#new atheists

[catechismic-failure]

I like how people are like "We should have New Atheism 2 but they should be less atheist." As if the problem with the New Atheists was that they were atheists and not that they were racists, misogynists, and transphobes in the same way religious people are.

[inqilabi]

Nothing more low vibrational and self hating than "ex muslim " spaces thank you for providing a platform for muslims that aren't as practicing but culturally identify as so. Thank you ❤ there is something so dark about these "ex muslims" types reminds me of the wahhabis

Haha you're exactly spot on. They're often wahabis of atheism

[queersatanic]

someone has been having a very normal one talking about trans people for a couple of days now

who would have thought that Dick "eugenics is great actually" Dawkins might be bad at understanding race and gender identity?

[tweet 1][tweet 2][tweet 3][tweets 4&5]

let us put well to bed the idea that "atheism" and "progress" are in any way synonymous.

Dawkins embraces the superstition that gender can be divined at a person's birth by reading the shape of their genitals, but perhaps with Graham Linehan kicked off Twitter (and out of his marriage), Dawkins is gunning to be Prince Consort of TERF Island, then quadruples down on it

we've mentioned before how all sorts of reasoning can get you to the recognition & respect of a person's humanity. This thread by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg goes through how an ultra-Orthodox rabbi followed previous discussions that angels are nonbinary, and Elijah was taken up to heaven to become an angel, therefore a trans woman was a woman and her marriage could be annulled.

meanwhile, you have evolutionary biologist and "thinker" Richard Dawkins who is just parroting variations of the exclusionary rhetoric "words have meanings" and thinking he's very very smart

today would have been Anton LaVey's birthday, and what a great career move he made dying before he could show his ass on the Internet anew, decade after decade, like Dawkins

[arcticdementor]

Nietzscheans, and others in the “atheist outgroup”, who continually pointed out that the humanist morality that the “New Atheists” clung to was merely Christianity with the supernatural, ritual, and a few rules of sexual morality filed off, and that their “New Atheism” was at least as old as the decades-dead Bertrand Russell, were never particularly welcome there. While they loved arguing about religion, re-evaluating the foundations of their humanist worldview was just about the last thing they wanted to do. A re-evaluation of all values? Tossing out liberalism, socialism, and the rest of the lumber of the ages and embracing the radical freedom of a world in which we can truly define good and evil in our own image, or transcend them completely? Those notions utterly terrified the “New Atheists”.

Commenter “Hanfeizi”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

When you hear “God is back”, that obviously doesn’t mean he actually went anywhere. Faith in God is back. Not a blind, unreasonable faith, but one that is well grounded in evidence. The grounded evidence is the basis to communicate that faith in a straightforward clear manner. If nothing else, the writings of the new atheists have succeeded in awakening millions of Christians from their dogmatic slumbers.

Dr. Rice Broocks

[marzipanandminutiae]

It’s interesting how, with atheism’s reputation in the gutter, a certain type of “ex-new atheist” has sprung up. Basically these were once the “grrr god and religion suck” types, but later fell in with the anti-social justice crowd and now see religions like Christianity as something that “enshrined western values” and must must be preserved in the face of Multiculturalism and Islam... the fact this sounds like creepy white nationalist rhetoric is NOT a coincidence, yikes.

This is why my issues with certain types of atheists don’t really stem from the basic premise of atheism or even aspiritualism. It’s a certain personality type that would be terrible regardless of the group or belief system or lack thereof the person was involved in. They just want to be an authority with a clear-cut enemy to hate and fight, and they’ll align themselves with anything that lets them do so. The scary part is that, because everyone loves feeling shouty and righteous without having to examine nuances or ambiguities (hell, I know I do! it’s a great feeling!), these people do tend to rise to the top of any group that will listen to their rhetoric.

Basically, awful people will be awful no matter what, and if they aren’t getting enough of an audience being awful in one place, they’ll go be awful somewhere else.

[inqilabi]

Currently, a burgeoning industry of memoirs by Muslim women do the work for imperial feminism that texts such as Betty Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter did in an earlier era. However, the oppressed Muslim/Middle Eastern woman is no longer just produced by Western feminists but is also self-produced by Muslim authors in the spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism, while carefully protected and promoted by Western states, media, and conservative organizations. Farzaneh Milani points out that in 2002 “more books were published in the United States by Afghan women than in the entire history of American letters. In contrast, memoirs of life in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, depicting the escalating violence, . . . and the harsh living conditions for women, are rare.” Memoirs by Muslim women about the oppressiveness of Islam provide an “ameliorative narrative” that legitimates U.S. imperial policies and appeases the guilt or uneasiness of readers about U.S. wars overseas, as Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel, The Kite Runner, also did in offering a narrative of rescue and redemption about the war on Afghanistan

— Sunaina Maira, “Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms. 2009