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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)?
What in the heck are you even saying here?
To the rest of your post, atheism is correct in the sense that if there's not sufficient compelling evidence then people should default to a position of not knowing instead of just blindly believing things on faith. This jives pretty well with the rationalist movement that this forum is a descendent of.
Atheism used to be pretty blue-coded back in the Bush days when proto-Wokeists teamed up with principled atheists to lambast the evangelical hegemony of the early 2000s USA. The movement splintered when the principled atheists like Dawkins essentially said "actually our critiques apply to ALL religions, like Islam too", which caused consternation with the proto-Wokeists since Muslims are blue-coded. This caused the Atheism+ to be born to try to explicitly pivot the movement towards social justice and woke causes, but the inconsistencies were big enough that the movement collapsed almost immediately. Atheism as a political movement has effectively no power today, even though the rates of irreligiosity continue to increase.
Implying atheism gave rise to wokeism is nonsense. The two were aligned a few decades ago, but they have very separate origins, goals, motivations, etc. which is why they split.
If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves. I've seen a lot of people here argue junk like "wokeism is just the lack of religion" (it's not) or try to promote a revival of religiosity by cherrypicking parts of religion that present it as an almost godless political philosophy for conservatism while ignoring the superstitious parts like, say, the whole origin story, the concept of eternal salvation, etc.
I've explained it in a few comments downthread. Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.
That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.
The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses, not that they had the same origins/goals/motivations.
Fair enough, though I'd say you should really provide a better explanation in the first post next time. For whatever reason, the philosophy nerds and especially the metaphysics people seem to think everyone has a very high baseline knowledge of philosophers on this forum. Some might, but I've always found metaphysics to be both highly esoteric and quite useless in the few brief forays I did on the subject.
Agnosticism (i.e. confidence in belief) is on a separate axis from atheism (i.e. direction of belief). The vast majority of atheists will be agnostic. Most religious people will be gnostic. There are some gnostic atheists but they're mostly just strawmen.
I don't think we're necessarily disagreeing here. To reiterate, I'm saying that everyone should default to being (agnostic) atheists until they've been given sufficiently compelling evidence to believe otherwise.
This sounds like a "wokeism is just the lack of religion" argument that I mentioned up above. Your only articulation on this point in the top post was "Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses". I don't really follow. I'm assuming you're talking about cultural relativism here? Modern wokeism really isn't relativistic; it's morally absolutist about its causes so I really don't know what you're getting at.
I've never understood this way of discussing (a)theism. What's wrong with just using probabilities like we do with every other belief? What does the confidence-direction distinction add to the epistemology/discussion?
The concept of agnostic vs gnostic arose as a necessary defense against theists who'd retort "how are you so sure that God doesn't exist???" and try to pin the burden of evidence on the other side. Sarcastic atheists would respond with something like "how are you so sure that we weren't created by a magical Flying Spaghetti Monster?". More charitable atheists would explain the agnostic vs gnostic split.
The atheist making this argument does assign some probability to god existing (maybe its 0, maybe its 49%, whatever). Like, they have to make decisions, which means they have a probability they implicitly endorse.
As far as I can tell, making that agnostic vs gnostic split is literally just playing word games to allow the agnostic/atheist to avoid having to justify their beliefs. More explicitly, the conversation would be
Like, I don't believe in God, but I really don't see how this distinction is anything more than word games made to win an argument. I'm interested in being proven wrong on this point.
You call it a "necessary defense", but there are plenty of other defenses for why a theists' conception of God is unlikely
Over time religious people have moved the goal posts as science has repeatedly falsified whatever claims they made, so existing theology is very p-hacked.
The existence of many contradictory religions (many predating your own) suggests religion is something humans are ~99% likely to invent regardless of its truthfulness, so the fact that a bunch of people believe your religion (and claim miracles for it, etc) is actually remarkably weak evidence in favor of it
Your religion is extremely self-contradictory, which makes it likely that large swathes of it are false
Virtually no one in your religion acts like your religion is true.
etc
And like, my point is not to prove any of those is uncontroversially true - my point is that plenty of other defenses exist - they're just more annoying to make.
Those other defenses you listed are well and good, but they don't specifically address the concern of "Why are you so sure that God doesn't exist" (bolding added this time). Those other defenses cast doubt on the likelihood of God, but none are 100% knockout blows. There's always still some chance, however small, that God (or even just some god) does exist. That's why debates on the confidence of belief are important, because a theist interpreting an atheists claims as being gnostic are almost always strawmen.
This is a different question. Again, it's a question of "likelihood that God exists" as opposed to "when does evidence become so unconvincing that that you discount something"?
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