#atheism plus

My guide to assessing agency

[Content note: mostly personal musing I wanted to get out of my system before finally turning the page on this general topic.  Perhaps anticlimactic, but I hope this succeeds in tying some things together.] My last three posts here have focused on the grand metaphysical debate over free will.  Well no, not really.  For the most part, my primary concern hasn’t been in directly tackling the…

Disagreements are like onions II

(or “Why we shouldn’t put all our arguments in one rhetorical basket”) [Content note: Pulse shooting, homophobia, Islamophobia, gun issues, fundamentalist Christianity, and, sadly, more Donald Trump. A bit on the disjointed side, and perhaps best read as three separate sub-essays.] As the title suggests, this is a direct follow-up to my last post, “Disagreements are like onions“. I. Separation,…

Oddly, though I've believed in higher powers for most of my life, capital G Gods have never been my gods.

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” ~ Jesus Isn’t it funny how this saying now correctly applies to the online atheism movement? So many atheist groups are splitting off and gaining traction among their own grounds yet are failing to make traction where it matters. 

You have groups like Atheism Plus, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Freethought Blogs and then their online counterparts of online atheist celebrities like Atheism is Unstoppable (not the maker of this blog), MrRepzion, thunderf00t, The Amazing Atheist and JaclynGlenn, all with their own little followers. MrRepzion followers hate The Amazing Atheist (and vice versa) and Atheism is Unstoppable and his followers are an outcast in their own community, meanwhile Atheism Plus is the pariah of the atheist community with only RationalWiki continuing to defend it. Why is the atheist group so fractured? It’s simply because atheism has became an ideological movement looking for a leader to lead it and with weak incoherent YouTube atheist celebrities and even weaker public atheist speakers (i.e Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris etc), this is a movement in a crisis. The question I pose then is: why should we take atheism seriously when it can’t even take itself seriously? It’s a movement that can’t agree on its own definition, is it about a lack of belief in a god or knowing God does not exist? It’s a movement that can’t even rally people together under one cause. Does it oppose all religion (anti-theism) or not? 

Richard Dawkins in Offensive Twitter Tirade

The famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins has offended tens of people with an astonishing tirade of offensive tweets on the social media platform Twitter. Dawkins, a proponent of the ‘new Atheism’ – a term invented by people bored with plain old Atheism (not to be confused with Atheism Plus, a term invented by people bored with life) – has caused a Twitter storm on several occasions with…

These days he couldn’t be invited to anything his friends have ties into and other atheists freely bash the guy. The guy deserves it indeed for all the incredibly stupid things he’s said while also advocating for censorship and demonizing people who disagree with his politics but it’s still sad to know he’s actually gotten so far up only to fall so far down. 

One story about him is that he and Dawkins went to see that shitty Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed documentary. The one that promoted “intelligent design” and insisted it’s totes not creationism while making all the same creationist arguments and so on. While in line, apparently he was told that he wasn’t allowed in the theater and was escorted away. Myers wasn’t allowed in yet somehow Dawkins slipped past everyone’s notice. 

Now I don’t think it’s possible for something like that to happen. Dawkins probably wouldn’t want to see him being so far on opposite ends on issues like safe spaces and trigger warnings and even Myers’ unwilling to speak to people who aren’t on total opposite ends of issues but disagree on key points or whatnot. I don’t think anyone would recognize him these days or care that much if he’s here or there. He no longer has any sway over atheists or skeptics (which he publicly divorced himself from the skeptical community for being...skeptical)

And the saddest part is that he gave it all up himself. He wasn’t tossed away by atheists, he burned the bridges himself by supporting an intentionally exclusive sect of atheism that sought to dehumanize anyone who wasn’t a part of it and then continue to post outright lies, refuse any sort of debate on the matter, and dig deeper and deeper into the whole of censorship we now call social justice.

It seems a lot of atheists are now going opposite of where PZ wanted everyone to go. Mentioned before were the likes of Dawkins but other people who have spoken out against SJWism include Sam Harris, Thunderf00t, etc and those are people more known for being atheists than anti SJWs. The vice versa would extend the list to people like Sargon of Akkad (Youtube), MundaneMatt, Sh0eonhead, Justicar etc. 

Those are people whose videos reach out to thousands and sometimes millions of others. They certainly have more sway than Myers. A livestream between Thunderfoot, Justicar, and the Internet Aristocrat on atheism plus had more people tuning in than the Atheism+ forums during any time of its inception. 

More and more people are coming about against the very things Myers has burned every bridge to become apart of. There are exceptions. Some atheists are SJWs and I won’t for a second claim that atheism is inherently against SJWs as what Myers and Steve Shives doesn’t understand: atheism doesn’t have any stance of any issue unrelated to “Do you believe in God/s?”

However, just as there’s atheist SJWs there’s also Jewish ones and Christian ones and there’s probably even Muslim ones. The whole goal of atheism plus trying to make atheism as interlinked with SJWism, something that any theist can easily subscribe to is absurd. It’s like trying to make evolution an inherent aspect of Christianity or atomic theory an official stance of Libertarianism. 

I guess he doesn’t have to worry too much about that. Whenever the name PZ Myers comes up, very few are worried that they might be exposed to atheism but instead brace for more SJWism. 

I certainly hope defending the likes of Rebecca Watson while demonizing the likes of Elon Musk or Richard Dawkins was worth it because there’s no way from there but down.