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What you're seeing may just be a first-generation atheist effect. Most atheists in the US are still first-generation and rejected their parents views within th

What you're seeing may just be a first-generation atheist effect. Most atheists in the US are still first-generation and rejected their parents views within the last couple decades. They also tend to trend younger, and it isn't too surprising that their beliefs are "sophomoric" (in the sense of being like a college sophomore who has just figured out everything about life with their wealth of experience). As a 51 year old that was raised without religion, I'll agree they are in fact really tiresome. [also see this good comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 -- I've lived in Seattle for the past 30+ years so just never come face-to-face with religiosity in ages. If an Atheist is surrounded by Christian assholes they tend to turn into an asshole right back. That is just normal behavior of humans (or abused animals as well really). ]

muyuu 4y ago
I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins seems to embody, that new atheists are MORE religious than their parents, but they are pious of their non-deistic beliefs and they very strongly preserve the religious-based culture they stem from in terms of moral values and societal norms the danger in this, which we are observing now, is that their ability to predict the dynamics of society is worse not better than that of plain old religious types - because their own piousness is invisible to them and they engage in deranged stuff like assuming people will just default to their hierarchies of values and morality, once the religious rooting and background of their moral beliefs is removed the obvious thing to assume would be the opposite, that humans would resort to their historically documented patterns of behaviour and repeat the intense conflict of the past to adjudicate moral disagreements, which the previous state of stand-off had already paid its dues to - and those conflicts were violent and bloody, which should bring us pause in our desire to go back to a state of "new religion" even if this one is based on the state-of-the-art science of the day and might be not deistic in the common sense of the word TLDR; in the sense of moral belief, it's not clear whether it would be better to have a non-religious society (non-coherent in moral values and collective moral rules) or even if such a thing is possible, or could be stable over time. My gut instinct is that (moral) atheism and collectivism are a bomb of a combination that is unlikely to end in anything other than disaster, and my egoistic belief is that I'm much happier if people believe in exotic supernatural stuff but it's neatly compartmentalised into the private sphere and controlled public spheres, than if they start a crusade to uproot the collective's beliefs, which will likely affect my livelihood - I see the New Atheists movement as an effort to destroy a very desirable state of affairs, not a grand goal of ushering in a rationalist Utopia

muyuu 4y ago

I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins seems to embody, that new atheists are MORE religious than their parents, but they are pious of their non-deistic beliefs and they very strongly preserve the religious-based culture they stem from in terms of moral values and societal norms the danger in this, which we are observing now, is that their ability to predict the dynamics of society is worse not better than that of plain old religious types - because their own piousness is invisible to them and they engage in deranged stuff like assuming people will just default to their hierarchies of values and morality, once the religious rooting and background of their moral beliefs is removed the obvious thing to assume would be the opposite, that humans would resort to their historically documented patterns of behaviour and repeat the intense conflict of the past to adjudicate moral disagreements, which the previous state of stand-off had already paid its dues to - and those conflicts were violent and bloody, which should bring us pause in our desire to go back to a state of "new religion" even if this one is based on the state-of-the-art science of the day and might be not deistic in the common sense of the word TLDR; in the sense of moral belief, it's not clear whether it would be better to have a non-religious society (non-coherent in moral values and collective moral rules) or even if such a thing is possible, or could be stable over time. My gut instinct is that (moral) atheism and collectivism are a bomb of a combination that is unlikely to end in anything other than disaster, and my egoistic belief is that I'm much happier if people believe in exotic supernatural stuff but it's neatly compartmentalised into the private sphere and controlled public spheres, than if they start a crusade to uproot the collective's beliefs, which will likely affect my livelihood - I see the New Atheists movement as an effort to destroy a very desirable state of affairs, not a grand goal of ushering in a rationalist Utopia