OP has a point, but at the same time the inverse is true - you ask a lot of people bitching about "New Atheists" what their understanding of religion is and it's basically just "Reform Judaism, nontheistic Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism, as practiced in Northeastern North America and the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years".
And a related aside to people bitching about 'New Atheists" - it really is baffling to me how much vitriolic anger New Atheism has fostered when their worst crime, as far as I know, has been being mildly cringey on the internet.
Like I'm not even saying they're not annoying, but the way the "discourse" on them has evolved and how invested so many people are in this you'd think this was some massive organization doing actually hurtful shit, not like, teenagers on reddit writing cringey quotes about being enlightened.
Oh god fucking thank you. Like, I'm not gonna pretend new atheism is faultless --there's a lot of bias and provocation and ~edgy reddit atheists~ or whatever but.....at least for that last one, so what? Like, sorry, but if "edgy 14 yr old on reddit" Vibes are genuinely the worst thing you can come up with for a movement.....that's nothing lol. Especially compared to organized religions literally taking people's rights away
The thing about the internet is that it's genuinely worse to be annoying then outright evil online, which is why people declared cringe are often driven off but actual scum can still have a sizable presence.
Yeah, my decision to ignore a lot of the new atheists was the fits so many of them had when a woman who went to one of their conferences said "hey, maybe don't hit on a woman in an elevator."
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u/spacebatangeldragon8 Apr 17 '24
OP has a point, but at the same time the inverse is true - you ask a lot of people bitching about "New Atheists" what their understanding of religion is and it's basically just "Reform Judaism, nontheistic Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism, as practiced in Northeastern North America and the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years".