I was a new monasticist Christian who deconstructed during this whole atheism thing and can vouch for all of this. We read some of these atheism books in Bible studies because they were both prevalent and quite lazily written, like these “four horsemen” just didn’t have a good grasp on philosophy. I even had an agnostic philosophy prof come to a Christian Bible study and explain some of the mainstream and competing views in philosophy about these subjects and it kind of validated how they weren’t serious as philosophers. After I lost my whole social group when I lost my faith I decided to check out an atheist group, which I attended for a time, but there were always these people who loved these terrible arguments for atheism and even wanted to go evangelize door to door about atheism. The group split in to culture war factions and died shortly after I stopped attending in 2012. It was worth it because I met a few very dear friends from this endeavor, but we all agreed this whole thing was trash.
The fact that we actually have peopel trying to “Spread the good word of Atheism” and coming up with arguments so bad it almost makes God sound… likely… shows the problem was never faith, it was always man. If Religion never existed, humans would be just as awful, they’d just find different reasons to be just as horrible.
Yeah basically, concepts like “civil/civic religion” describe this well. It’s like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, “the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest.” Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.
The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that’s how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of “religion” and cleave it away, because they think it’s this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn’t yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.
I was a new monasticist Christian who deconstructed during this whole atheism thing and can vouch for all of this. We read some of these atheism books in Bible studies because they were both prevalent and quite lazily written, like these “four horsemen” just didn’t have a good grasp on philosophy. I even had an agnostic philosophy prof come to a Christian Bible study and explain some of the mainstream and competing views in philosophy about these subjects and it kind of validated how they weren’t serious as philosophers. After I lost my whole social group when I lost my faith I decided to check out an atheist group, which I attended for a time, but there were always these people who loved these terrible arguments for atheism and even wanted to go evangelize door to door about atheism. The group split in to culture war factions and died shortly after I stopped attending in 2012. It was worth it because I met a few very dear friends from this endeavor, but we all agreed this whole thing was trash.
The fact that we actually have peopel trying to “Spread the good word of Atheism” and coming up with arguments so bad it almost makes God sound… likely… shows the problem was never faith, it was always man. If Religion never existed, humans would be just as awful, they’d just find different reasons to be just as horrible.
Yeah basically, concepts like “civil/civic religion” describe this well. It’s like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, “the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest.” Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.
The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that’s how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of “religion” and cleave it away, because they think it’s this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn’t yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.
I wanna give you a medal for this write up