Yes, reddit atheism should make a come back

So...remember how I recently tackled religion and slavery? Well, Kyle covered it today, and he said something that I really wanna delve into myself, and that is the idea that reddit atheism needs a come back. I know I'm not an actual atheist any more, but a lot of my current ideological views owe a lot to the secular humanist/"new atheist" movement. Post christianity, that stuff is what my starting point is for building up my current worldview. It's secular humanism. And yes, I do tend to embrace the edge lord stuff to some extent. I kind of dulled my edginess somewhat in recent years as I became spiritual again and developed friendships with more moderate christians, but looking at the world today, yeah, we NEED this stuff. Because here's the thing. Religion is very relevant to morality, it's relevant to politics, and its influence is very negative. And the above video just confirmed what I've already talked about. A lot of these people on the right, these religious psychos, they have no problems with SLAVERY. If anything, some may want it to come back, because let's face it, the losers of the first american civil war are kinda bitter about that. And some of them STILL, in 2025, want to bring slavery back. And because the bible isnt opposed to it, they're not morally opposed to it themselves.

Now, anyone with a modern mindset should see the obvious problems with owning a person. It violates their freedom, and freedom is an inherent good. It violates their ability to pursue their own happiness. It inflicts suffering on people, and can in some cases lead to their deaths. Basically, it violates ALL basic moral precepts of my worldview. Slavery is one of the worst evils in the world, up there with rape, torture, and murder. And Im so sensitive to the concept I have an issue with wage labor under capitalism basically being that with extra steps. But some people wanna go back to just out right owning people and not leaving them ANY choice, which is even worse. 

And yeah. Again, it's because the religious right has no morality outside of their book. They literally think if you dont believe in the bible, that you would do literally anything and we'd just live in a perpetual hobbesian reality. And this is a condemnation of themselves. They believe humans are inherently evil, they need to be made good by conformity with the biblical law, and that without it, they would have no guardrails. And honestly, it's a really immature take on morality.

Like, if you go by kohlberg's stages of morality, these guys are like stage 1-2. They're preconventional. They think, without the bible, we'd all have nothing. Maybe in recognizing this, some move on to conventional morality, stages 3 and 4, where they wanna be seen as "good" people. Or they recognize the value of the morality, without really getting to a stage of questioning it and figuring it out. Thats where post conventional morality comes in, and that's where I'm at. I consider myself as stage 5. I support democracy, rule of law, and making morality good for the people. I might even show glimpses of stage 6, but stage 6 thinkers arent so consistently, so...yeah. Stage 5, maybe 5.5, that's where I'd consider myself. 

But at this point, and this is what happens when you go humanist and throw religion out, you stop seeing morals as rigid edicts and start seeing it as flexible and only existent to serve humanity. We dont exist to serve rules, rules exist to serve us. And yeah, these fundies are just...very morally stunted people, they dont get this level of morality, the religion cripples them from doing so by keeping them in perpetual obedience to a 2000+ year old code, and then they end up supporting horrible things anyway because the code is so outdated that stuff that by modern standards is considered evil isnt evil because only the old stuff matters. THey go on about how "well all morality is subjective", separating human created morality from god's morality, and they just use it to throw out modern morality in favor of the past. ANd yeah, that's where these guys are. 

And yeah, I guess all morality is subjective in the sense that theres no universal moral code given to us by god, but this is where that guy on the bus meme comes in. Christians are like the whole looking at the rock side of the bus going "all morality is subjective" while those on the sun side are like "wow, all morality is subjective!". Like, the one side thinks this is bad because at any point, their moral system no longer matters, but then the other side is like, yeah, this means we can stop being beholden to old codes that dont work. I mean, all morality being "subjective" in this regard isnt a bad thing. It allows us to get the nonsense authority crap out of the way and the simplistic "god said so" stuff, and it allows us to think about what world we wanna live in. 

And when we do that, I think that eventually, and maybe this is where i go stage 6, yeah, there are some ideas that are just objectively beneficial to the human experience, and other things that arent. Having system of human rights a la the liberal enlightenment order is good. Democracy over dictatorship is generally good. Separation of church and state is generally good. That which extends life, reduces suffering, and respects peoples' freedom, autonomy, and human dignity, is generally good. Things that kill people, or make them suffer, or enslave them, or make their existence miserable are generally bad. And yeah, maybe at some point, enlightened thinkers gotta push their morality on the stage 1 and 2 people who would act like animals if not given a moral code. And maybe some level of "authority" is a means to an end there. Even though our society is run by these high minded enlightenment ideas, we still need police, for example. We still need a military. Why? To protect us from the "bad" people. Who are the bad people? The people who would murder, torture, rape, enslave, or otherwise make your existence miserable if you dont stop them. 

But yeah, religion, it's a useful tool for those low level thinkers to keep them in line. But it also tends to cripple their moral development where they never progress. And I would argue, given the moral conflicts I've outlined in discussing my own deconversion before, that, yeah, me shifting from stage 4 to stage 5 is very correlated to my deconversion. Did one cause the other? Eh, in a way they operated as a feedback loop. Developing my own moral voice put me at odds with christianity, and after i left christianity it was like i left the cave (hence the blog name). Like, i finally saw reality and morality for what it is, and my understanding massively grew as a result. 

And yeah, to return to the topic, if we want to beat the fundies, we need to mock them. the SJWs tried the outrage politics, and it led to them getting worse. As kyle said above, and he's mentioned this in a few videos now, the right has developed "vice signalling" in response to "virtue signalling." Basically, these guys are immune to all forms of shaming due to their "own the libs" "F your feelings" mentality, and they've developed echo chambers where they start trying to say increasingly unhinged things. Which is how we get the young republicans' recent leaked group chat where they're all like "I love hitler" and making gas chamber jokes.

 So how do we deescalate this insanity if we cant shame them into oblivion? After all, we've created a monster immune to shame and due to tribalism and overshaming on our side, they literally are emboldened to get more and more insane. Well...we mock them. This is why theocracies make blasphemy illegal. While the right acts like nothing is sacred, religion is VERY sacred for them. THey put it on a pedastal, and make mocking or making light of it illegal. Why? Because it's the antidote to their entire belief system. If you point out how absurd their ideas are and relentlessly mock them, it takes away their power. And you know what? This helped me out of christianity myself. I never thought of it the way that the reddit atheists framed it. And a lot of the ideas surrounding the religion are just absurd and insane. And i think a reason we on the left lost our edge is because with the SJWs, we lost our sense of humor. And when we lost our sense of humor, we lost our greatest rhetorical weapon against the right. We became dull, serious, and perpetually butthurt. And in doing so, we gave the right power. They became the edgy ones. And unlike our edginess, where our edginess is "hahaha you get your morality from an ancient religion that makes no real logical sense.", their edginess is holocaust jokes and racial slurs. 

So yeah, if were going to stick to the grounds of relative civility and debate, and win the moral high ground without force and violence, we gotta get good at persuasion. And if we wanna beat the right, we gotta swap away from from perpetual outrage to just relentlessly mockng their stupid AF ideas. We need to point out just how absurd the right's perspective is, how absurd their morality is. Hell, with the kirk debate, how much of his own perspective was clearly governed by this underlying fundamentalist christian worldview? A lot of it. And ya know what? As i followed along with that debate, the terms i felt most confident i could beat kirk on was on the religion stuff. Because as a skeptic i dont have to prove anything. They have to argue their perspective. And then we just tear down their ideas and poke holes in their arguments. ANd if they get really insane, we mock them. 

Really, intellectually, the right has very little valid thought behind it. It's why they hate college and discourage people from going and treat it as liberal indoctrination. Because it breaks the spell of their ideology and worldview. And it makes it seem very unremarkable, flawed, and illogical. 

Well....new atheism....can at least give people the tools to deconstruct this stuff without college. Like, when atheists debate, logic is very heavily prized. Evidence is very heavily prized. And if you cant defend your views properly, well, maybe you should reconsider. College does the same thing, just in a softer way. It tells them that its okay to believe anything, as long as you can defend it using rationality and evidence. And I left conservatism, and religion, because I lost the ability to defend it. And that's what we need to do. Strip religion of all of the authority and sanctity that we give it, and tear it down through relentless mocking. 

And yeah, this mindset needs a comeback on the left. Less feels, aka SJW mindset, more reals, aka the reddit atheist one. I keep saying it. The downfall of the left is correlated with the fall of new atheism and the rise of SJWism. We were beating them. And then we stopped, and here we are a decade later and thinks are getting really, REALLY scary. This crap was unthinkable a decade ago. Because not only was it psychotic, it was also irrational. I mean, who could properly defend this stuff/ And the thats the thing. It's not defensible. If you get down to the nitty gritty with these people, their whole mindset is totally screwed up. But we dont really address it. But we stopped debating and started shaming. THey became immune to shame and kept escalating. And now they're ironically making genocide memes and calling for being slavery back. Mockery and rationality needs to make a come back. And with new atheism, we get both.