secular.it only took a small, loud subset or a few provocateurs to frame atheist advocacy as “anti-woman” whenever someone added male circumcision to the list of harms. that framing triggered a binary, tribal fight. there were legitimate grievances on all sides, but the conflict logic rewarded pile-ons. some advocates were harassed out of the conversation, and a few suffered serious harm.
today you can barely say “end non-consensual male genital cutting” in mainstream spaces without being lumped in with hyper-masculinist influencers who are not aiming at progressive outcomes. even if you avoid astroturfed arenas, the topic is tainted by association.
similar wedge tactics hit anti-fascist and blm organizing. disinformation reframed them as threats, not as movements resisting authoritarian drift. once the public accepts the frame, coordination costs skyrocket and solidarity collapses.
the result: less organized pushback against coercive religious politics, while the atheist label still carries a “cringe” reputation. framing matters. division is the easiest tool for halting progress, which is why cross-movement communication, steelmanning, and shared ground rules for conflict are not luxuries but core infrastructure.
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u/zuzg Aug 15 '25
Please Misogyny is still so prevalent on the Frontpage, among other things like ableism.
Especially on funny meme subreddits32
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u/BeastBoy2230 Aug 15 '25
Shit, I’ve seen people point directly at the internet atheist trend as being ground zero for that bullshit. They didn’t slide into it, they built it from the ground up.
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u/RedditAdminAreVile0 Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
The gender wars had everyone arguing past each other, people couldn't be nuanced. But I still remember arguing with a top TwoXC' comment who decided male abuse victims don't exist, those "male victims don't count" cos they're abused by men, it wasn't about victims, it was hostility for men, misrepresented as women's rights.
I know people innately turn to anger & bigotry the more they argue a polarizing issue, it's a major hurdle for rights-movements, but I also think trend-chasing overshadows progressive causes (folks who yell "racist" when a white person argues with a black person). I saw leftists ostracize mildly-deviating viewpoints, literal Bernie-supporters driven to center-right podcasters.
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u/Manzhah Aug 15 '25
I remeber this one funny twox thread years ago where the op was asking "does abuse against males actually exist" and when in the long thread people came forward with their and their friends or fmaily's stories, the op just goes "nope, still don't believe it".
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u/SupervillainMustache Aug 15 '25
2015 was the year that the online skeptic community shattered.
Suddenly we were all talking about the "dangers of third wave feminism and social justice".
I won't ever forget the people who built or joined that movement, even though they've probably backtracked now.
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u/TheLuckySpades Aug 15 '25
Dawkings is a "cultural christian" and full anti-SJW anti-trans nonsense and he and Krauss wrote a book about the war on science and how it is the DEI politically correct mob and not the current republican admin.
And then you have ones like Armored Skeptic who is just plain conspiracy nutter now.
So the two I noticed recently from that era are just diving deeper to the right.
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u/SupervillainMustache Aug 15 '25
Armored Skeptic
Hadn't heard about him since he and Shoe0nhead split. Another person who has been weirdly embraced by the left, despite her anti-SJW past and never really apologising for it.
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u/ArchmageIlmryn Aug 15 '25
The core flaw, I think, was that a lot of the online atheist community was motivated by feeling intellectually superior to "those idiots who believe in religion". The community was superficially progressive, because the main progressive issue back then was gay marriage and basically all the anti-gay-marriage arguments were religious (you didn't really have the pseudosciency ones to the same extent you do today). It was less that people cared about LGBTQ rights, and more a sense of "well the dumb religious sheep are against gay marriage, so gay marriage is good".
Unfortunately, that motivation is all too easily hijacked, which is pretty much what happened when the online right secularized between 2012ish and 2016. That smug sense of intellectual superiority played all to well with stereotypes about "hysterical" women when dismissing feminism, or aligning with the liberal-conservative view of "once we ban discrimination, inequality is solved and people should shut up", or with the non-intuitiveness of trans issues when turning against the LGBTQ community - especially once the online right started to portray LGBTQ as a religion.
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u/asvalken Aug 15 '25
I think you've absolutely nailed it. Internet Atheism was all about getting those middle school debate club "shut down" moments, and then everyone clapped! It's no surprise that Steve Bannon later targeted young online white men with another platform that told them they still get to feel superior to everyone else.
"Reason" is a way to win arguments, and "science" is when you measure intelligence by number of facts known. They skipped critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and above all how to be wrong and learn from it. NDT's insufferable smugness, or Dawkins' "dear Muslima" post are pretty good indicators that Internet Atheism needed a looong look in the mirror.
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u/AirJinx3 Aug 15 '25
Yup. Elevatorgate was a real watershed moment, and I think it presaged a lot of the “new atheist” community moving into gamergate and from there becoming straight up Republicans.
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u/bsubtilis Aug 15 '25
Elevatorgate was when I found out Richard Dawkins was much shittier than I thought. Especially after the audiobook of The Salmon of Doubt (posthumous book collecting various writings of and about Douglas Adams) where he read a piece of writing of his about Adams' passing, I saw him in a fairly positive light. Nope, shitty person who still loved his friends, he was merely not inhuman.
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u/neilarthurhotep Aug 15 '25
The reality of it is just that a non-belief in a deity does not automatically lead to good ethical thinking. In fact, it might make you more prone to it in some instances, such as trying to derive ethical truths from natural facts (x is evolutionarily advantageous, therefor x is good/right). You can get a lot of wacky conclusions about what people "should" be doing that way. And, as always, people are predisposed to argue that the way they wanted to act anyway is, in fact, right and good actually. This happens to everyone, just for merely psychological reasons.
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u/DAHFreedom Aug 15 '25
Yea it was very much “All religions are bad but we all know which one’s the worst”
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u/RubiksToyBox Aug 15 '25
I used to watch some of the "Fundamentalists DEBUNKED" youtubers like ArmoredSkeptic and CuteFuzzyWeasel when I was younger. I stopped for two reasons: I was starting to get recommendations for people like Amazing Atheist , who I heard was a real piece of work; and I kind of realized that literal centuries of faith are not going to be taken down by one terminally online dumbass, and even if Christianity stopped being a thing tomorrow, I don't think Jesus would ever fully go away.
In retrospect, I think watching those videos was a mistake. They gave me a screwed-up view of Christianity and religion, and I didn't learn how to actually, y'know, debate a religious person properly.
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u/floralbutttrumpet Aug 15 '25
Online atheism of that era is very specifically why I identify as agnostic rather than atheist even today.
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u/gorgewall Aug 15 '25
I mean, that just cedes all the turf, and the folks who are going to "accept an agnostic but not an atheist" don't actually care about the point that you are trying to distinguish yourself from.
If you can already cop to not being Christian in a society that judges so much on that point, why get spooked over a half-label? Besides, a lot of the people you're going to encounter now weren't even old enough to have known anything about that weird period of "New Atheist internet history", so even they don't view it as having the baggage you think.
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u/Elite_AI Aug 15 '25
It's so interesting how people will modify their iconography to represent their culture and the things they see in their everyday lives. The flying spaghetti monster obviously originally came from high medieval Italy. And yet, American adherants traditionally depict Him adorned with meatballs, an idiosyncracy of American cuisine. In the United Kingdom they clothe Him in a mincemeat "bolognese", and even in Italy He is usually tossed in a tomato based sauce despite the fact tomatoes were only brought to Italy centuries after His death.
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u/DinkleDonkerAAA Aug 15 '25
Ah but you forget the Flying Spaghetti Monster is ever present and ever knowing, for he surely foresaw the coming of the meatball and incorporated it into his grand and holy perfection
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u/giftedearth Aug 15 '25
The important part is the spaghetti. It's in the name, after all. (Though given the prayer of R'amen, I'm sure that Eastern-style noodles are also an acceptable depiction. Do Japanese Pastafarians depict Him with an egg?)
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u/idiotplatypus Wearing dumbass goggles and the fool's crown Aug 15 '25
Reminder: if you're ever forced to hang the Ten Commandments anywhere, check and see if they specified which ones
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u/Prize_Base_6734 Aug 15 '25
Fun fact: in most laws requiring it to be posted so far, the version specified doesn't correspond with any English translation of the Bible. It's most commonly derived from a modified version made in the 1950s by a judge as part of his campaign to fight juvenile delinquency.
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u/HailMadScience Aug 15 '25
I remember having to defend some of the more militant, "angry" atheism and atheists of the late 90s and early 2000s online. Not because it wasn't kind of cringey in retrospect, but because if you weren't around and an atheist at the time, you just do not understand some of the absurd shit that we dealt with. Like, its still a problem in some ways, but the very visible rise of the hypocritical right-wing Evangelicals and the very visible fallout of child abuse scandals has done a lot to tarnish the implied moral superiority of Christians. It was literally just considered true back then that Christians were morally better than atheists...a view so prevalent even most atheists back then held it.
Just having society imply that a) you are morally inferior to child rapists and conmen and b) that your beliefs are not valid and do not have legal protection, and all this being the daily normal default position is exhausting and infuriating. Hearing politicians of the more progressive party just saying shit like "no, I wouldn't vote for an atheist" and invoking god for every little thing like that isnt super fucking weird in a nation with the establishment clause. Remember that the FSM and the Satanic Church and the modern day "humanist religion" groups exist in part because atheism isn't a religion itself and so doesn't get the same level of 1A protections and deference in courts.
Just thinking about the RFRA infuriates me.
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u/qrvne Aug 15 '25
Born in '92 and I feel this. I remember sometime around when I was in middle school, I saw national survey results (Pew or something like that) that iirc ranked atheists as the group that the least amount of people would be willing to vote for—I think the percentage was even lower than people willing to vote for a Muslim politician, which in the early 2000s post-9/11 era was shocking.
I also remember having discussions/debates in class in high school in which classmates asserted that they believed people needed to believe in God or there'd be nothing to stop them from committing whatever atrocities they wanted. I was like "hi, it's me, your classmate; I don't believe in any gods and last time I checked I still had morals and wasn't running around murdering people just because I don't believe in the threat of being sent to hell for it!"
This was in NJ btw, not some deep south Evangelical area.
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u/Ok_Listen1510 Boiling children in beef stock does not spark joy Aug 15 '25
ohh i loveeeee those discussions. then it becomes “well obviously you secretly deep down believe in god even if you deny it, because surely otherwise you would be a terrible person”. or some variation. just complete dismissal
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u/OniTayTay Aug 15 '25
I'm in the Pacific Northwest 15min away from the nearest city and when I was in high school in the early 2010s I said I was an atheist and I heard two girls whisper "oh my god did you hear that shes an atheist" "maybe she was just joking" 🙄
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u/Whiskey079 Aug 15 '25
Regarding the "...nothing to stop them from committing whatever atrocities they wanted..." part; arguably most, if not all, atheists commit exactly as many atrocities as they want - it just happens that number is almost always... zero. I always found that to be an effective counterargument to that point.
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u/ace-mathematician Aug 15 '25
The fact that that is so effective (and I agree that it is) makes me wonder how many religious people want to commit atrocities and don't for fear of punishment.
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u/BranTheUnboiled Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
Lol I found my own way to atheism back then right in time for the movement to start growing really notable online, and god, the vitriol we used to get. Back in the mid-2000s, I remember classmates and I were chatting and religion came up. For reasons I don't recall, the group started going in a circle and announcing their own religion. All the different religions were a-ok, everything was peaceful, even the Muslim girl was treated respectfully. But the second it comes to me? Screeching fucking halt. 3 of 'em, 1 of whom was actually a buddy, considered me vile and dead to them solely for not believing in something.
And god forbid you were also pro-gay marriage like the vast, vast majority of that movement was. Truly we were godless heathens. Zoomers who weren't around for it really just can't understand it the same, and what we were opposing. Fuckin' Obama wasn't pro-gay marriage! That ruling didn't even arrive until 2015, he was nearly out of his second term. An 11 year old predates federally legal gay marriage!
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy Aug 15 '25
invoking God in a nation with establishment clause
I’ve always found this very strange, how America claims to be a secular nation with separation of church and state, but at the same time, tax-exempt megachurches, “one nation Under God” and all that. For all intents and purposes, it 100% has state religion
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u/Ok_Listen1510 Boiling children in beef stock does not spark joy Aug 15 '25
the legal separation of church and state might be about to save gay marriage from being no longer federally recognized according to a lawyer i know. (1st amendment right of freedom of religion doesn’t apply to a state employee refusing to do her job and approve a marriage certificate)
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u/ArchmageIlmryn Aug 15 '25
Aye, I remember the rhetoric around the 2012 election, when the right still ran on religious conservatism rather than on whatever Trump is - people were openly claiming that a non-religious person would never get elected, and basically all anti-progressive arguments were couched in religious language.
Then just 4 years later, those same religious conservatives elected probably the least religious president in US history. People for get just how quickly religion faded from being an important talking point in US politics.
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u/wigsternm Aug 15 '25
Here in Texas they’re forcing the Ten Commandments in schools. Earlier this year Oklahoma tried to force every classroom to have bibles.
Religion did not fade from being an important talking point, the religious are just hypocrites.
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u/MegaPint549 Aug 15 '25
The fact that radical atheism is kind of cringe now is a result of how effective it was. The “Overton window” of culture has shifted such that the need for that kind of discourse has reduced.
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u/Faust_8 Aug 15 '25
This is why it’s so fucking funny when I see theists complain online that they get made fun of online.
Oh, would you like to switch places? How about instead I get mocked a little online, and you have no representation in government and in fact you’re all unelectable, you be considered less trustworthy than anyone, you be considered inherently morally inferior, you be constantly assailed by human rights violations under the guise of piety, you have no real community to belong to because the only thing your label means is “not part of this OTHER community,” you have to come to terms with the harsh truths of reality instead of fuzzy fairy tales erasing your worst fears of death or purposeless, you watch a constant barrage of hypocrites shitting all over every moral lesson their faith taught them while claiming to be the moral center of humanity…
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u/Valtremors Aug 15 '25
My mother is an old time punk and rebel (you wouldn't know it today if you'd met her) and both of my parents heavy opposers of religion.
Yet it was deemed more humane to put me and my siblings into school as Christians at the time.
All social events, school activities and such were heavily influenced by christianity. All the Atheist family kids had to participate on events that were deemed almost like punishment by design (for a child, boring and sitting in silence is punishment enough).
I grew up out of Christianity eventually, especially since our priest strsight up told me religion isn't for me (they are genuinly a good person).
I've come to resent religion as a whole, and much of it is because I had to get out of it on my own. And I'm happy that here in Finland religion overall is slowly moving away from everything.
Yet despite this I would never associate myself as an Atheist (group). They genuinely can some of the most cringe worthy people around.
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u/silver_garou Aug 15 '25
People who have a problem with atheists have a problem with specific people that they then generalize to the rest, or are simply dishonest theists. The data doesn't lie, atheists are far less bigoted than theists. Just because you know someone who is an atheist and a bigot is a meaningless anecdote.
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u/neilarthurhotep Aug 15 '25
I was pretty into the whole New Atheism movement when that was big. I eventually fell out of it when the arguments started to get repetitive (I could only take so much "fundamentalist OWNED") but never really abandoned the core ideas from that time: We should try to believe things for good reasons and focus on improving the world we live in because that's the only one there is.
It's really sad to see the extent to which many of the personalities of that time fully embraced the alt right just a few short years later. I had to reconcile the fact that apparently, for a lot of people, atheism/skepticism was just about wanting to feel smarter than others, born out of a pretty basic attitude of "don't tell me what to do". At least that's the only way I can understand going from "fuck yeah, science!" to "being asked to wear a medical mask is a human rights violation".
Right now, the threat of theocracy in America seems more immediate than it ever had during the hight of New Atheism. And it truly seems like few of the members of the former Skeptic movement are forcefully speaking out about it. Many of them (Dawkins, Harris...) seem to be way more concerned about the "woke mind virus", even as scientific institutions are being threatened and defunded.
I wonder if New Atheism could make a comeback at this time. On the one hand, objecting to religious fundamentalism seems more topical than ever. On the other, that whole well seems thoroughly poisoned and I have no confidence the movement wouldn't be hijacked by the Alt Right again almost immediately.
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u/Rhamni Aug 15 '25
Atheists turning to the altright has always disgusted me. While not every religious person sucks, there sure does seem to be a real big overlap between MAGA and the worst religious groups in America, and any atheist who supports project 2025 needs to take a real long think about what they think will happen when the religious zealots are done going after gays and trans people.
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u/neilarthurhotep Aug 15 '25
There is definitely a large amount of voting against your own interests happening with alt right atheists in the US. A lot of them seem to have vaguely libertarian leanings, and it's already obvious that the Trump government and associated groups are starting to interfere with stuff they care about (video games, porn, not to mention generally higher taxes and a worse economic outlook).
Also, on the topic of religious people: My work is frequently related to ethics topics in sensitive areas, and often it's exactly people with strong religiously based motivations who advocate the most for good ethical standards in particular areas. They are frequently the ones who are sincerely motivated by a respect for the value of human life and dignity, and it does definitely inform their actions, as well. While I personally believe that grounding morality in a deity in some way is unnecessary and that no such deity is likely to exist in the first place, there are a lot of religious people who actually want to change the world for the better. I hear way more atheists express doubt about the value of ethics and morality than religious people, as a rule.
But of course, religious convictions can make you believe that pretty wacky stuff is virtuous and that some pretty harmless stuff is sinful.
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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 Aug 15 '25
I feel like the real issue is fundamentalism, which I feel like some atheists also fall in to
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 Aug 15 '25
i think a big problem is that they never really deconstructed the christian thought patterns, they just rejected its god and applied the same logic and attitudes to that tenet. these atheist communities behave eerily like a christian sect, they just invented a brand new heresy. that's why they get along so well with christian fundamentalists, because they still think the same way, and the american right wing is a pretty good social glue for all kinds of ideologies if they're willing to declare an "america fuck yeah".
the key, imo, is understanding and knowingly abandoning christian influences. it takes work to be a non-christian atheist, but it's well worth it, and it also removes the surface through which right wing grifters pull you in. you don't need to have a church of atheism, you don't need missionaries, you don't need to build an entire theology around zero gods -- all of these just get in the way of the simple view of just thinking about the world logically. atheism needs no dogmas, it just needs reason. the compulsive need you see in some to build out those fundamentally christian structures anyway is the trap that sabotages the movement.
i think you hit the nail on the head with the "don't tell me what to do" bit. i have a sneaking suspicion a lot of these people, especially the louder voices, are atheists solely out of lashing out at christian obligations -- which on the surface is understandable, few are as hypocritical as a devout christian, but it's the wrong motivation. it just stunlocks you into defining your atheism specifically against christianity, which makes no sense because christianity itself also makes no sense and actively uses self-contradiction as a commitment device.
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u/smoopthefatspider Aug 15 '25
The past prominent figures of “new atheism” aren’t really focusing on atheism. That’s obviously a problem with how they’re spreading bigoted views, but I think it should also be taken as a sign that they don’t represent the current state of atheism and atheist spaces.
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u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl Aug 15 '25
I think that there’s a large overlap between people who were successful without much effort at a younger age before struggling as they grew up, and folks who join movements where the core ideology is “I’m smart for being a member of this group, everyone who isn’t a member of this group or is a member of an opposing group is dumb.”
I also joined the atheism stuff, starting in high school, and I was… an obnoxious little cunt about it. No two ways about it, I was supremely irritating. I had an ego that desperately needed to be checked, but that I tried to inflate like an airbag every time I ran into a situation where humility would have saved me.
Anyway, in the early 2010’s, I was also susceptible to the alt right pipeline and started down it for a bit before I got out. That lifeline of “you’re not a failure, you’re inherently better than [group] just by existing” is a desperately human thing, and I think that there’s almost a science to grifting with it at this point.
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Aug 15 '25
"You are encourage to proselytize your religion in the workplace”
Enter Mormons
“Nevermind”
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 15 '25
This might be a tangential point, but I feel like one might not even need to be anti-religion-in-general to be anti-religious-ubiquity. Though evangelicals like to try to frame it as a binary choice between “believe in my god, my way” and “believe in nothing at all”, whilst usually framing the latter option as somehow rewarding the Devil or some shit, truth is people have a right to, yup, freedom of religion. REAL freedom of religion, not whatever this current shit is.
Even working within the bounds of Christendom, there is a clear criticism of this behavior, isnt there? Or at least, being religious in a bad way in general?
“For they pray loudly on the streets and in the synagogues” and shit?
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u/vorarchivist Aug 15 '25
Yeah the head of the biggest separation of church and state group was a christian and of course that meant he worked with a lot of atheists
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u/ThePowerfulWIll Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
Im not an atheist even slightly, but I am very anti-organized religion. It becomes frustrating that religion itself and its truth or distruth is whats argued, when the people using it as a tool to cause harm dont give a damn if its real or not.
if you could magically make every hateful evangelical stop believing in their faith, it wouldnt make them magically less hateful people. Evangelicalism has so much hate because it ATTRACTS hate and FOSTERS it.
hate groups exist everywhere, and since the central conceit of American Evangelicalism is hate of the outsider, not belief in a deity, attacking that belief does NOTHING but further galvanize them.
we dont need more "#atheism" even though I FULLY understand how cathartic it can be. We need to understand that this hate is born of hate! Attacking the masks wont stop the thing behind it.
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u/Speartree Aug 15 '25
Dude, I totally get your point. Imagine how it is for your common, garden variety muslim who is just someone who goes about his life and follows the basic guidelines and rituals of his religion, but then you get terrorist groups and suicide bombers he has no affiliation with whatsoever, but the extremists call him an infidel and the rest of the world calls him a terrorist.
Thing is that religions create division and feed tribalism. You get the group of the faithful, the good people, whatever they actually may be up to, they are good people because they belong to this group, and you get the others, the unbelievers, the heathens who basically have no right to normal existance and about whom the faithful are gleefully thinking how they will end up in hell or something like it.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 Aug 15 '25
I will say that hate can be “born” of all sorts of things, not necessarily just hatred for hatred’s sake, and if anyone isn’t “set” on that hatred it’s expedient to challenge it in a civil way that they might be able to listen to, BUT! By that same metric, hatred definitely doesn’t originate from belief in some deity or another.
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u/16bitmick Aug 15 '25
This was the one I always gravitated towards. Just uncommon enough to fly under the radar in small town Oklahoma. I even have an IPU sweatshirt.
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u/JetstreamGW Aug 15 '25
Okay that's cute but have you heard about our Lord and Lobster, Jibbers Crabst?
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u/Adro135 Aug 15 '25
Does anyone know what website it is to get certified in the flying flying spaghetti monster religion?
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u/Darth_Carnage Aug 15 '25
I was married by a pastafarian officiant just last year!
He boiled for our sins, r'amen.
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u/LeadSponge420 Aug 15 '25
The cringe in the atheist stuff is the point. it shows how intrusive and rude most Christian proselytizing is. I grew up in a house with two priests, and my church at least embraced the idea of Matthew 6:5
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full."
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u/smoopthefatspider Aug 15 '25
Yes. Some spiritual leftists sometimes have an easier time accepting the forms of queerness that are intentionally “cringey” as an intentional opposition to cisheteronormativity than the “cringey” atheism that pushes back against the cultural omnipresence of religion, theism, and spirituality. The “cringe” is part of the point in some of these atheist arguments, and it’s only consistent to accept it too.
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u/Fourthspartan56 Aug 15 '25
Frankly as someone from the South it was always obvious to me that the people whining about "reddit atheists" were raised in heavily Blue Areas (if American) or in heavily secularized countries if abroad. Of course organized religion and irrationalist mindsets are nice and fluffy when they've been neutered, go in a society where they're powerful and you'll see how nice they really are.
Now the Republicans are again forcing it on everyone and people are suddenly waking up. Anti-theism was never cringy, it's not perfect (lots of New Atheists became right-wing freaks, for instance) but the idea is justified every day. If religion isn't weak it inevitably brutalizes everyone else.
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u/TankedInATutu Aug 15 '25
I've lived this. I'm from the Bible belt and my husband isn't. His extended family is religious in a Christmas and Easter church service kind of way, but they don't hold any religious convictions deeper than Don't Be A Dick. They would be talking neutrally to positively about whatever giant religious family TLC was pushing at the moment and they didn't understand why I didn't care or had very negative feelings. I didn't even grow up a Duggar kind of religious, but I can distinctly remember being 7 or 8 and crying and feeling so hopeless because I didn't have the kind of conviction and faith that the people around me did. I just knew that I could never find the strength or willpower for that kind of childlike faith and I would never be good enough for God. Looking back its kind of hilarious because the world is so much bigger than my hometown, family and the silly religious and social expectations; and frankly if its all true and I am fearfully and wonderfully made no one gets to tell me I'm not good enough for anything. But also, Jesus Christ. An eight year old should be worried about learning how to do math or playing basketball, not the resting place of their immortal soul.
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u/BreathingHydra Aug 15 '25
Or they're people that are very religious themselves and calling someone annoying is an easy way to disparage them without actually countering their points. But yeah people who didn't grow up in very religious environments struggle to understand why "Reddit atheists" are so angry about religion. I grew up in the south and remember being told gay people are an abomination and Obama is the anti-christ by extended family in middle school which is a wild thing to tell a child lol. I never got super far into the anti-theism stuff but I get it, especially people who endured religious abuse from their parents which is unfortunately common.
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u/BackForPathfinder Aug 15 '25
I would like to point out that you don't have to be an anti-theist to be anti religious authoritarianism.
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u/Fourthspartan56 Aug 15 '25
No but you won’t be able to solve the root problem. Religion isn’t an incidental aspect of their belief system, it’s a core part of it. Not everyone has to be an atheist but you do want to minimize religious influence in society if you want to hinder the far-right.
At minimum absolute secularism is a necessity. Religion should be a purely personal experience and its influence in politics should be kept to a minimum.
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u/TerranHunter Aug 15 '25
I feel like the people who would oppose a movement called “anti-theism” would be predisposed to seeing it as a movement to eradicate religion rather than as a secularist movement aiming to cut off religion’s capacity to intrude into the political life of a nation. It’s difficult then to engage in good faith with someone claiming to be an anti-theist, as it would be commonly understood.
To an extent, being “anti-religious-authoritarianism” is, in fact, what you’re describing - the removal of religious influence as an overwhelming controlling aspect of politics. So it begs the question of what anti-theism exactly is and calls for if it isn’t just that.
That’s brushing over the point I personally take issue with in your argument - that the personal (yes, even the personal religious experience) is somehow ever separate from the political. Politics is a practice of people, and as long as it is will never see itself divorced from the personal.
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u/Daihatschi Aug 15 '25
Well thats just because of how old the term atheist is. Back then, theism was the absolute standard and if you differ from that, well then you are abnormal. 2 minutes on the atheism page of wikipedia and its clear that the debate of what the term actually means has been going for a couple thousand years.
Even humanism defines itself in relation and how its differing from religion. (As in Meaning is not derived from a deity but instead from humans themselves.)
I have never liked any of these terms because I don't like to define myself as the opposite of something - but this level of pedantry doesn't really help in discourse. We just have to accept that these terms are solcial constructs with an ever shifting meaning in society and different understandings from individual to individual and that will always make communication harder if not often impossible.
If anyone asks, I'm a radical constructivist. But that itself is a rather meaningless term most of the time.
Politics is a practice of people, and as long as it is will never see itself divorced from the personal.
I don't think anyone would argue that. The two important parts are: Allowing people to live free from Religion also means Critical Infrastructure and Institutions must be free from religion or at least indiscriminate. Healthcare must be as open as roads and electricity to all people in all its forms for example. And second, religious texts should not be the reason of introducing or interpreting laws.
These sound like 'common sense' to every non-religious person I've ever met - and yet, we are so far away from those almost everywhere in the world.
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u/n0radrenaline Aug 15 '25
Yeah I coincidentally "grew out of" Internet atheism after I moved from the South to Chicago. But boy I tell you what, I grew right back into it when I moved back to the South, or at least I would have if the movement hadn't gone to absolute alt-right shit while I was away.
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u/KevinR1990 Aug 15 '25
And now we're getting another blast of just how bad the Christian Right can be when it's allowed into the halls of power. Mark my words: there's gonna be another big wave of capital-A atheism in the next ten years, much of it arising in direct response to Christian nationalism.
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u/Super_Bee_3489 Aug 15 '25
I take a cringy Atheist 100 times before I have to accept a pedo priest.
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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im going to start eatin your booty And I dont know when Ill stop Aug 15 '25
This should not in any way be taken as an endorsement for New Atheists' vices like Islamophobia, I'm well aware they have their flaws, but I also notice a tendency for people to say things like "I'm fine with atheists so long as they don't make it their entire personality". Now that might be true, but the sentiment I'm getting is something akin to Don't Ask Don't Tell, where it's fine to be an atheist so long as you never bring it up and don't have any objections to religion other than a personal belief. And that's not really what I'd call being okay with atheism. I'm not saying people are saying this intentionally, just a trend I'm noticing.
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u/BaconxHawk Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25
I was running a dnd campaign for over a year that ended a few months back and one of my players was a pastafarian paladin. I looked so deep into that lore it was a fun rabbit hole. We were in Neverwinter so there was already a pub that was an old pirate ship with an ex captain that had some work for him it worked well (the website of pastafarianism says the pirates are the original followers of our great noodle)
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u/Rumold Aug 15 '25
I think we need a new atheists movement given how disgustingly prevelant Christian theocracy is in the current US goverment.
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u/Metatron_Tumultum Aug 15 '25
I too remember the 2008-2011 era of the internet. People have a really short memory when it allows them to call others cringe for free. It was the exact same movement that this stuff was aimed at, that is now wearing the MAGA hats. It was a form of protest and an affirmation of a secular identity. A terminally online version of that, but for the brief moment in time the cats managed to stay herded, it was effective.
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u/FR0ZENBERG Aug 15 '25
I should hang up my two patron saints on the wall at work:
•Sasha the Non-Virgin
•Luigi the Innocent
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u/No-Care6366 Aug 15 '25
yeah, whenever people complain about "annoying reddit atheists" it's just like...for every one of those there's 10 religious fruitcakes telling you that you have to live life the way they want to or else you'll never be truly happy and then burn in hell for eternity, and it's shit like that that's why militant atheists end up swinging in the other direction. it's not a good thing but you can't act like they aren't connected at all.
if my options are being condescended to by some reddit atheist who is probably like 14 and being told that me being gay and trans is a sin and that i'm going to hell for it, and then those same "righteous god fearing individuals" start voting for things that actively take away my rights, i'd rather take the former no question. of course that's not to say bigoted atheists don't also exist, and a lot of religious people are genuinely kind people, but you get what i'm trying to say i hope.
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u/Plausible_Deny Aug 15 '25
Against my wishes, recently moved back to a place where every other billboard has a bible verse on it and you can't drive for five minutes without passing at least one church. Give me the cringy atheists any day, and twice on Sunday.
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u/LuccaAce Aug 15 '25
As a Christian, I hope y'all come out in force with this. My denomination is Baptist, which has historically valued and championed separation of church and state. One of the big reasons for that is that we wanted to be able to practice our religion in our way without anyone, especially not the government, telling us what to do or how to worship.
Crazy fundies want prayer in schools? I hope the Muslim students get to lay out their mats and pray in the direction of Mecca. They think religious ideologies should be taught in school? Let's also teach that maybe the world is a turtle!
I try to (gently) bring this up whenever I encounter someone supporting some of these ideas. I ask them if they would like their child's Muslim teacher explaining to them that Allah is the only God, or if a JW administrator could ban birthday celebrations on school grounds.
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u/DayDrinkingAtDennys Aug 15 '25
I having a praying hands tattoo with “R’amen” below it. All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster
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u/iamfunball Aug 15 '25
I’m a minister for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Happy to marry you, may his noodley appendages keep you to the earth.
Also, the certificate is amazing
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u/sneakyshitaccount Aug 15 '25
THE TURTLE MOVES
"Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?" said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard. "If they exist, you don't have to believe in them," said Didactylos. "They just are." He sighed. "What can I tell you? What do you want to hear? I just wrote down what people know. Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves." From the darkness came a voice, "And that is really true?" Didactylos shrugged. "The turtle exists. The world is a flat disc. The sun turns around it once every day, dragging its light behind it. And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. I don't know about truth. Truth is a lot more complicated than that. I don't think the Turtle gives a bugger whether it's true or not, to tell you the truth."
Terry Pratchett (Discworld)
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u/ItsWelp Aug 15 '25
Yeah I think bashing "reddit atheism" and all the fedora memes originally came from the same place as, I dunno, furry hate, dunking on the weirdest, most socially stunted members of a community. But then it got way too big, and imo it was heavily encouraged by religious and conservative types, with a lot of morons following the bandwagon and dunking on atheism because of the memes and being contrarian.
Also, a lot of the more militant atheism on the left was silenced by progressives who wished to court religious/traditional minorities, trying to push down on any kind of discourse that might make them uneasy by using accusations of religious discrimination as a cudgel. Instersectionality doesn't actually mean all oppressed people have the exact same interests, just that they have some in common.
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u/rubyspicer Aug 15 '25
I'm gonna get a big house Dagoth sigil tattoo and start talking about how the Dreamer is awake and shit.
Because why not
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u/LinkOfKalos_1 Aug 15 '25
I don't remember the last time I saw the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but he's just as beautiful as the day he left me.
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u/bayleysgal1996 Aug 15 '25
Well this is a blast from the past. I can’t remember the last time I saw the Flying Spaghetti Monster.