Where does Atheism belong on an ideological scale

[RINO Tom]

Atheism and religions don't belong to any specific side of the political spectrum. There are atheist and religious people from the far left to the far right.

There are many leftist atheists. Most of the marxists are atheists. But I think that the 2000s militant atheism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are usually supported by people of the center and center-right.

(I am obviously ignoring the ridiculousness of this thread to respond to your post directly, lol...)

You might have a point with Hitchens and his outspoken opinions RE: Bush Era politics, but I don't know about the other two.  The most "right wing" thing I have seen Richard Dawkins say is that there are two biological sexes and that is all there is to it ... this is just considered a basic fact by 99.9% of people and does not really speak to ideology.  Meanwhile, Sam Harris has openly said that to lie and conceal information if it prevents Donald Trump from being elected is an unambiguous moral good, lol.  And he supports a "science-based morality" that would be so far past Marxism's tearing down of Western cultural norms that I don't even know how we could classify it.

[RINO Tom]

     Cutting against the grain, I would classify atheism with the left-wing in that atheism as it exists as a mainstream phenomenon fights for overturning traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between man and society. It's true that atheism is not directly political and it is very possible in principle to be a right-wing atheist, but I cannot think of an example of atheism intersecting with politics where the result hasn't been an active effort to push the Overton Window to the left.

Randism/Objectivism

     Not a bad example, though I will note in my first sentence I did specify "mainstream". At the risk of being pedantic, Rand has largely gotten serious backing (outside of crank bookworm circles) only from conservative leaders who considered themselves to be Christian. This phenomenon is quite different from something like the October Revolution or New Atheism where the intellectual leaders and footsoldiers of the movement are all atheists.

You could certainly argue many of the Nazis fit your view.  While their views are considered ridiculous, many saw Christianity as a "Jewish religion" that invaded Europe and dampened a previously strong and warrior-like "Aryan" (i.e., Indo-European) spirit.  Many of the Nazis like Göring saw religion as useless and yet saw what they were advocating for as a return to some type of cultural paradigm that even predated Christianity ... arguably, that is extremely culturally reactionary.

P.S.  Before someone comes at me with the tired line that the Nazi movement in any way "supported Christianity" because (A) most of its leading figures had at least some vaguely Christian upbringing in an age where nearly 90% of Europe was Christian or (B) that they attempted to cooperate or at least not outright attack the major German churches that a vast majority of the people belonged to ... that's a terrible argument.  I highly recommend the book The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn and Robert Gellately, which is available on Audible.  It contains hours and hours of actual interviews with all of the Nuremberg Trials defendants while they were imprisoned, as well as 14 prominent Nazis who were incarcerated as witnesses to the main war crimes trials and would be on trial themselves later.  In their OWN words, they make it quite clear their regime was tacitly hostile to religion with a plan to replace it as soon as they could at best and outright combative toward it at worst.  Additionally, while some of the men refound faith before their death sentences (they were each allowed time with either a Lutheran pastor or Catholic priest), the vast majority claimed to only have any sort of religious affiliation again once on death's door.

[RINO Tom]

     Cutting against the grain, I would classify atheism with the left-wing in that atheism as it exists as a mainstream phenomenon fights for overturning traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between man and society. It's true that atheism is not directly political and it is very possible in principle to be a right-wing atheist, but I cannot think of an example of atheism intersecting with politics where the result hasn't been an active effort to push the Overton Window to the left.

Randism/Objectivism

     Not a bad example, though I will note in my first sentence I did specify "mainstream". At the risk of being pedantic, Rand has largely gotten serious backing (outside of crank bookworm circles) only from conservative leaders who considered themselves to be Christian. This phenomenon is quite different from something like the October Revolution or New Atheism where the intellectual leaders and footsoldiers of the movement are all atheists.

You could certainly argue many of the Nazis fit your view.  While their views are considered ridiculous, many saw Christianity as a "Jewish religion" that invaded Europe and dampened a previously strong and warrior-like "Aryan" (i.e., Indo-European) spirit.  Many of the Nazis like Göring saw religion as useless and yet saw what they were advocating for as a return to some type of cultural paradigm that even predated Christianity ... arguably, that is extremely culturally reactionary.

P.S.  Before someone comes at me with the tired line that the Nazi movement in any way "supported Christianity" because (A) most of its leading figures had at least some vaguely Christian upbringing in an age where nearly 90% of Europe was Christian or (B) that they attempted to cooperate or at least not outright attack the major German churches that a vast majority of the people belonged to ... that's a terrible argument.  I highly recommend the book The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn and Robert Gellately, which is available on Audible.  It contains hours and hours of actual interviews with all of the Nuremberg Trials defendants while they were imprisoned, as well as 14 prominent Nazis who were incarcerated as witnesses to the main war crimes trials and would be on trial themselves later.  In their OWN words, they make it quite clear their regime was tacitly hostile to religion with a plan to replace it as soon as they could at best and outright combative toward it at worst.  Additionally, while some of the men refound faith before their death sentences (they were each allowed time with either a Lutheran pastor or Catholic priest), the vast majority claimed to only have any sort of religious affiliation again once on death's door.

     You definitely had Nazis who were basically atheists, but they ran a wide gamut and their religious bearings in most cases I am aware of had less to do with rejecting religion in the manner of a Nietzsche or a Dawkins and more to do with rejecting Christianity per se. A particularly interesting (and influential) case is Rosenberg, who was anti-Christian but wanted to replace it with a new religion that would be founded in a theory of German-Nordic supremacy. Perhaps he was dishonestly leveraging the concept of religion and did not believe in it one whit, but if that is the case it seems if anything to bolster the identification of atheism with the left. If we suppose he was a closeted atheist then his development of a racial mythology to replace traditional Christianity seems to be a statement that he did not believe atheism was in fact compatible with the ideological aims of the Nazi regime and that a far-right movement needed a different theological basis.

That's all fair, I was just trying to think of a counterexample for the sake of the discussion.  I would certainly say that atheism in and of itself is a fundamental rejection of an absolutely essential component of "culture" as it has been defined for the vast majority of human history.  In this context, you would certainly think it is fundamentally culturally left wing in trying to deconstruct what has existed before and usher in something new.

[RINO Tom]

Uncategorized. It's like asking where "apolitical" is on the ideological scale.

Would you say the same about theism?  Because I would think if theism is considered ideological in any way, atheism has to be, as well.  FTR, I would probably say neither are inherently ideological in nature, though they probably predispose people toward certain ideologies for cultural issues.