I recall reading something a while back that I couldn’t find when I went to write this, about a Christian flavor of atheism. Not the actual sorta-religion “Christian atheism“, but rather the position “I’m an atheist, but the God I don’t believe in is Jehovah.” To those of us who grew up in Europe or places colonized by Europe, this is to some extent unavoidable: to varying degrees, we’re soaked in an assumption of Christian faith and if we have to outright reject a religion we had before, it’s almost always some flavor of that one.

Similarly, there’s a lot of people who are agnostics or just secular in their daily lives to the point that even if they have a faith it doesn’t really have anything to do with them except the occasional big holiday observances or family functions. These people aren’t atheist per se atheist, but are still passively steeped in a Chritianity-saturated environment.

There are effects of this. It affects our values and our language – and with them, our marketing. It tells us what a hero is, and thereby what to do to look like one. It tells us that being the underdog looks good, that fighting an inhuman – dare I say, demonic – enemy looks good, and that the ultimate image to make people love you is to become a martyr. It tells us, in point of fact, what “cancel culture” really is. [Read more…]