If you wanted to rebel against your parents in the 80's you might have joined a Punk band. In the 90's maybe you dyed your hair and listened to too much Marylin Manson. But, in the 2000's perhaps you discovered New Atheism. No one spikes their hair and pierces their nose for intellectual reasons. Similarly, almost none of the New Atheists came to disbelieve because of some higher rationality. Trends aren't bad, but you should grow out of them.
New Atheism was a trend, and the trend died with Sam Harris' recent interview.
It’s ironic too, considering Harris was the one to get the ball rolling back in 2004, when he published The End of Faith in response to the attacks on the WTC. In 2006 Harris published his second book, A Letter to a Christian Nation followed by Dawkin's God Delusion. A year later, Hitchens published God is not Great. At some point Daniel Dennet got involved but he’s the lamest one of all. Together, they were known as the "4 Horsemen." Ayan Hirsi Ali was supposed to be the 5th "horsewoman" but she never made it in the club. Ali was a diversity hire, anyway.
New Atheism is hard to pin down, because a collective identity around a lack of belief is strange, and often times unfruitful. As many atheists knew, atheism said very little about a person outside of their stance on the God question. You could be a Republican or a Democrat, you could be a materialist or a new Ager, you could be nerd or a jock, it didn't matter. It just meant you didn't believe in God. Atheism has no doctrine, no set of rules.
New Atheism was as much of a reaction to Islam as it was the Bush Administration. They sensed the same kind of fundamentalism in the White House as they did in the House of Saud. It was Hitchens that first took note of the fact that, between the two, radical Islam was probably a much bigger threat to global stability. Hitchens publicly endorsed the Iraq war. It was probably the first big rift within New Atheism.
Hitchens was lambasted for his support of the war by his more progressive colleagues. He was accused of supporting imperialism, being an Islamophobe, and siding with a different flavor of fundamentalism. Hitchens didn't care. Without some unifying principle, rifts like these are bound to happen.
Hitchens died in 2011, and his brand of atheism died with him.
At a conference, The Skepchick, Rebecca Watson did a talk about "sexism in the atheist community." On the elevator back to her hotel room, a man asked if she wanted to go get coffee and Watson felt uncomfortable. This became known as Elevatorgate. Even the scandals were gay. At least Punk Rock was a fun and cool way to be a rebel. Now being a rebel means doing jazz hands at feminist slam poetry festivals. This was post-Hitchens Atheism, or as Jey Mcreigh, the feminist ally to Watson called it, this was Atheism+. What's the + for? Well,
Atheists plus we care about social justice.
Atheists plus we support women's rights.
Atheists plus we protest racism.
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia.
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.
A lot of what we'd now call Wokeness really gained a foothold in the Atheism+ crowd. It attempted to attach atheism to progressive causes. There were, however, a lot of atheists that did not like these ideas. They thought it was turning a non-belief into a political movement. They didn't like the baggage the + carried. In some ways, what eventually developed into Gamergate had its origins in this split within the "atheist community."
By now, whatever is left of New Atheism has faded into irrelevance. It was hip for moment. I can think of no better example of this than Sam Harris recent interview. Two quotes perfectly summarized what New Atheism was. First, Harris said,
"At the eleventh hour, when who knows how this election will go, who knows what the capacity for disinformation at the last minute to tip the balance is, then what do you do with the Hunter Biden laptop story when we already know that FBI Director James Comey's last-minute intervention over Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016 was the killing blow to her candidacy.
This was a highly analogous situation [.] we're going to open up this laptop from hell and this news cycle is going to be just a nuclear bomb of an October surprise and we're going to get four more years of Trump if we actually give this a fair hearing [...]
I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution like the New York Times to show obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty [.] The way I would frame it is, 'Listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's laptop.' At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared ... Whatever the scope of Joe Biden's corruption is [...] it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in."
He just said it. In black and white. Clear as day. You have to appreciate the honesty. Sam Harris just said, openly, that it's ok to lie and censor information to keep certain candidates out of office. I've said some Machiavellian things in my older posts, but Sam Harris has me beat. I thought I had contempt for Democracy, but that quote makes even me sound like a populist.
What he revealed to us all was that, despite the rhetoric and aura of a rationalist, Harris believes in truth insofar as the truth does not threaten the Liberal Democratic process. In other words, Harris does not believe in truth, he believes in managers and technocrats.
The second quote I want to focus was this,
"Where is Heaven exactly, given that we have multiple telescopes up there beaming back information."
This man is supposed to be an academic. He's considered a public Intellectual. But he just asked the atheist equivalent of,
"How is evolution true if there's still monkeys?"
New Atheism is only new in the sense that it is hyper fixated on outdated scientism and a long dead logical positivism, an adolescent faith in naive realism, a smug dismissiveness towards metaphysics, and an infantile understanding of the history of ethics. On top of this mountain of midwittery is a personality type deferential to authority, the kind of authority in lab coats or sociology departments, a reverence for the new priestly caste of bureaucrats, managers, and journalists who get to decide truth for the unwashed masses who might dare to elect a politician out of line with their technocratic utopia.
New Atheism had its deathbed conversion. It converted to Gay Race Communism.
tbh all atheists are gay retards who will have nothing but fear near death #ripbozo