Atheism is fine. Antitheism is bigotry.
Atheism is fine. Antitheism is bigotry.
No one is free from criticism. Harmful ideas should be condemned, when they are demonstrably harmful. But theist beliefs are such a vast range and diversity of ideas, some harmful, some useful, some healing, some vivifying, and still others having served as potent drivers of movements for justice; that to lump all theist religious belief into one category and attack the whole of it, only demonstrates your ignorance of theology, and is in fact bigotry.
By saying that religious and superstitious beliefs should be disrespected, or otherwise belittling, or stigmatizing religion and supernatural beliefs as a whole, you have already established the first level on the "Pyramid of Hate", as well as the first of the "10 Stages of Genocide."
If your religion is atheism, that's perfectly valid. If someone is doing something harmful with a religious belief as justification, that specific belief should be challenged. But if you're crossing the line into bigotry, you're as bad as the very people you're condemning.
Antitheism is a form of supremacy in and of itself.
"In other words, it is quite clear from the writings of the “four horsemen” that “new atheism” has little to do with atheism or any serious intellectual examination of the belief in God and everything to do with hatred and power.
Indeed, “new atheism” is the ideological foregrounding of liberal imperialism whose fanatical secularism extends the racist logic of white supremacy. It purports to be areligious, but it is not. It is, in fact, the twin brother of the rabid Christian conservatism which currently feeds the Trump administration’s destructive policies at home and abroad – minus all the biblical references."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/5/4/the-resurrection-of-new-atheism/
You're viewing a single thread.
Couple of thoughts:
-
Atheism is not a religion. Religion is defined by doctrine and rituals, atheism has neither. It is the absence of religion. Some argue that atheism requires faith when compared to agnosticism, which is fair, but it does not make it a religion per se.
-
Antitheism typically stands on the ground that religion has been used to justify atrocities. It posits that religion is poisonous due to its effect on people and its ability to control their behavior to do irrational or evil things. Antitheism is not misanthropic in nature, nor is it trying to persecute people for their religion (at least not inherently), it is just the belief that a purely secular would would be more harmonious.
-
The idea that a minority group like antitheists have started the beginning stages of a "genocide" against religious people just because they find their beliefs to be harmful is absurd, even at face value. Even atheists hold no institutional power anywhere in the world and antitheistic, hardline anti-religion beliefs tend to be fringe, even among atheists.
tl;dr - Generally disagree about everything
Some argue that atheism requires faith when compared to agnosticism, which is fair, but it does not make it a religion per se.
I agree with most of your points, but I'm not sure I think it's fair.
While atheism/antitheism is obviously a belief, it is not "capital F Faith" in the usual religious sense. You have a "faith" in gravity and that it'll keep doing gravity things, which is based on measurable phenomena. The other kind, "just-have-faith/God works in mysterious ways" faith, is specifically based on the opposite, and is more akin to trust and hope. Trust and hope are great, but it does make the concepts fundamentally different. Equating the two is a very common occurrence that just so happens to either paint atheism/antitheism as a much more "random" belief, or paint theism as much more substantiated than it is, depending on perspective.
I agree that it's more of a semantics game. Religious faith is different from a faith in secular theories and hypotheses. One is based on superstition, while the other on reasonable probability. That said, the answer to the question "why do you believe in anything if knowledge can never be guaranteed" always ends up being some variation of "faith" in my experience, whether the beliefs are secular or religious, but I know there are those who disagree and/or will categorize these things differently based on their choice of language.
Antitheism has plenty of blood on its hands, just like every other religion. Counting human lives only:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antireligion
And going beyond human lives, only something like 1-3% of the human population is vegan. That means 97% of people are actively complicit in an egregious atrocity every day, and that is blood on the hands of people of all religions.
Again, antitheism does not have the defining characteristics of religion. And what you're pointing to is state violence, which again, is not an issue today since antitheists do not hold institutional power, are considered a fringe group, and would generally not accept a state-sponsored genocide of religious people. I feel like you are arguing against the ghost of Stalinism.
-