We Need to Talk About the Successes And Failures of New-Atheism

We Need to Talk About the Successes And Failures of New-Atheism

Sargon beat me to the punch with this one, but I have more to say about this topic than I think he did. I’ve legitimately been thinking about this topic for months now, almost to a self-destructive degree. I somewhat blamed myself for my part in the influencing of people away from mainstream religion. I should back up a little.

In the late 2000s to early 2010s, I was coming to the start of my journey in the philosophical, and academic world. I was 12 when this started. I was a very aware kid and knew from the very beginning that a literal interpretation of religious texts just didn’t sit right with me. I criticised the bible, I questioned the “truths” others were trying to thrust upon me, and I slayed these beasts pretty easily. Turns out it’s not hard to slay such strawmen, a word I didn’t even know at the time.

I eventually found The New Atheist movement. England back in the 90s to early 2010s was a seriously different place. Progressivism was slinking about under the societal surface, yet to rupture out of the flesh, bringing all of its disgusting ideological baggage with it. England is a very dead kind of place. It’s a place where time stood still, most schools still had chalk boards until the early 90s, most cities and towns are hundreds of years old, and the weight of religious pressure, especially from Islam and extreme sects of Christianity was getting to a point that it may damage science.

Creationism in particular was a serious threat to evolutionary science, because it had support and weight in the old-guard media rooms, on television, in newspapers, and even politically. The movements had sway and damaged a lot of institutes of learning, some even opting to do, well, what some progressives do today, cancelling them wherever they could, supressing speech, harming their credibility, etc.

The world was a very different, odd place back then. Along came the four horsemen, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett. I idolised these people, especially Dawkins and Hitchens. They had intellectual prowess and debating skills I’d never seen before, and truthfully, I wanted to become like them. A lot of my debating style, conversational style came from Hitchens, though obviously modified and I slowly evolved to my own style.

What these men did was debate an infrastructure that I and many others felt was amoral and stagnant. The system had stood still for far too long and the scientific push was being held back by extremists. We were right to do this, and I stand by the decisions I and they made. I do not regret moving the conversation forward.

Now, if you wanted to hear an atheist-atheist love letter, this is where to stop reading. If you want the truth, keep going.

The Blind Spots

While the Four Horsemen of Atheism were busy wailing away at literalist interpretations, and rightly so, for they were the source of 99% of the problems and resistance with what we were trying to do, i.e. create a more rational and logical society, one less resistant to scientific progress, etc. We very much so ignored a solid chunk of the argument. We, so to say, missed the point. When asked the morality question, that being as much of a curse word in the Atheist community as “Jesus Christ!” is in hardcore Christianity, most more able respond with something about rights. “it’s about rights.” Or similar.

Again, I don’t want to strawman, but I talked to many men and women who were atheists and they actually couldn’t give me a good, solid moral framework that can stand in place of a religious one. Some would give me a pseudo-religious answer, but that always resulted in logical loops. “where do you get this idea from?” in which they must eventually, painfully concede that a lot of morality was carried via religion and they say something like “well, I’m not religious and I think it’s bullshit.”

Again, not trying to create a strawman, I’ve literally had this discussion hundreds of times over the years. Atheism on its own as a moral philosophy is weak. “uh, something, rights.” Is the general response.

That is lazy, and it leaves out the immense wealth of meaning-creating force behind the world, responsibility. Many atheists I’ve talked to do not want to talk about responsibility, most have fell into hedonism. Most are excessive in their vitriolic hatred of other people’s beliefs; most are toxic as hell and would rather doubt your beliefs than create some of their own. They are no longer truly atheists of the stripe of Dawkins and Hitchens, who were immensely hopeful of the world in a way, the descendants of New Atheism have become a hateful caricature, a meme, and a mass of lobotomised fools.

Or, they escaped. They stopped criticising blindly that which doesn’t matter, that which no longer poses a threat to us, for the time being. When the old enemies come, and the theocratic rule is once again pressing its thumb onto our freedoms, we must ensure we come this time with a moral framework. Floaty, weak notions of “morality” being the most important aspect of life is a childish and foolish answer to the deepest question mankind has.

You must do a great deal of philosophical work in order to understand who you are, what it means to live in the world, what it means to be, and it’s a constant process for people, religious or not. Nearly every atheist I know is depressed, including myself.

Is that for lack of moral guidance? I have moral guides, philosophical mentors from history and I believe in some things that put me only just on the cusp of atheistic; the utility of mythos and mythology, for one. There is no doubt at all, there is something missing from me personally as an atheist, some aspect of higher existence I miss because I’m simply not wired to believe.

So, I adapted, I became something more than my roots. I became somewhat spiritual, not in the Sam Harris way, I simply became much more aware of my love of nature and embraced it. I no longer see the point in criticising every single aspect of life to death. I chose the live-and-let-live idea.

Personal philosophy aside, we have a lot more to talk about.

Atheism Plus

Now, what happens when a void is left? When a huge opening in the market becomes available? When so many people exist, who are without moral structure and simply, blindly believe in “uh, rights, or something?” Atheism Plus. Started by P.Z. Myres, which very quickly became the biggest blight on the name of atheism in history. Before that point, we had something akin to a stable, healthy-ish relationship with one another. Atheists spoke the same language so to speak. Freethought Blogs comes along and slowly began to radicalise its at one point, hundreds of people towards an ideologically shaky way of thinking. Almost all progressives, all pink-haired, body-hair-proud feminists come from this shift.

What this movement did was sour something missing a lot of meaning into something that has pseudo-meaning. It gave people a place to become feminists.

That’s about all I can say about the topic without relenting on the fact that we could almost have had a stable movement.

The Elephant in the Room

A movement that is itself only critical cannot exist stably. A movement that is made up of a thousand justifications out of belief is not itself a system of belief. A movement that seeks only to reduce cannot inflate or grow. The vacuum of belief was too great, and the bubble started to collapse around 2015. I loved this movement when it was stable, but I quickly grew to hate the people inside it.

I noticed a change in tone of my audience on a prior Facebook page I once owned, which was a mock religious page, a bit of harmless fun for atheists, not criticising anyone, simply pseudo-worshiping a being called the Flying-Spaghetti Monster (blessed be his noodly appendage) and simply parroting a lot of religious talking points. The attitude turned extremely feminist-like and I closed the page down.

For me, that was the closing of a very large book. I’m still an atheist, barely. I have a moral framework that I manufactured myself, and parts of it are very religious and parts of it aren’t.

The take home from all of this is, as cliché as it sounds, be your own person. Be you. Don’t accept the justifications or exhaustive explanations of others because your brain isn’t theirs. Believe what you believe and be what you are. Don’t get swept up with popular movements if you can help it.

I will emphasise the point: we did a good job with New Atheism, a very good job and we removed a lot of old stodgy beliefs, made people much more critical, and I played a very small role in that over the years via debates, but we never bothered to answer the moral question, and that was the ultimate downfall of New Atheism.

Thanks for reading.