What primarily killed New Atheism?

[John Dule]

Other: I've never heard the term "New Atheism" from anyone but BRTD, and atheism never died.

[John Dule]

Other: I've never heard the term "New Atheism" from anyone but BRTD, and atheism never died.

You've never heard of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?

I know of them, but I've never consumed much of their writing or interviews. I wasn't aware that there needed to be a "new" way of saying "I don't believe in god."

[John Dule]

Other: I've never heard the term "New Atheism" from anyone but BRTD, and atheism never died.

You've never heard of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?

I know of them, but I've never consumed much of their writing or interviews. I wasn't aware that there needed to be a "new" way of saying "I don't believe in god."

It wasn't really about "I don't believe in God" so much as "I don't believe in God so I'm so much more intelligent and truly intellectually superior to all those stupid religious people, lol they're so dumb amirite?"

Somehow I don't trust you to give an accurate and unbiased summation of Harris' or Dawkins' arguments. To tell the truth, I think most of your ripping on atheists on this website stems from insecurities you have about your beliefs and a cognitive need to distance yourself from atheism in order to reassure yourself of those beliefs. No other Christians on this site behave the way you do; even I don't start religious arguments on here unless provoked by a uniquely silly claim or comment. I hope you get these things straightened out for yourself soon-- not for your spiritual health, but because it's becoming exhausting to read the repetitive threads you make.

[John Dule]

People began to realize that the secular right, when given power, could be just as dangerous as the rabidly Evangelical right, and that they often aligned with one another.

Except amongst self declared atheists, Trump only got 11%. This was the lowest share amongst any religious/non religious group other than black protestants.

I don't think it helps to mix up a few prominent online voices with the views of atheists. That's as disingenuous as saying church leaders 'represent' the laity.

But this thread is specifically about New Atheism, not atheism in general. I don't think New Atheists are representative of the average self-described atheist, but that's precisely the point.

It still requires defining New Atheist online voices as 'the New Atheists' not people who define themselves as atheist, 'new' or 'new adjacent' or otherwise. There were probably more individuals involved with the Westboro Baptist Church than were online figures of note for atheism for a hot second in 2010.

The people who knew the most, talked the most, engaged the most and lined the pockets the most of New Atheists were Christians and Christian educational institutions in particular.

I mean, obviously it's not the kind of thing that can be defined rigorously, but I think most people understand what they mean when they say "New Atheist". There was a pretty specific phenomenon of very aggressive atheists in the 2000s and 2010s who had Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens as their ideological ringleaders and were famous for being mostly devoted to celebrating their own supposed intellectual superiority. I don't have statistics on this, but anecdotal experience suggests a disproportionate number of these people drifted toward the alt-right during the second half of the past decade (including Harris himself, of course) and have largely become irrelevant clowns in the process.

To call Sam Harris "alt-right" is to pretty much rob the term of its meaning.

[John Dule]

Harris is literally talking about genetic causes for Black crime rates. If this doesn't make you alt-right, then the term has no meaning.

As far as I am aware, Harris has never professed such views. He hosted Charles Murray on his podcast-- a questionable decision, perhaps, but definitely not a blanket endorsement of everything his guest has ever written or said. Maybe there is some other controversy I'm not aware of, but this is the only time that race comes up on Harris' Wiki page.

[John Dule]

Harris is literally talking about genetic causes for Black crime rates. If this doesn't make you alt-right, then the term has no meaning.

As far as I am aware, Harris has never professed such views. He hosted Charles Murray on his podcast-- a questionable decision, perhaps, but definitely not a blanket endorsement of everything his guest has ever written or said. Maybe there is some other controversy I'm not aware of, but this is the only time that race comes up on Harris' Wiki page.

I distinctly remember him strongly signaling agreement with these views in multiple instances, but obviously I don't remember those since I don't think about it very much. If I'm wrong I'm wrong, but he's at the very least heavily leaning in that direction.

From what I've heard, most of the accusations of racism levied against Harris hinge upon his attacks on Islam, especially on Bill Maher's show a few years back. I always thought these were totally baseless and unsubstantiated.

[John Dule]

Harris is literally talking about genetic causes for Black crime rates. If this doesn't make you alt-right, then the term has no meaning.

As far as I am aware, Harris has never professed such views. He hosted Charles Murray on his podcast-- a questionable decision, perhaps, but definitely not a blanket endorsement of everything his guest has ever written or said. Maybe there is some other controversy I'm not aware of, but this is the only time that race comes up on Harris' Wiki page.

I distinctly remember him strongly signaling agreement with these views in multiple instances, but obviously I don't remember those since I don't think about it very much. If I'm wrong I'm wrong, but he's at the very least heavily leaning in that direction.

From what I've heard, most of the accusations of racism levied against Harris hinge upon his attacks on Islam, especially on Bill Maher's show a few years back. I always thought these were totally baseless and unsubstantiated.

As far back as a decade or so ago Harris openly supported racial profiling, including--self-admittedly--of himself if need be (Harris being Jewish and Jews, famously, looking a lot like Arabs in many cases). On the other hand, this was in the context of his opposition to Islam, so I suppose an argument could be made that it was an unseemly combination of an anti-Muslim view and a hyper-utilitarian view, rather than a racist view per se.

That's still many orders of magnitude away from endorsing phrenology or whatever Antonio is asserting. While I generally have little patience for people who reflexively embraced civil liberties violations during the Bush era, they were not necessarily motivated by racial animus.

[John Dule]

I couldn't find the specific clip I remember of him peddling quasi-phrenological bullsh*t (and I'm not going to listen to hours of his pseudointellectual ramblings to find it again) but I found this, which goes into a bit more detail as to what went on with Charles Murray (spoiler: it's not just about muh platforming, he's actively laundering his views). Have fun dismissing that too I guess.

I am studying at the moment, but I took a few minutes to look over that article. From what I read, it doesn't sound like the author is attacking the claim that there is a correlation between race and IQ-- it sounds like he is arguing that the correlation exists and is mostly due to environmental and not genetic factors. Is that an accurate summary? I find that interesting because the phrase "race and IQ" is so loaded with horrific connotations, and it's surprising that someone from Vox would ever claim the existence of such a correlation.

[John Dule]

I couldn't find the specific clip I remember of him peddling quasi-phrenological bullsh*t (and I'm not going to listen to hours of his pseudointellectual ramblings to find it again) but I found this, which goes into a bit more detail as to what went on with Charles Murray (spoiler: it's not just about muh platforming, he's actively laundering his views). Have fun dismissing that too I guess.

I am studying at the moment, but I took a few minutes to look over that article. From what I read, it doesn't sound like the author is attacking the claim that there is a correlation between race and IQ-- it sounds like he is arguing that the correlation exists and is mostly due to environmental and not genetic factors. Is that an accurate summary? I find that interesting because the phrase "race and IQ" is so loaded with horrific connotations, and it's surprising that someone from Vox would ever claim the existence of such a correlation.

Yes, that is an accurate summary, and I'm pretty sure it's the consensus in sociology? As far as I've heard; no one denies that there is a correlation between race and IQ (although, tellingly, it's significantly weaker now than it was when The Bell Curve came out). The point is that IQ is largely a measure of educational attainment and other cultural factors that shape people's cognitive development (and which are, in turn, largely a product of family wealth, hence why it's not surprising at all that Black people perform lower on average). The idea that it measures some innate, intrinsic, culturally-invariant intelligence is where the pseudoscience comes in.

An individual person's IQ score can shift outside a few standard deviations just depending on how much stress they're under or how much sleep they've had. It's clearly not a measure of innate or biological intelligence. I have never read anything by Charles Murray, but if that's what he says then it is definitely BS.

[John Dule]

I couldn't find the specific clip I remember of him peddling quasi-phrenological bullsh*t (and I'm not going to listen to hours of his pseudointellectual ramblings to find it again) but I found this, which goes into a bit more detail as to what went on with Charles Murray (spoiler: it's not just about muh platforming, he's actively laundering his views). Have fun dismissing that too I guess.

I am studying at the moment, but I took a few minutes to look over that article. From what I read, it doesn't sound like the author is attacking the claim that there is a correlation between race and IQ-- it sounds like he is arguing that the correlation exists and is mostly due to environmental and not genetic factors. Is that an accurate summary? I find that interesting because the phrase "race and IQ" is so loaded with horrific connotations, and it's surprising that someone from Vox would ever claim the existence of such a correlation.

Yes, that is an accurate summary, and I'm pretty sure it's the consensus in sociology? As far as I've heard; no one denies that there is a correlation between race and IQ (although, tellingly, it's significantly weaker now than it was when The Bell Curve came out). The point is that IQ is largely a measure of educational attainment and other cultural factors that shape people's cognitive development (and which are, in turn, largely a product of family wealth, hence why it's not surprising at all that Black people perform lower on average). The idea that it measures some innate, intrinsic, culturally-invariant intelligence is where the pseudoscience comes in.

An individual person's IQ score can shift outside a few standard deviations just depending on how much stress they're under or how much sleep they've had. It's clearly not a measure of innate or biological intelligence. I have never read anything by Charles Murray, but if that's what he says then it is definitely BS.

This is quoted verbatim from Sam Harris in that conversation (emphasis mine):

People don’t want to hear that a person's intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person's intelligence even in childhood. It's not that the environment doesn't matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don't want to hear this. And they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

Now, for better or worse, these are all facts. In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than these claims. About IQ, about the validity of testing for it, about its importance in the real world, about its heritability, and about its differential expression in different populations.

Again, this is what a dispassionate look at [what] decades of research suggest. Unfortunately, the controversy over The Bell Curve did not result from legitimate, good-faith criticisms of its major claims. Rather, it was the product of a politically correct moral panic that totally engulfed Murray's career and has yet to release him.

I take it we agree that he's a pseudointellectual hack peddling something that dangerously approaches phrenology, then?

Does that imply IQ is genetic, or merely the more general quality of "intelligence?" I have zero training in biology, so I couldn't tell you if the 50/80/whatever statistic is right. Obviously some component of intelligence is hereditable though.

[John Dule]

I mean sure, there's probably a genetic component, but he's clearly saying much more than that in this passage, and this is all in the context of the discussion around IQ. And then in the very next sentence he's implying that there's a correlation between that and race.

It's really not hard to draw the implications of what he's saying and I can't help feeling like you're being deliberately obtuse to avoid it.

It's possible that people like Harris stop right before the line because they don't want to "say the quiet part out loud" and give away their true beliefs. But it's also possible that they just choose their words very carefully because they genuinely don't believe in the interpretations you're drawing. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here, mostly because Harris and people like him are very good at making their opponents look like they're jumping to conclusions if they don't respond precisely to the letter of what they've said.

But this all started because you said Harris was "alt-right," and I still don't see that he was involved in the alt-right movement at all based on the evidence you've drawn my attention to.

[John Dule]

If 'dying off' resulted in declaring ones atheism to become twice as popular amongst GenZ than Millennials then I'll put flowers on it's grave.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1479859967695982592

I think this is probably because the perception of self-identified atheism among people younger than twenty-five or so is no longer dominated by people like Dawkins, Harris, etc. That and the fact that it's especially clear in very-young online spaces that "nothing in particular" says nothing about one's actual views and that plenty of people who describe themselves that way are at least as nonrational in their approach to fundamental questions as most religious people.

Yeah I'd say the majority of my friends are non religious but I've never met anyone my age who's actually vocal about their atheism (unless you go back to a couple particularly edgy people in middle school). It's more that they just don't really care much about religion.

New Atheism is islamophobic too.

There's no such thing as "Islamophobia." It is a fabricated term used to deflect valid criticisms of the most violent cult on the planet.

[John Dule]

If 'dying off' resulted in declaring ones atheism to become twice as popular amongst GenZ than Millennials then I'll put flowers on it's grave.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1479859967695982592

I think this is probably because the perception of self-identified atheism among people younger than twenty-five or so is no longer dominated by people like Dawkins, Harris, etc. That and the fact that it's especially clear in very-young online spaces that "nothing in particular" says nothing about one's actual views and that plenty of people who describe themselves that way are at least as nonrational in their approach to fundamental questions as most religious people.

Yeah I'd say the majority of my friends are non religious but I've never met anyone my age who's actually vocal about their atheism (unless you go back to a couple particularly edgy people in middle school). It's more that they just don't really care much about religion.

New Atheism is islamophobic too.

There's no such thing as "Islamophobia." It is a fabricated term used to deflect valid criticisms of the most violent cult on the planet.

There absolutely is such a thing as Islamophobia even ripped away from it's religious foundation. Many Muslims experience it because it's a proxy for anti-Arab, Indian, Pakistani, Bengali etc discrimination against sometimes shared family and communal traditions and culture. Hindus and Sikhs experience it to despite not being Muslim because the very last thing most Islamophobia is, is a 'valid criticism' of the faith.

We have a word for discrimination against Arabs, Pakistanis, etc-- it is called "xenophobia," or just "racism." Islam is a religion, not a race. If you voluntarily choose to be a member of a belief system, you should not be able to use the "phobia" shield to defend yourself. You might as well call someone "commiephobic" for speaking out against the CCP.

[John Dule]

Do you think people who are xenophobic have enough nuance in their xenophobia to hurl the correct slurs at the correct groups?

I'm not sure how this pertains to the subject at hand.

[John Dule]

Do you think people who are xenophobic have enough nuance in their xenophobia to hurl the correct slurs at the correct groups?

I'm not sure how this pertains to the subject at hand.

I just explained in earlier post. You think it's 'just' xenophobia, but if you are getting hurled anti Muslim insults, despite not being a Muslim, but you know, you're 'Muslim looking' or the person insulting you is too stupid to know that the turban wearing gentlemen is Sikh, then it's not xenophobia. It's targeting someone on the assumption they are Muslim. That's not motivated by race, ethnicity is it?

Xenophobia is the hatred/fear of "the other" generally. I think what you described falls very neatly into that category, and there's no need to carve out a special term for a religion (especially one like Islam).

[John Dule]

It's entirely appropriate to consider aggrevation towards a persons faith, perceived faith, or lack of one as something distinct.

Why should a person's beliefs receive some special recognition or protection under the law just because they are rooted in centuries-old texts or supernatural doctrines? Why are other deeply-held beliefs, such as political or secular moral beliefs, not afforded this same degree of deference?

[John Dule]

It's entirely appropriate to consider aggrevation towards a persons faith, perceived faith, or lack of one as something distinct.

Why should a person's beliefs receive some special recognition or protection under the law just because they are rooted in centuries-old texts or supernatural doctrines? Why are other deeply-held beliefs, such as political or secular moral beliefs, not afforded this same degree of deference?

Thing is, I don't completely disagree with you.

On a rights basis; the fact a person can hop from religion A, to religion B and from position A to position B on a matter of 'conscience' overnight and have position A protected from an advocate of position B, even though that person held position B the day before, does have the potential to debase rights associated with characteristics such as race and sexuality.

And of course an argument could be made for say, advocating that white supremacy is a sincerely held belief and personal philosophy (which it unfortunately is for some) which we would wish no court, whether legal or public opinion to agree to. The fact we have a basket of certain beliefs we separate out from that is clearly a matter of choice.

So yes, 'special' concessions are made for religious belief and tradition as 'things' worthy of protection carried over from periods of state formation and in dis/functional western democracies seems to not cause any significant problems.

I tend to be an advocate of expanding rights, so it's not something I would wish to be rolled back; rather having religious rights constrained as the expression of all rights are, by others in the public sphere.

Yet surely you'll agree that some rights are mutually exclusive. The right to free speech, for example, might often conflict with the supposed "rights" of religious or spiritual people, and in that instance I would certainly support "rolling back" religious protections in favor of protections for free speech. What bothers me about the term "Islamophobia" is that it attempts to equate Muslims with a protected class on the level of racial or sexual minorities. This is the thin end of the wedge-- the other end of the wedge is anti-blasphemy laws, which have no place in modern society.