Thread by @NoraReed

movement atheism flagrantly encourages misogyny, transphobia and racism because it is a movement that largely revolves around choosing to worship an idea of "science" that exists purely as a placeholder for where religion would be otherwise

for all the overlap between movement atheism and the "skeptic movement" they, as a group, have as much interest in looking skeptically about their racist, transphobic and misogynist beliefs as any Christian bigot has in the importance of tolerance in the scriptures

movement atheism relies heavily on fields like evolutionary psychology that consist largely of just so stories created as post-hoc justifications for how the world is "naturally"

movement atheism is basically indistinguishable from most religions in its mix of bigots and people trying to get it to be less shitty, the fevered effort of its establishment to stomp out movements towards more humane attitudes and splinter groups focused on tolerance

i think that saying that misogyny, racism, transphobia, ableism and the full range of other bigotries aren't an inherent part of movement atheism can be fairly naive, because what movement atheism does is provide a structure that works as an alternative to religion

and you don't end up with the progressivism that you can get in religions that are inherently focused on a religious structure that is focused on values of tolerance and humanity

you get tons of churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, covens etc that are focused on... not twisting the bad bits of the religion into weapons to be turned against the vulnerable, and they often do so as part of their religious principles

movement atheism is so focused on making an enemy of all religion that they have learned 0 from those efforts and effectively treat reformist movements within the greater movement like a power-hungry religious group will go after its heretics

that's what happened to atheism+

it is unlikely that movement atheism will ever be able to get away from this because its being reactionary is so built into its fundament

that isn't to say that all movements focused on not believing in a god or gods are going to have this problem, but people who aren't interested in the reactionary bullshit will have to find other groups

capital-h Humanism, various leftist political groups, etc. those are what will fill in those gaps.

movement atheism-- not the group of people who just casually call themselves atheists but people who are part of the community that builds an identity around that and runs conventions and shit-- isn't going to become less of a cesspit any faster than the Catholic church

(it's also not going to move any quicker or with less constant resistance to solve its rape problem)

the honeybots mean that i've gotten really good at figuring out how to flatter and bait atheists into wasting their time making fools of themselves for the entertainment of myself and others

i'm fairly confident it would be similarly easy to do something like that for bigoted religious groups, i just don't know how to do bait and flattery in ways that will work on them

i didn't almost convert to any fundamentalist christian groups so i don't have an idea of how to attract the low hanging fruit from that group to making asses of themselves; i did almost become a jackass atheist

movement atheism mostly relies on flattering people who think they are too smart to have bias. i'm not sure what the religious equivalents are. thinking that they're just... inherently better, in some other way? an abstract way? i am not sure

i think a lot about the Snow Crash quote about "the especially virulent type [of sexism] espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists"

movement atheism has a fair bit of that and also a fair bit of "well, sexism is actually correct, because of [evopsych just so story]"

"women like pink because they evolved as gatherers in society and have eyes that are supposed to be able to pick out pink berries" etc etc

religion minus the poetry