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I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error). But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokeism. Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople". Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but atheism typically gets a free pass. Even the philosophers on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.
Does this happen because atheism is largely not viewed as a threat anymore (since its birth of wokeism is already in the past) and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and atheism is vaguely internet-weirdo-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokeism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that atheism makes go so far beyond typical constraints of the scientific method that one actually does just quietly make an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation (and people just fail to ever mention such)?
Athiesm isn't derided because no opposing viewpoint is offered.
New Athiesm only happened because almost no believed in their religion anymore... How many were ready to go to war in the middle east to defend the besmirched honour of American empire after 9/11? Now how many were advocating crusade against the Saracen to spread the literal word of god before 9/11?
We know what true conviction based religious belief looks like... it looks like the Crusades, or the Mormons fleeing into the desert, or Jihadists taking the fight to the infidels.
And that doesn't exist in America... even the Mormons abandon core theological convictions the second the US state wants them gone (their prophet was murdered in the same house as his wailing wives... and they axed polygamy to appease the government that persecuted them).
New aethiest issued a challenge that religious conviction was the font of all the worlds problems, and instead of retorting that lack of faith was the font of all evil and we needed a moral, political, and possiblity military crusade to drive that unbelief out...
All the alleged "Christians" in America just folded and basically agreed Chrisitianity was a failed predecessor of progressivism.... and just begged that in private they be allowed to privately imagine Jesus as a proto hippy
A true Christian is a martyr. Much more like Padre Pio than a crusader. Crusades were an empire western civ thing and the merger with Christianity. OG Christianity was a slaves religion.
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