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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 it's just an age thing. Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet. I think it's just hard to enforce that level of blindness in the age of the internet.
There do seem to be a few people in my life that never grew out of their atheism phase, but they seem generally uncurious.
Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists. I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.
To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.
You seem to entirely discount the existence of many older atheists who used to be religious.
Many were religious, asked that question, and this led to them becoming atheists.
It's kind of amusing seeing this kind of argument dunking on atheists as just angry teenagers who never grew up. There's a certain kind of religious belligerent who is the mirror image of the condescending atheist sneering at sky fairies.
Doubtlessly most atheists have a shallow and simplistic understanding of religions, but is that not also true of most religious people? I would bet that the vast majority of practicing Catholics are not experts on Thomistic metaphysics, and could not explain the exact nature of the Trinity without accidentally falling into heresy. If dismissing a belief you don't understand is worthy of scorn, is not professing one even more so? Do Christians need a solid grasp of Buddhist epistemology or Islamic jurisprudence, or for that matter atheistic philosophies, before they can properly and respectably disbelieve them?
So... why can't atheists do the same? Why do they need to study the alternatives before embracing their own beliefs and opinions?
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Sure, there are people who stopped going to church when their parents couldn't make them anymore. There are also people who struggled for a long time with their faith before coming to atheism.
There are definitely plenty of atheists with a very shallow understanding of religion who just want to dunk on the superstitious dummies. Just as there are plenty of religious people with a very shallow understanding of atheism, or any religion but their own (and often not a very deep understanding of that), who just want to dunk on unbelievers.
There are certain tells that people on either side use that indicate they are just arguing with memes and canned zingers that date back to the very early days of the atheism debates, and I find the angry atheist who sneers about sky fairies and the condescending believer who thinks he can psychoanalyze the cause of your atheism to be equally insufferable.
I would like to understand why you say you agree with my last point and then proceeded to exemplify it with this kind of sneering remark.
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It was how the Apostles cited as evidence of Jesus being the Messiah, old testament verses that had nothing at all to do with him.
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You're lumping all religion together. Sure , people have had various mutually exclusive belief systems since the beginning of history. If you want us to buy into Roman Catholicism, then you have to argue that its specific god is the one god that actually exists, as opposed to say Zeus and the Roman Pantheon.
"Lol no," said the man after criticizing people who approach the subject with the sophistication of 12 year olds.
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We may not be smarter than people in the past, but we do know more than them. We have accumulated a vastly greater amount of knowledge than they had available, scientific and otherwise.
That doesn't prove that people who've believed in a religion for hundreds of years were wrong. However, the fact that something has been believed for hundreds of years isn't good evidence that it's true, either.
So yes, a proper response to "Who are you to think you know better than an entire history of peoples?" is "Someone who has more information than those people did." I suspect you do not apply this "How can you presume to be wiser than them?" argument to cultures who practiced and believed things for centuries that you don't consider true.
The fact that they didn't know what cancer is is not relevant. The fact that they did not know that diseases have a biological origin and are not the result of evil spirits or angering a deity is.
No one claimed that.
You show very little understanding of where I am (like, for example, by assuming I identify as a "rationalist" and then making further assumptions about what I believe about moral reasoning).
You suspect incorrectly. And you need to stop doing this. Engage with people in good faith and without the snide insults. That's not mod-hatted because it was a response to me, which I responded to, but I see you doing it to other people, and given your history of talking to people like this, I strongly recommend you do some thinking about how to actually have civil conversations with people who do not share your assumptions. That is what this place is for. That is how you have a "more than high school level" conversation, as opposed to just showing off how many digs you can slip in for an inflated sense of superiority.
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I'm sorry but this "entirely discount" irritated me more than it probably should have. No I am not "entirely" anything. I'm pointing out a perceived inverse correlation between age and adherence to atheism, oh and wouldn't you know, since we all love polls here so much, that is reflected in polling: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/age-distribution/
Obviously these people exist. I still have all of their books, and used fawn over their youtube videos and post their takes on my various social media accounts. I still celebrate Christopher Hitchens birthday and mourn him on his death day, and still consider him one of the most influential people in my life outside of my own family.
Especially given the types of responses I've gotten, I agree.
Yes, there's an inverse correlation between age and religiosity. You're implicitly pushing the idea that people become more religious over time. But the poll you quote is a snapshot of a particular moment in time. I submit to evidence more polling from the same organization that suggests that since the early 2000s, Americans in general are becoming less religious, and at quite a steady rate [1].
The alternative hypothesis is that ever since there was widespread penetration of Internet access, young people could easily research better explanations than "God did it". And that younger generations are less religious than ever and will stay so over their lifetime, because that's the best explanation for the available evidence.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/11/Detailed-tables-for-upload-11.11.19.pdf
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Most of the responses you've gotten seem more thoughtful than your OP.
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