askchapo

Smugness and basically replacing God with “logical thinking”

I disagree with a lot of the commenters here that Islamophobia and focusing more on Islam than Christianity is a key part of it. It’s somehow what a lot of people landed on, but I don’t think those are requirements to be a Reddit atheist.

As someone who was a prime example of a Reddit atheist when I was like 14, my thoughts on Islam were “It’s bad but we can deal with that after getting rid of Christianity.” Why would I care about Islam, only like 1% of the US is Muslim, and they’re not the ones who told me I would burn for eternity at my grandma’s funeral.

I wanted to (and still kinda do tbh) destroy every remnant of Christianity root and stem. Every cross destroyed, every church repurposed or burned. There was a year I decided we should turn Christmas back into Saturnalia. I (frankly, correctly) saw Christianity as the largest cause of harm and misery in history. Turns out capitalism is the bigger cause in modernity, but capitalism was birthed from Protestant Christianity, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Similarly, a lot of Reddit atheists are western chauvinists, which never made sense to me, because I saw (again, correctly) western civilization as the outgrowth of the evils of Christianity, and if only (and this is where I went wrong) everyone could see the world through the logical eyes of atheism everyone would understand that racism and sexism, poverty, war, are completely illogical and would end. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate this at the time but I basically believed religion was the only thing holding us back from communist utopia.

All of this is to say I don’t think those are the factors that define a reddit atheist, because I definitely consider my teenage self one, despite not having those beliefs. It’s the smugness, the annoyingness, and the worship of “logic”. It’s commenting annoying shit on people’s social media posts because they mentioned God. It’s thinking that if you can just explain the obvious contradictions in religious texts people will be like “Oh wow, I hadn’t noticed that! This whole thing is silly!” That you can debate-bro people out of their religious beliefs.

Honestly, most of my beliefs haven’t changed I’ve just become a lot less annoying about it. I still believe that Christianity is a scourge on this planet that should be destroyed, and liberation theology and other attempts to sanitize it are not enough to justify its continued existence. I think if you could wave a magic wand and erase every Bible from existence the world would become a somewhat better place overnight. But I now have a better understanding of just how entrenched it is, and how the current causes of harm have disconnected themselves from it, and so it’s hardly even worth targeting. Capitalism grew out of Christianity, but it’s like those contagious tumors that Tasmanian devils have, and it’s spread to infect every other aspect of society, and euthanizing patient 0 now won’t do much. So I mostly shut up about it and focus on the more immediate problem, capitalism.