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I'll add that as an Atheist, Ive concluded that politics has become everyone's new religion and I hate it, and I especially hate the progressive/leftist religion. To my mind, I'm the last New Atheist, being a stubborn prickly contrarian against smug sanctimony and moral panic regardless of the mask it wears.
Yeah, I think the time I started noticing this was happening was when Atheism+ happened and New Atheists started saying that merely being against religion wasn't enough, that we had to stand for something. My response was and is that no, my lack of religiosity doesn't have downstream implications about what I should support politically. At the time, I didn't realize that this was going to be the manifestation of a religion-replacement, but I suppose I should have.
Being as fair as I can be to the New Atheism/Atheist+ stuff, I think when the New Atheists were riding high and getting public notice, they thought that finally the moment had come for atheism/non-religion to go mainstream at last and that now eventually religious belief would be laughed and scorned and pitied into oblivion. But if you wanted to make that a mass movement, you needed something more than "well we don't go to church on Sundays" because a lot of ordinary people don't go to church on Sundays, either, but don't identify as atheists (or as the Science! loving types that New Atheism were tending to venerate).
So if you wanted to get the average Jack and Jill interested in coming out as "yes, I'm an atheist!", you needed something that could hook them and where they could see their atheism being part of their lives. And since not everyone is going to be "oh all my life I have longed to be a white-coated scientist", that had to be things in ordinary life.
And politics is one of those things. And a replacement for religion is, too. "Atheists are lovely people who believe in equality and fairness and niceness and reason and science-based decision making and live and let live" type philosophy to attract everyone, which of course then gets bogged down in "to non-existent hell with you for your incorrect opinions on tea in first or milk in first" because that's human nature.
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Your experience with New Atheists and Atheism+ seems similar to mine. I always scoffed at the notion of people having a "god shaped hole" in their heart or whatever that I'd heard from religious people, but the behavior of atheists in the last decade or so since Atheism+ have convinced me that this metaphorical "hole" is as biologically real as the physical heart. And, quite possibly, leaving this hole empty to let nature take its course with its abhorrence for vacuums, is far worse than filling it with something like Christianity, which could be considered the least-worst option that at least has a track record of surviving more than a generation or two.
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