Anonymous A (OP) double-posted this 6 days ago, 2 minutes later[^][v]#1,413,451
I personally know a lot of people who'll say they're atheists or agnostic when asked, so it's not like atheism went away. But where's the edgy atheism gone? Where's Dawkins and his fanbase? Why don't I hear about r/atheism anymore? Sam Harris? Christopher Hitchens (yes I know he's dead)?
The blackest guy double-posted this 5 days ago, 2 minutes later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#1,413,459
One thing I have found annoying about militant atheists is that Catholics are more private with their belief than Protestants are, and the United States is majority Protestant, so whenever I’ve heard a militant atheist complain about Catholicism, it never really swayed me because it always sounds like they’re complaining about Protestants and don’t know what the difference is.
The blackest guy triple-posted this 5 days ago, 4 minutes later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#1,413,460
Mostly it just seemed overly reductionist to me, if there are 1.4 billion Catholics and the church is 2,000 years old, you can’t just label all of that history and all of those people as good or bad. Trying to reduce it down to a binary doesn’t mean anything.
tteh !MemesToDNA joined in and replied with this 5 days ago, 24 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,413,466
Well, the New Atheists® themselves scattered. Hitchens died, Dawkins got old, Sam Harris moved away from the "New Atheism" lane into podcasting and spirituality/Buddhism (he already fell out of favour with a lot of lefties after defending airport profiling lol), Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity, and Daniel Dennett finally popped his clogs. The closest to a new 'horseman' is probably Alex O'Connor, and he's no antitheist.
But really I think a lot of people just grew up, and atheism stopped feeling like a rebellious/subversive/edgy identity once the teens who devoured The God Delusion entered the real world. Once it's just a default stance for a lot of people, who wants to rally around a movement defined by what it doesn't believe? And the attempts to bolt an identity onto it (Atheism+, the 'Brights' movement) felt contrived, probably because building a movement around a negation is inherently retarded. Some people strayed into adjacent movements like Effective Altruism and other TESCREAL-ish currents, which actually tried to offer a substantive programme (despite being their own flavour of retarded).
At the end of the day I think the novelty wore off and most people were happy to just... not believe, and move on.
boof joined in and replied with this 5 days ago, 10 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,413,469
in some group or groups, there's been drama with pro versus anti feminist stuff that is a distraction, devolving into a fuck-you-I'm-fascist-now attitude at worst