Quote:
Originally Posted by uke_master
That kind of thing seems less prevalent 10-15 years a later, and I'm not 100% sure that's just me losing attention personally and maturing, but it seems that this kind of "movement atheism" is less strong these days as well, despite atheism itself probably being stronger.
This is probably true. I think there were a few things that happened that killed off that atheism.
1) Sam Harris proved himself to be basically an
Islamophobe. That's just one possible source of many that could have been pointed to, including some debates inside this forum and maybe there was one in SMP (but I don't remember anymore).
2) Hitchens died in 2011.
3) Dawkins discovered Twitter and discovered the rush of
going viral for making stupid statements.
4) Dennett... I have no clue what happened to him.
But from what I see, the thing fell apart from the inside and people just moved on with life.
For another perspective:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...wkins-hitchens
As far as this forum goes, it's dead because there's nothing new to debate among those that are left. The staunch atheism that tries to yell down religious folks mostly died away. (There are exceptions.) But the atheism that exists now is more reasoned and nuanced as its own thing rather than being mostly an anti-religion thing. There's much more common ground there, so we don't see vigorous debate. And so it ends up being both religious and non-religious folks going after people posting nonsense (both religious nonsense and non-religious nonsense), which isn't nearly as interesting.
From a religious perspective, the election of Donald Trump has led to most of the criticism of American Christianity to be in the form of non-white/non-conservative American Christians trying to figure out what is wrong with white conservative American Christians. (That's not to say that there isn't criticism for supporting Trump from non-Christians, but that one stays more in the realm of an actual political argument and not a religious one.)
And not a lot of people are willing to step up to defend Trump and the theology of supporting him in this forum. I think that's mostly just self-selection because people who skew conservative like that probably aren't visiting poker sites too often.