The broad church of atheism

 

"Well, my beloved Vyasa, it seems that *we* at least
aren´t atheists by any definition!"

Some random observations about the mostly American YouTube atheist subculture. Let´s call its denizens American YouTube Atheists, AYA´s for short. 

Why do AYA´s have such a broad definition of "atheism"? It seems that everyone except Pat Robertson and the Pope (OK, make that the former Pope) is an "atheist". You can believe in Platonic forms, dualism, idealism, magic, reincarnation, aliens, werewolves and even Buddhism (!) and yet still count as an "atheist" in good standing. (Thanks, btw.) I sometimes wonder if even Alfred North Whitehead´s process philosophy (in which God is a kind of Uber-Monad) would be "atheist" by this loose standard? Why do AYA´s have a definition of "atheism" so broad that it could include most of the New Age? Here is a guess: it´s an attempt to cover up the fact that the AYA subculture is really very small and insular. 

If the broad church (pun intended) strategy works, is another matter entirely. While dualist atheists undoubtedly exist (I even chatted with some of them), the New Age and one billion Buddhists remain largely unresponsive. The way the word "atheist" is *usually* used IRL is this: an actively anti-religious person who is virtually always a materialist and always a supporter of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Historically, atheists have usually been socialists, anarchists or liberals. Another example of the big tent strategy is the claim that you can be an "agnostic atheist". This is an attempt to claim the agnostics as atheists, too. This *may* be correct, since agnosticism can indeed be a form of "shame-faced atheism", so I won´t dwell upon it much here. 

AYA´s also constantly claim that atheism "isn´t a worldview", it´s "merely a lack of belief in something", in this case God or gods. Nor is it anybody´s "core identity". But *of course* atheism is part of the AYA´s core identity. Or are we to believe that they have created an entire subculture, complete with a kind of organizational structure, around a "mere lack of belief"? Are there any subcultures around the mere lack of belief in pink unicorns, green space lobsters or Cthulhu? Even the claim that atheism isn´t a worldview is problematic - true, the notion that God doesn´t exist isn´t *in and of itself* an entire worldview, but in a culture that has been theistic for millennia, it will be a very central tenet of the worldview of the person holding it. Does anyone seriously doubt this after looking at an AYA "response video"? Once again, I get the impression that the AYA´s are trying out a kind of big tent strategy.

20 years ago, American atheists came in two types (or at least that was my impression). One type was right-wing libertarian. The other was the Skeptics movement. While the latter wasn´t explicitly atheist, I think it´s safe to assume that most of it functioned as an atheist front in a situation where American culture was still very "pro-Christian". I assume Skeptics were mostly mainline liberals. (Marxists formed a subculture all their own, and usually emphasized other topics than a direct confrontation with religious ideas qua religious ideas - make of that what you wish.) Today, the atheist subculture seems to be dominated by SJWs or Wokesters. Or "left-liberals", if you´re charitable. They even buy into the 57 genders BS. So no, nobody believes them when they say that they don´t want to force their beliefs on others. Of course they want to force their beliefs on others. Cancel culture, anyone? 

In general, the AYA subculture seem to be confluence of three somewhat different streams: the nerds (the guys who know every argument against some obscure verse in the deuteropauline epistles), the cult survivors, and the SJWs. This is not really a criticism, though, but merely an observation. (I also oppose cults and have frequently criticized pro-cultist tendencies among scholars of religion.) However, it does give the AYA´s a distinct subculturalist flavor far out of the mainstream, which may explain the big tent strategies mentioned above.