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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)?
I think your attempt to re-trace the philosophical and metaphysical implications of the New-Atheism-to-Wokeism transition and being confused as to why we're seemingly uncritical of a movement accused of birthing our outgroup is getting tripped up by missing an important element: libertarianism. I realize I shouldn't be speaking for the others, but many "New Atheists" were probably animated by the same basic impulse: don't coerce us.
The atheism wars of the 2000's were animated by this very same impulse--it's what that whole culture war was about, and funny enough, it's also what our current culture war is about. 2000's atheism was about fighting back against stifling normative cultural programming from Christians, and the current moment is about fighting back against ungrounded ideals being programmed into the mechanisms of society. So yes, we treat atheism with "kid gloves" because we are godless liberals who didn't go woke.
Again, as someone who could have been one of those cringy Reddit atheists, I like to think I can get along well with religious people, but at the same time, I'm not particularly interested in acting as if some ancient Jewish guy magically came back to life after being left for dead in the Israeli desert just to accomodate them, nor am I particularly interested in being told I'm going to Hell after I die just because I don't really feel God in my bones. No, I guess this isn't grounded in any coherent idea of metaphysics or whatever, but I don't care about that aspect most of the time; it's based in practical reality.
I think the atheism-libertarianism connection is moreso that - or at least this is how it has always looked to me - in the United States, particularly in the years after the Christian Right ascendancy in the Republican Party (and this certainly was still going on during the Bush II years, W. wore his religion on the sleeve in a way that Trump certainly didn't), "libertarianism" often was basically just code for being right-wing but not being religious. This also explains why online libertarianism seems to be less of a presence on forums than now; post-Trump and with the general reduction of the power of religion in American society, it's more possible than previously to just be a secular conservative, like through being a nationalist or "anti-woke" or so on.
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I’m skeptical of the ‘new atheism birthed woke’ idea, tbh, and I say that as someone who doesn’t like either very much- new atheists are still around being new atheists, and they’re often stridently anti-woke. No one really pays attention to them(which I suspect is why the motte is so uninterested in criticizing atheists), but Dawkins is still out there making 13 year old Redditor arguments.
The impression I got is that somewhere around 2012 there was a massive schism within the New Atheism community, from which the daughter community Atheism Plus was born. Atheism Plus, spearheaded by people such as PZ Myers and Richard Carrier, added several social-justice causes to New Atheism, and indeed largely shared interests, priorities, and rhetorics with the modern social justice movement. Eventually most of its members lost interest for the atheist aspect and sort of faded into general-purpose SJ. After the schism, people who still considered themselves New Atheists, such as Harris and Dawkins, were pretty much anti-SJ by default -- if they hadn't, they would have moved into the A+.
A good summary, but my impression as a New Atheist-ish type was that A+ was a consequence of a wider trend, from about 2008, to elevate economics over social policy issues, and for feminism to regain some of its early 90s prescriptivism rather than later 90s/00s "Girls just wanna have fun" feminism.
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As someone who does think that the "New Atheism" community played a pretty outsized role in shaping what basically makes up modern progressive culture, I would almost certainly say that the Atheism part of it is largely irrelevant. It's more of a coincidence than anything else, it could have happened in pretty much any other online community (I do think social media plays a role in this) that leaned left.
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Many mothers who aren't particularly nice people end up greatly disliking their children when they turn out to be, surprise, not very nice people either. They just realize something about the fruit of their labor after the deed has already been done.
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