Engaging The New Anti-Atheist Christians
Maybe you’ve heard the term “New Atheists.” I guess it’s a “new” idea to some people, but rather than ignoring the hypocrisy and harmful acts of organized religions, these atheists speak out against it. They don’t simply sit back and say “I’m really not convinced that Jesus was a god.” Instead they point out unpleasant hypocrisies of the church (sex abuse scandal?) or the absurdity of the Christian notion of proxy atonement.
Some traditional Christians are content to ignore this allegedly novel tactic and continue to spread nonsensical apologetics to explain away the fact that their Bible is so inconsistent or why the vague second- or third-hand testimony in scriptures should be sufficient evidence for us to believe in an event as absurd as Jesus Christ’s resurrection. But that’s not sufficient for a select few.
The New Christians
A New Christian sect seems to be emerging in response to this unfamiliar feeling of being doubted. I call the new sect Anti-atheism because their focus seems to have changed. Rather than preach the Gospels, the anti-atheist sect can be distinguished from other Christian sects by their focus on denigrating and insulting non-believers as a whole.
For these Christian “soldiers,” it seems that the defense of Christianity has morphed into irrational and prejudicial attacks on the character of all non-believers. Whereas criticisms of the “New Atheists” tend to be tied to specific abuses of the church (e.g. covering for child sex abuse, coercive psychological threats like hell, and shunning / shaming to achieve conformity), these New Christians use straw men and prejudices as the foundations of their attacks on individuals or our group as a whole.
While the New Atheists attack the moral foundations of an institution like the Catholic Church for covering up child sex abuse, the New Christians attack all atheists for … a wide range of things we shall discuss shortly.
One could argue that the New Christians are a propaganda machine — spewing out propaganda to discredit the atheists who dare criticize their cherished institutions. It’s not clear to me whether they see it all as pro-Jesus marketing or are sincerely as prejudiced as their statements suggest. In either case, my parents taught me that you can’t prop yourself up by tearing someone else down. I tend to agree with that message.
Exemplars
This Max Kolbe Group account is run by one of the most bigoted Christians on Twitter / YouTube. Rumor has it that he is Dean Esmay
A similar account run by Christians whose dogma seems to be focused on anti-atheism is this one. It even has a Patreon account for fundraising for their ministry of hatred.
Eve is allegedly a philosophy professor whose job would be at risk if any of the awful atheist philosophers around her discovered she’s Christian.
In that vein, there’s even anti-atheist hate groups like FFAF, a rather sad tit-for-tat response to #FFRF, which seeks to defend the first amendment from Christian majority privilege.
Some people have suggested that these three accounts are run by the same person. I wish there were twitter tools to analyze language usage to identify likelihood that a single person runs multiple accounts. Seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Stitch is a self-admitted troll. It’s right in his bio. His Twitter existence seems built around hating atheism.
Tactics
The tactics these groups use are like a review of my favorite logic-themed website, “Your Logical Fallacy Is . . . “. So let’s start at the top:
Strawman
I know quite a few atheists — both through my UU Fellowship and through Twitter. Almost none of them are nihilists. Sure, Nietzsche has a few witty quotes, but I disagree with his conclusions on the meaninglessness of everything. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have far more reasonable perspectives on meaning, value, and purpose without any need to appeal to a god.
Nevertheless, Anti-atheist Christians insist that Nietzsche is the only rational conclusion under atheism. They demand that we conform to THEIR conclusions about atheism rather than determining what we believe by ohhhh. I dunno . . . asking us?!
Here’s a thread where a New Christian goes off on how life is ultimately meaningless without god, so we must all be hedonists.
Its a well he goes back to often, despite being repeatedly told it’s not the philosophy of most atheists
It doesn’t really matter what you believe as an atheist. In Huffman’s mind, you’re nihilist because “atheism necessitates nihilism and existential despair.”
Lest you think I’m picking on this one guy, here’s a few more:
The last one suggests that all atheists can be characterized by the “atheist atrocities,” which is a nice segue into false cause.
False Cause
The False Cause I’m speaking of reads something like, ‘All the bad things atheists do are indicative of all atheists, while the bad things Christians do are just absurd outliers.’ My simplified response to such claims is summed up as follows:
The implicit assertion these New Theists in the anti-atheism sect are pushing is that atheism is the cause of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pol Pot’s mass murders. But atheism, as it is used today, is nothing more than lacking a belief in any gods. Atheism doesn’t describe my moral stance any more than theism defines theirs. Remember that ISIS is theistic, and so were the Incans.
But there’s an interesting and important distinction between the atheist atrocity leaders and cultures which once sacrificed children. Hitler’s motivation to commit genocide was not his (alleged) non-belief in gods. Rather, it was his conviction that they were subversive to the state. He was motivated by the desire for power and control, not a lack of gods. In contrast, the Incans and many other cultures were motivated to sacrifice children because they believed it would placate their gods. Indeed, their actions were directly linked to their theistic beliefs. The same can be said for ISIS. I made a handy diagram to illustrate the motivations / causes for societies which committed atrocities. An interesting pattern emerges. It becomes very hard to suggest that non-belief causes an action.
Browsing some of the anti-atheist cult’s tweets, I found this one, which is so extreme, one can’t tell if he truly believes it or meant it as a joke.
Regardless, of whether Andrew is sincere, it’s a great example of the sort of nonsense that a false cause argument looks like.
Christian Apologist refuses to consider the possibility that Stalin saw the church as an organization which could oppose his power. The ONLY permissible cause is his atheist-derived HATED people who believed in God and his atheist-derived blood-lust. That was the cause. It had to be.
Appeal to Authority
“My God gave us morality, so therefore an objective morality exists (and I know it).”
Another good one is “people think X, so X is true.”
Composition / Division
The “all atheists are nihilists” argument is something of a composition / division fallacy, as is the atheist atrocities argument we’ve already discussed. Both falsely imply that all non-believers must be alike.
I suppose the implication here is that we should be liberated because he doesn’t like nihilism? SMBC Comics describes this logic rather succinctly with this comic:
No True Scotsman
Gosh, it’s so hard to chose. Is “All atheists must be nihilists” a No True Scotsman fallacy too? Rather than a positive appeal, this appeal to purity, this appeal demands that atheists are purely evil.
Appeal to Nature
Interestingly, this one is often done in reverse. Theists believe that morality from evolution will mimic the morality we observe in animals (hint: our morality DOES mimic animal morality). Examples include:
- Caring for those in our tribe
- Fighting with other tribes
- Mourning the loss of a tribesman
- Killing our own babies when resources are scarce
The old fashioned arguments against #LGBTQ communities
Anecdotal
I’m starting to think that I should have just presented their claim, then explained all the fallacies involved. “Atheist atrocities” argument is anecdotal. Almost no atheists endorse genocide, yet personal experience and isolated examples are trotted out as though they are compelling evidence for the anti-atheist cult’s bigoted hatred.
Conclusions and Recommendations
I consider myself a pretty loving person. I’m a Humanist, and I put a lot of trust and faith in my fellow man. It was disheartening to read the nonsense these people are saying about my morality, ethics, civility, human decency, intelligence, and rationality. Distortions, exaggerations, and misrepresentations galore.
But we certainly aren’t the first minority group to be disparaged by a subset of the majority when they see their political and social clout begin to wane. It’s a natural social tendency, especially among men, to “rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status.” In practice, people lash out at those lower on the social ladder than themselves to direct attention away from their own losses of status.
Many but not all of those in the New Christian cult of anti-atheism seem to fit this bill quite neatly. They express anger and derision towards atheists in every statement. Then, when atheists rightly get angry at the stream of insults, they say “look how hateful the atheists are!” They pat each other on the back and walk away more confident than ever at how right they were about atheists.
So what to do?
Simple advice in social media:
- Avoid anti-atheists. Mute or block people seeking to engage with insults
- Only engage when you have the patience. You will not change their minds. They are here to make you angry. Don’t let them win.
- It’s always OK to walk away. They’re going to tell you you’re an idiot and they totally won the argument. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t actually interested in your positions and you aren’t obliged to give them your time.
Simple advice in real life
The #NormalizeAtheism campaign on Twitter is encouraging people to be open about their beliefs. Not in-your-face, but present. In the same way that gay out campaigns have dramatically helped ease public perception about Gays, it will soon do the same for us.
People just need to meet us to learn who we are and what our values are. That way when the anti-atheist cult screams “atheists have no morals,” the typical American will reply “that’s nonsense.”
