I don’t want to be part of a movement that includes racists, sexists, and shitlords, which makes being part of atheism problematic right now. Philip Rose feels likewise, and has a proposal: Atheism Minus.
He’s introducing the idea on YouTube, which might be a mistake — already, the shitlords are flocking to attack it, and the comments are a horror show of the usual dorks with their revisionist history and dogmatic denial of the importance of social justice causes to a social movement. They just want their privileges extended. I’m not in total agreement with everything Philip says, but goddamn, his shallow, stupid, asshole critics are repellent.
However, I am going to pluck out one of their comments as a relevant example of all that is wrong with these nitwits.
The community went south precisely when the feminism/SJW nonsense [dogmatic rejection of feminism noted. I don’t want to associate with anyone who thinks equality of women and minorities is
nonsense] got injected into it [Incorrect. There were feminists and anti-feminists in it all along. What happened is that the anti-SJWs rejected some of us rather vehemently (remember, “guys, don’t do that”? That triggered a mob) with harassment campaigns]. It was obvious to a great number that it was some kind of social shaming cult [You know, that happens when you have standards for ethical behavior. People who don’t meet some minimal expectations of civil social interaction get shamed. Do you really think /pol is a great finishing school for young gentlemen?] , so we walked away from it [Lie. You did not. Instead, you babbled a lot of dogmatic bullshit about how atheism isn’t allowed to have any moral expectations, and hounded women out of the movement. I wish you’d just left.] – and, as expected, we got ‘shamed’ by the group for not agreeing 110% with their superficially worthy, yet significantly flawed causes [flawed…how? Just the mention of feminism causes a knee-jerk response from you guys —FEMINISM IS CANCER. You can’t make a coherent critique.]. Philip attempted to turn the + of added social justice to a – of added social justice in a rather clumsy bait and switch that won’t fool those of us that rejected it the first time. [Then reject it. Walk away. Just fuck off, you regressive turds.]Just because we’re agagainst the intersectional SJW nonsense [Social Justice: The concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity and social privileges. Intersectionality: the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. You object? Why?], doesn’t mean we hate women or folks of other ethnicities [Actually, it means you regard the goals of those groups as irrelevant and unimportant. Equal pay and fair treatment under the law for others are less important to you than that white men might have to back up their entitlement with responsibility] – it’s the inevitable victimhood cult and anti white male rhetoric that does that…. [And there it is: the big problem in society is that white men might get called mean names. A black man might fear getting shot by the police, a woman might fear getting raped or passed over for promotion, but the great American crisis is that white men are being told that they benefit from injustice.]
Let the shitlords rage. They dominate the discourse in areas of social media where they’re allowed to be totally anonymous and spew crap without any accountability, like YouTube, but out here in reality the major atheist organizations all recognize that that nihilistic, movement-without-meaning attitude doesn’t work, and as Philip points out, you can’t fight for the rights of an atheist minority while denying the rights of far more oppressed groups.
I do have one objection to the idea of Atheism Minus. The onus shouldn’t be on civil, normal, healthy members of a community to separate themselves from the rotten apples. We should recognize that Atheism Plus or Atheism Minus or whatever we call it isn’t the weird subset — it’s the standard. We need to just reclaim the title of Atheism as our own.
