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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'm more than happy to shit all over atheism any time, anywhere. I cut my teeth in internet debates against atheists in the late 90's/early 2000's. That said, in my experience it only seems to come up as a topic in two contexts in discussions here: 1) atheism plus and other ways in which the modern atheism movement has been taken over by and also enabled wokism 2) the inability of atheism to provide solid moral grounding, fill the God-shaped hole in people, unite society under a common culture, etc. And in both those instances I think atheism sees plenty of criticism here.
What I don't see is a lot of genuine self-reflection by the atheists here on the possibility that atheism itself might actually be factually wrong, as opposed to them making arguments that it is just leading to bad outcomes for society. But that's about par for the course in my experience with debating them in real life or online.
I am an atheist. Atheism being wrong doesn't mean any of the currently existing religions are right. If any of them pull off something straight out of 1 Kings 18, I'll convert in an instant. If you're not trying to convert me to one of the existing religions and atheism is factually wrong, what is the factually right worldview?
So you say, but if Christianity is right then according to Luke 16 you wouldn't convert even after seeing an outright miracle.
The interpretation of Luke 16 is considerably more nuanced than that- after all, Catholicism claims multiple mass conversion events following public miracles, and every Christian denomination claims at least one.
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