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I think this is an interesting issue, but let me take a stab at why there might be less overt enthusiasm for grappling with this stuff these days, perhaps.
Many of us cut our teeth on internet New Atheism, and I suspect many of us also had a fairly religious background prior to that (I'm seen someone note that, from their time in the rationalist community, they were surprised how often people had previously had pretty religious backgrounds before turning into dogmatic atheists, though I've never verified that myself)
At the time, what we really had was something like American Fundamentalists (often Southern tinged), just after their numerical and political peak of the late 80s / early 90s, picking active fights on matters of material and scientific fact with New Atheists types, a disproportionate number of whom came from biology and evolutionary academic backgrounds. So that fight had very, very hard battle lines. And then Fundamentalists went into decline and lost confidence with the failures of the George W Bush years and the forward march of the internet, and New Atheism was absolutely wrecked (in extremely telling ways) by the rise of Wokeness in its own midst. And so that fight lost a lot of steam.
Fundamentalism was very, very anti-intellectual in many cases. Noted scholar of evangelicalism (and himself a Reformed evangelical Christian) Mark Noll was already writing, back in his 1994 book "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind", that the issue was that by that point there wasn't much mind to speak of. So it's not exactly a giant surprise that the most visible, most politically successful strain of American Christianity was leading with a glass jaw by that point, and I think it was especially vulnerable to exactly those academic fields where something like a strict totalizing materialist world view was the most successful, and that definitely included evolutionary biology...
...but, well, the opposite of being an idiot is not automatically being smart yourself. And the reality of most of the New Atheist thinkers is that they had the exact weakness that almost every academic I've ever known has had - there were a bunch of thinkers who were very, very smart when talking about ideas in their own narrow specialties, but the circle of their confidence vastly outstripped the circle of their actual expertise, and so as a practical matter, for a very wide range of very important human subjects, many of them were actually about as retarded as the Fundamentalists they so despised. But that was very, very easy to overlook when they were publicly tussling with the highly obnoxious, often very Southern, ignorant-and-pig-headed-and-very-low-social-status Fundamentalists who really did need to be taken down a peg.
A very interesting website is the amusingly acerbic History for Atheists website, https://historyforatheists.com/ . And one of the things that I especially love about it is that, well, it makes it pretty clear that the profound ignorance and ideological bias of many New Atheists activists when it comes to history is an almost perfect parallel of how Fundamentalists (and lazy Christian apologists) abuse history - the Founding Fathers were not, in fact, Fundamentalist Christians, but it's also the case that figures like Voltaire was absolutely full of crap about massive amounts of history, and many of us are still wading in the propaganda he and other French Philosophes spewed in the 18th century, and huge amounts of New Atheism was based on those kinds of anti-faith promoting stories that are absolutely trash as history. And part of what makes that website appealing is the author is an atheist who has no particular love for Christianity, but he has enough of a history background, and takes history seriously enough, to be deeply irritated by New Atheist history abuse.
And likewise, as I've been more recently digging through David Bentley Hart's "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" as well as Tim Keller's "Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical", one of the immediately apparent issues that crops up is that most of the public New Atheist figures were not just deeply ignorant (and indifferent) about history, they also tended to be deeply ignorant about philosophy and subfields of philosophy like ethics and epistomology, too, and especially of the ways that philosophy and theology intersect. Which is not to say that philosophers are immediately sympathetic to all the arguments in either of those Christians books, but it is to say that they tend to be deeply horrified by the deep philosophical ignorance in the intellectual foundations that New Atheists thinkers tended to just straight up assume (like a blind faith in hyper-reductive strict materialism), and they tend to recognize that at least some of the philosophical arguments that sophisticated theists wrestle with are, in fact, hard and credible and not easy to dismiss.
And so lurking in the background, one may well say that much of what gave so much heat and fire to the New Atheist / Fundamentalist online slap fight is that both sides agreed to be deeply ignorant about most complicated domains of human knowledge, and both sides glossed over the fact that much of what they wanted to fight about were basically regarded as something like category errors by many other important thinkers.
There is a irony here, too, which is that part of what made New Atheism so incredibly vulnerable to Wokism (with Atheism+, etc) was exactly this deep ignorance about history, philosophy, ethics, and so on, and misunderstanding that the older, much bigger history of Enlightenment Atheism (and Deism) and its role in things like the French Revolution, the rise of Communism, 20th Century Communist revolutions, and so on. Having lived through that late 90s era, you'd see this claim that was something like "God doesn't exist, there is no hell, now nothing has changed, so go live your life no different than you already were doing, and have a nice day". And... historically, that is not how people have responded, writ large, as they've let go of a theistic view of history, tradition, and associated human anthropologies. And this fact, the incredibly disruptive and radical nature of actual atheism as it works its way through society, is trivially obviously from engaging with actual history and philosophy. But none of this seems to have appeared obvious to evolutionary biologists who were annoyed at Fundamentalists.
All of which is to say, if you actually take the history and the philosophy and the theology seriously (which I've come around to thinking I should!) you can have a really rich conversation, but I suspect it's unlikely to look anything like the fireworks that were the hallmark of the early internet Fundamentalist vs Atheist fights.
I don’t see this as a failure of all Christianity. Most fundamentalist and evangelical Christians really have a very shallow understanding of the faith as compared to some older Christian traditions. It’s basically boiled down to the 5 solas, and that’s it. It’s basically like if all you knew of physics was the very simple equations of classical mechanics and you start arguing with someone who doesn’t believe in materialism because of some interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s not that materialism is wrong, it’s that the argument for physics and materialism is being made by someone with a grade school understanding of the subject. For lots of historical reasons having to do with the Great Revivals and Tent Revivals and the American frontier, Theres never been a big emphasis on understanding how things work in Christianity. Theology and sacraments and apologetics and biblical history and biblical philosophy are not taught as often as they might in higher church denominations. The lack of understanding makes it harder to defend what they believe simply because for the most part they don’t understand what they believe or why they believe it. Jesus loves Me is a cute kids song. It’s just that it’s an inch deep as compared to what Christian thought was about for the first 500-1000 years.
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What made New Atheism vulnerable to Atheism+ was that it already had a strong left-leaning majority and so progressives could try a takeover. This general trend affected basically every left-leaning space during the Great Awokening.
Many of the most prominent New Atheists went on to be antiwoke, notably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.
So you can pretend it was that New Atheists had a "deep ignorance" but I think you're making most of that up. The average New Atheist knew/knows a lot more about the topics you list than the typical believer. I'm pretty sure whatever his failures, Daniel Dennett did not lack for a lack of philosophical understanding...
At the end of the day, no religion has managed to prove itself true to other religious folks. Atheists are merely considered impolite for recognizing the consistent lack of proof.
Frankly, I find most annoying the "sophisticated" believers who can't quite truly believe, but look down on both the atheists and the true believers.
Also, it's always funny to see someone ostensibly defending religious faith by accusing materialists of "blind faith."
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I think that Tim O'Neill is actually a smug idiot and there's a lot of ideas that he's promulgating on that website that are worse than the new atheist positions he's trying to debunk, like the dark ages ages weren't dark, the date of christmas, the christianity of various traditions of christmas and easter, mythicism itself and even flat earth.
I think you are mistaking rejection for ignorance. I have a lot of sympathy for the position that philosophy is just as useless, if not more so, than religion.
If you actually read some of the history of atheism you will find that in the west there are actually two atheisms. You can conceptualize both as different forms of christian heresy, if you like. The first one is theological it says "we examined your theology and found it discordant with the evidence". The other one is moral, it says "we examined your theology and found we can be more pious without you" hence woke.
Those two types of atheism keep getting rediscovered throughout history and they are often allied but reached a breaking point now that religion has become almost completely irrelevant in the west and the ideological differences can come to the surface. For example:
etc etc
Oh, you wanna get into "When were the Dark Ages, what were the Dark Ages, and why did the Independent Free-Thinking Ain't Nobody Gonna Tell Me What To Believe set wholeheartedly and uncritically accept Protestant polemic propaganda?" Because let's fight about history while we're at it!
See, OP, why I think this was a bad idea? 😂😂😂
EDIT:
Throw in Easter and Hallowe'en while you're at it, this is more Protestant anti-Catholic stuff repurposed first for the Enlightenment Enlightened ("haw haw the Christians just took over existing pagan festivals in order to win over the masses and hold power over them") and then later for the Neopagan Wiccan lot ("excuse me, those are our celebrations which the persecutors stole and rebranded!")
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-dark-ages https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2024584895847121066 https://x.com/GuthmannR/status/1741216526760374312 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
The dark ages are real, the name is merited and who came up with it first doesn't matter.
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
Yes, the Dark Ages were real. They were not "and this lasted up to the 14th/16th century until 18th century Enlightenment/19th century Rationalism/20th century mass Atheism came along to liberate us!"
It does matter who invents the name and the concept, or do you indeed agree with this stunning example of fact-based representation?
Yes, original invented by Christians Easter. It is based around the Jewish festival of Passover, or are you going to argue the Jews stole this from the Anglo-Saxons, too? In nearly every European language, the term for Easter is derived from ecclesiastical Latin or church Greek "Pascha", derived ultimately from Pesach, for Passover. See the Irish word Cáisc or, indeed, the English term Paschal (and the name derived from that, Pascal, as Noel and Noelle from Christmas).
We even had rows in the early Church about the date of Easter being too near to Passover!
Now, where the pop culture "Easter is a pagan feast them dirty Christians stole!" depends on two legs:
(1) Many cultures have spring festivals. Easter is a spring festival, therefore The Dirty Christians stole it from pre-existing European spring festivals.
To which I reply, the only people with a legitimate right to complain about us appropriating pre-existing religious feast of the time are the Jews with Passover, and if we're gonna blame The Dirty Christians then we also have to blame Da Joos for ripping-off Passover from some Canaanite or Mesopotamian spring festival. It's turtles all the way down!
(2) There totes was a goddess Eostre and she was the same as Istara/Inanna. Here we get the divergence and, ironically, the recombination of anti-Catholic Protestant polemic (the good old Two Babylons type) and the neopagan movement. The anti-Catholics were (and still are?) very big on "There used to be Pure Gospel Christianity, but at an early date corruption crept in, thanks to the emperor Constantine, and the Roman Catholic Church was born, and this was chock-full of pagans only pretending to be Christian, and they carried over or cynically adopted popular festivals so the masses could keep on worshipping the old gods under the pretence of celebrating new Christian saints and what-not". Then the neopagans hopped on this with "ours is a Genuine Ancient Tradition not invented out of whole cloth in the late 19th up to mid-20th century, we have rights to the big popular cultural events like Christmas and Easter because they belong to us" (often, as I say ironically, quoting the anti-Catholic stuff for evidence).
To which I reply, the big foundation stone for this is one (1) reference, by a Christian saint St Bede (formerly known as the Venerable Bede before his long-delayed canonisation) in a book on working out the dates of major Church feast days like Easter, The Reckoning of Time. (See above where I mentioned about controversies over dating Easter). He mentions that the Anglo-Saxon name for the period where Easter is celebrated is (what now corresponds to our month of April in modern dating) named after a goddess Eostre:
(If these calendar names are stirring vague sensations of "haven't I heard something like these before?", yes, Tolkien used these as basis for month names in The Shire, e.g. 'Winterfilth in the muddy Shire').
Now, this was catnip in the late 18th to early 19th century folklorists and antiquarians, particularly when we started getting European nationalist movements (think of the revivals of 'this is our native language and literature, these are our historic traditions, we are indeed a separate culture of our own and not mere helots of the dominant empire'). It had an entire name of its own, Romantic Nationalism. We get composers like Smetana and Sibelius writing works based on local folklore and myths, the Celtic Revival in Ireland, the search for and creation of national epics.
And discovering Big Important Pre-Christian Influences was a huge part of this. Eostre is probably linked to dawn goddesses and there were deities like that in Europe, heck we might as well invoke Ushas and Eos here as well. But those had fallen into obscurity, until the new scholarship seized upon Bede's mention to reconstruct an almost entirely imaginary goddess. We don't have any details of her worship, nature, etc. because Bede is the only surviving reference we have. But that didn't stop the Romantic Nationalists from giving her a slew of attributes and bigging her up in importance.
And so here we get to today, where it is taken as Gospel that hares, eggs, chocolate, and the rest of it are all derived from Eostre, the goddess cruelly displaced by the wicked Christians from her own feast.
But no, children, Easter is Christian. The name in the English-speaking world may be derived from Anglo-Saxon but the feast itself has been there from the foundation of Christianity.
Eh, on some metrics it did last until the 14/15 hundreds. Some of the graphs do look shockingly similar to the "hole" meme, tbh. The "enlightenment came to liberate us" part however is much more complicated.
That meme has a lot of problems but who invented it is not one of them.
Well, there you go. Original much like sonichu.
Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby
Well, okay. If you get your history off the pop culture shelf, who am I to stop you? 🤣 What, are the Carolingians nothing to you?
And who did the Jews copy Pesach from, tell me? Enquiring minds want to know!
I will refer you to my previous messages.
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O'Neill's point is not really as much "the collapse following the loss of Roman power in the West didn't exist at all" but rather that the concept of Dark Ages is overextended to basically claim the entire period from the end of the classical era to the beginning of the Renaissance as a "Dark Age", use this as a stick for beating Christianity (which didn't cause the Western Roman collapse in any case), and when this point is challenged the anti-Christian polemicists will resort to motte and baileying.
The Easter is obviously a continuation the Jewish Passover with the death-and-resurrection-of-the-Christ thematic superseding it yet still being symbolically in many was a part of the Passover, no Christian (or O'Neill) would deny this. The Easter myths that O'Neill criticizes are the spurious claims of pagan origin, such as the idea of an obscure British goddess that might or might not have been celebrated around this period having anything to do with the greater global Christian concept of Easter/Pascha.
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I don't know about "figures" but as a rank-and-file Internet Atheist Board Warrior of the era, I can say that these subjects are just plain deeply uninteresting to someone who simply wants to vanquish nincompoops who think Hebrew mythology can be successfully validated by science. Philosophy bros with unfalsifiable takes existed but went mostly ignored by both sides.
The name-calling started earlier than I expected.
To keep my end up in contributions, here's something about an Italian saint from the 19th century (but not canonised until 2025) who ended up promoting the rosary:
A natural progression, one might say? 🤣
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