As a fellow atheist and also someone who has studied child sexuality abuse hysteria, I believe that superstitious religiosity is only half the story. The other half is patriarchy-obsessed feminism, associated with demonizing men. Of course, men do the vast majority of bad sexual things, from coercion to child molestation to sex murder. But most men are innocent and well meaning. For a revealing account of the role of feminism in the 1980-1990s CSA hysteria manifested in (false) belief in recovered memories, which affected millions of families read Meredith Marian’s book “My Lie” or this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201009/two-minute-memoir-my-lie
It used to be cool to be the anti-establishment fact-checker, rationalist, skeptic, etc. in the late 2000s, early 2010s. Today if you do that somehow you're considered narrow-minded and missing the wider, cosmic significance of otherwise earthly, relatively mundane transgressions. It makes me think we're regressing...young people aren't reading books as much as earlier gens, there are fewer stable relationships, more anxiety about the future. They cling to podcasts and online communities as a coping mechanism.
Some of it's a backlash to overbearing cultural liberalism, which peaked in 2020-2021 -- youthful demographics understandably recoiled, and were not wrong to observe that it was being promulgated, and imperiously enforced, by the major "establishment" institutions. Revolting against that consensus entailed adopting traditional (culturally conservative) religious belief, because it was seen as the polar opposite of the thing they were repulsed by. The substantive validity of the actual religious doctrine was of secondary concern. (If they even considered it at all.)
I'm not talking specifically about the four horsemen and associated acts. I want more combative critics of the slop we are fed today by the podcast-occupied media. We need people with a lower tolerance for bullshit in an age when that attitude is seen as lame and dated. I'll take a few snotty, insufferable pro debunkers if it means the POM receives meaningful pushback.
What do you mean by way of thinking? Do you mean their ideas? Because their ideas were just half baked Humean empiricism which is false and not actually a good argument. Or do you mean their style, which was to attack people without caring about feelings, which only applies to backwards red staters and doesn’t apply to groups liberals like? Because they only went after targets the establishment didn’t like which is why they weren’t actually anti establishment
Well, they were prime examples of very smart dolts doing the same sort of navel-gazing that philosophers, those tiresome people, have been doing since we learned to make scratchy thingies with which to preserve our deathless words for the ages.
In this plane of existence--and who knows how many others there might be?--there are no answers to the ultimate questions. Where did the building blocks of the universe come from? How can you get something out of nothing? Where does space end? How can anything go on for infinity? Who made God? How can any entity come from nowhere? How is it possible to always have existed? Who invented natural law?
Why do "people of faith" keep making God in their own images? Why do they shrink God to fit?
And everyone gets so cute about that mythological thing, secularism. There's no such thing. Politics is religion. Atheism is a dogma.
We poor things, yet another species designed to live in packs and hardwired to sort ourselves into hierarchies and always searching for the alpha to lead us to salvation of one sort or another and getting led over cliffs more often than not--who hardwired us that way?
Me, I don't need to know. I was never without my own comfortable certainty that the Big Something exists--or maybe, as my Former Friend From Fifth Grade said scornfully, I was just brainwashed too early to remember the process.
Anyway have fun. You ain't gonna get nowhere with it, but at least we don't get lost going on circular journeys. We end up where we started.
Atheism, at its core, is simply the negation of a particular belief system -- theism. It implies no necessary "dogma," even if certain advocates of atheism may have individually added their own dogmatic features.
Yes but (I know from experience) atheists tend to turn science into a religion. Science is very very flawed - in fact, it's a known fact that in science probably a good 98-99% of science is false. Tell that to a true blue atheist science believer though. They'll get angry, and point to "The Lord's Prayer of Libtards": "In this house, we believe: science is real..."
Whatever it may be at its core, atheism amounts to a Faith since the devout firmly believe something they can't rationally prove. After seven decades living on this planet it's my observation that people are inherently religious; it's hardwired. Believe there's no such thing as a supreme being? Fine, but you're going to live out that belief in a way that implies religiosity, especially if you join your fellow believers in some form of observance.
The creepy Richard Dawkins, for example, simply doesn't realize how he comes across to people who know a worshipper when they see one.
This is not, at all, what atheism is. Atheism is a negation of the existence of God. It does indeed require dogma and it requires faith based beliefs disguised as claims to realism. It's mind-blowing that you're still stuck in this ditch after so long! You have a religion, Scientific Materialism, and the State is your god.
Yes, but you’re a Statist and a Scientific Materialist who doesn’t want to take responsibility for your faith based beliefs and dogma. You are literally obsessed with a televised political soap opera that you watch on the Screen. You think information from authoritative sources defines reality. You think you’re saving humanity by winning fake elections. Also…
Yes, I know what the word means. But once it became a sorting category for these types to label themselves--or others to label them with...
It's very funny--whenever I remark in comments threads about the silliness of religious dogma people will scream "atheist!" in response. It is a favorite slur. Seriously constricted powers of thinking, these guys have.
No one lives without a religious belief except true nihilists. Any belief system includes a leap of faith unless it says "since we are a walking bag of chemicals, nothing has significance and there is no morality."
I have no religious belief, yet can confidently claim to being more moral and ethical than many religious people. Perhaps more so, because I don't need the threat of eternal punishment to behave morally.
I share your impatience with navel-gazing philosophers. And as you know, I agree with you that not just religion, but politics and other tribes are cults.
However, I don't think that atheism is necessarily a dogma. The way some people approach it, sure. Me, I just wanna mind my own business down here in the moss and not be bothered by other people trying to impose their belief systems on me. If they do, I might bite back.
Great article and I am also troubled by the demon rhetoric proliferating on media. I’m a practicing Catholic and I am alarmed by this. Bang on Michael. Thanks. Kathryn from Brooklyn.
It's available on Amazon and now in Kindle. The original is hard to read at first because of the Fs for Ss but after you read awhile, you get used to it. The Kindle version is modern English.
It's good to be skeptical, but I'd like to point out that atheists are not immune to religious fervor. Almost every atheist I know (I've spent my life in the counterculture; I know a lot) fell for the Covid-19 mass hysteria. They demanded that everyone wear their talisman and take their sacrament to ward off demons.
Now that the empirical evidence is in, we know their models and projections were absolute crap. But they all had faith in the god Science(!).
You broke off Part One because it was getting too long, and we have to pay if we want to read the end of it? Wouldn't it make sense to give us the full Part One before trying to shake our pockets?
Uh, I gave you the full "Part One" here. Soon to come will be "Part Two," which I am going to paywall. Weird nitpick. Also weird to pejoratively accuse me of trying to "shake anyone's pockets," for VERY OCCASIONALLY making certain material only available to paid subscribers. Like that's a really controversial concept these days. MANY other Substacks paywall FAR MORE material than I ever do. In fact, I have definitely LOST a lot of money over the years for being averse to excess paywalling.
I was replying to the words, "This article got much longer than I expected when I first started writing it, so I chopped off the (forthcoming) second half." which made it seem unfinished. I beg your pardon if my frustration at paywalls I can't pay seems unappreciative of what you put out that is not paywalled.
Maybe Jeffrey would come back as the messiah and save us from the conspiracy Armageddon! I hear he's still alive, out there somewhere, watching over all of us, as Mossads usually do.
Great article. I was inspired to sign up as a paid subscriber. I admire your courage and critical thinking. I haven't seen anyone else directly tackle this important subject. Yes, many are apalled at Hegsdeath's blood-thirsty "prayers" but no journalist has just stated the obvious truth. It's frightening how so many insane ideas and actions are being normalized.
Excellent start to your series. Inspired by your thoughts, I offer the following possibly imminent scenario: The Iran war descends into a deeper disaster for the global economy with markets finally plunging, and even the most diehard MAGA supporters begin to turn on Trump. So the president calls in his "spiritual adviser" to perform an exorcism (she does these things) on live television.
As she hovers over Trump in the Oval Office, thrusting her hands and blowing into a microphone (her signature method), the president reels back in his chair, his eyes roll back and a rather strangulated voice hollers "We are legion!" At which point the (invisible) demons issue forth, apparently occupying Vance and the entire Trump cabinet as they run off and plunge into the Tidal Basin.
So you are really not talking about Christianity per se so much as some crazy forms of it. Of course similar critiques can be made of some crazy forms of non-belief, as I am sure you would not deny.
What it comes down to in my opinion is whether one feels a need to believe in the Hebraic idea of a God who is just. Some do not (including my own dear father or Steven Pinker for example) while most Americans at least do. Count me among them, or at least among the tortured agnostics.
For those who think it impossible, here is my poor attempt at an argument for the plausibility of a proposition that at least comes close to being equivalent to the existence of God in a scientific age: https://shorturl.at/aOzEY
Tardigrade "The Blind Watchmaker" is a pop psychology piece of propaganda that has been made totally obsolete with the science that has occurred since then. Have you heard of the Encode Project? If not, you may want to take a read. This is a good starting point: https://www.encodeproject.org/help/project-overview/
Dawkins is also a very ignorant person (in the original sense of the word) and has admitted this. He knows nothing about counter arguments against Atheism and arguments that are pro-Christian.
A fair amount of "satanic panic" stuff back in the day was based on reality, albeit hysterically exaggerated in some cases - but in some cases not.
Think of what happened re. some people toying with various forms of Satanism, real or imagined, roundabout the 80s, as the tail end of the narcissism and exploration of the 60s, turning dark in the 70s (heroin in Haight, Alamont, etc., big recession), and ending at the ultimate form of rebellious, narcissistic exploration, the ultimate "edge" or chasing the ultimate "high." (And this would be people who were in their late teens or early 20s in the 60s, hitting the wall of their ultimately useless lives in their 30s and 40s.)
There was definitely Satanism around, and there's a fair bit of solid evidence for it (there are a few deep dives on some of the famous cases by Black Pilled (Devon Stack) on Odyssee).
As a fellow atheist and also someone who has studied child sexuality abuse hysteria, I believe that superstitious religiosity is only half the story. The other half is patriarchy-obsessed feminism, associated with demonizing men. Of course, men do the vast majority of bad sexual things, from coercion to child molestation to sex murder. But most men are innocent and well meaning. For a revealing account of the role of feminism in the 1980-1990s CSA hysteria manifested in (false) belief in recovered memories, which affected millions of families read Meredith Marian’s book “My Lie” or this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201009/two-minute-memoir-my-lie
It used to be cool to be the anti-establishment fact-checker, rationalist, skeptic, etc. in the late 2000s, early 2010s. Today if you do that somehow you're considered narrow-minded and missing the wider, cosmic significance of otherwise earthly, relatively mundane transgressions. It makes me think we're regressing...young people aren't reading books as much as earlier gens, there are fewer stable relationships, more anxiety about the future. They cling to podcasts and online communities as a coping mechanism.
Some of it's a backlash to overbearing cultural liberalism, which peaked in 2020-2021 -- youthful demographics understandably recoiled, and were not wrong to observe that it was being promulgated, and imperiously enforced, by the major "establishment" institutions. Revolting against that consensus entailed adopting traditional (culturally conservative) religious belief, because it was seen as the polar opposite of the thing they were repulsed by. The substantive validity of the actual religious doctrine was of secondary concern. (If they even considered it at all.)
New atheists were establishment lmao
Lol. I'm speaking more generally though, like we need to bring back the way of thinking promoted by the new Millennium atheists/skeptics.
I'm not talking specifically about the four horsemen and associated acts. I want more combative critics of the slop we are fed today by the podcast-occupied media. We need people with a lower tolerance for bullshit in an age when that attitude is seen as lame and dated. I'll take a few snotty, insufferable pro debunkers if it means the POM receives meaningful pushback.
What do you mean by way of thinking? Do you mean their ideas? Because their ideas were just half baked Humean empiricism which is false and not actually a good argument. Or do you mean their style, which was to attack people without caring about feelings, which only applies to backwards red staters and doesn’t apply to groups liberals like? Because they only went after targets the establishment didn’t like which is why they weren’t actually anti establishment
Well, they were prime examples of very smart dolts doing the same sort of navel-gazing that philosophers, those tiresome people, have been doing since we learned to make scratchy thingies with which to preserve our deathless words for the ages.
In this plane of existence--and who knows how many others there might be?--there are no answers to the ultimate questions. Where did the building blocks of the universe come from? How can you get something out of nothing? Where does space end? How can anything go on for infinity? Who made God? How can any entity come from nowhere? How is it possible to always have existed? Who invented natural law?
Why do "people of faith" keep making God in their own images? Why do they shrink God to fit?
And everyone gets so cute about that mythological thing, secularism. There's no such thing. Politics is religion. Atheism is a dogma.
We poor things, yet another species designed to live in packs and hardwired to sort ourselves into hierarchies and always searching for the alpha to lead us to salvation of one sort or another and getting led over cliffs more often than not--who hardwired us that way?
Me, I don't need to know. I was never without my own comfortable certainty that the Big Something exists--or maybe, as my Former Friend From Fifth Grade said scornfully, I was just brainwashed too early to remember the process.
Anyway have fun. You ain't gonna get nowhere with it, but at least we don't get lost going on circular journeys. We end up where we started.
Atheism, at its core, is simply the negation of a particular belief system -- theism. It implies no necessary "dogma," even if certain advocates of atheism may have individually added their own dogmatic features.
Yes but (I know from experience) atheists tend to turn science into a religion. Science is very very flawed - in fact, it's a known fact that in science probably a good 98-99% of science is false. Tell that to a true blue atheist science believer though. They'll get angry, and point to "The Lord's Prayer of Libtards": "In this house, we believe: science is real..."
Every group has its idiots.
Whatever it may be at its core, atheism amounts to a Faith since the devout firmly believe something they can't rationally prove. After seven decades living on this planet it's my observation that people are inherently religious; it's hardwired. Believe there's no such thing as a supreme being? Fine, but you're going to live out that belief in a way that implies religiosity, especially if you join your fellow believers in some form of observance.
The creepy Richard Dawkins, for example, simply doesn't realize how he comes across to people who know a worshipper when they see one.
This is not, at all, what atheism is. Atheism is a negation of the existence of God. It does indeed require dogma and it requires faith based beliefs disguised as claims to realism. It's mind-blowing that you're still stuck in this ditch after so long! You have a religion, Scientific Materialism, and the State is your god.
Absolutely nothing about the negation of a theistic belief system inherently requires embracing "the State" as one's "god." What hogwash!
Yes, but you’re a Statist and a Scientific Materialist who doesn’t want to take responsibility for your faith based beliefs and dogma. You are literally obsessed with a televised political soap opera that you watch on the Screen. You think information from authoritative sources defines reality. You think you’re saving humanity by winning fake elections. Also…
Come on, be reasonable.
That's how a religious person views atheism.
Yes, I know what the word means. But once it became a sorting category for these types to label themselves--or others to label them with...
It's very funny--whenever I remark in comments threads about the silliness of religious dogma people will scream "atheist!" in response. It is a favorite slur. Seriously constricted powers of thinking, these guys have.
No one lives without a religious belief except true nihilists. Any belief system includes a leap of faith unless it says "since we are a walking bag of chemicals, nothing has significance and there is no morality."
I have no religious belief, yet can confidently claim to being more moral and ethical than many religious people. Perhaps more so, because I don't need the threat of eternal punishment to behave morally.
You could say the exact same thing as theism
I share your impatience with navel-gazing philosophers. And as you know, I agree with you that not just religion, but politics and other tribes are cults.
However, I don't think that atheism is necessarily a dogma. The way some people approach it, sure. Me, I just wanna mind my own business down here in the moss and not be bothered by other people trying to impose their belief systems on me. If they do, I might bite back.
I agree completely with your comment which I feel is perfectly compatible with mine.
Great article and I am also troubled by the demon rhetoric proliferating on media. I’m a practicing Catholic and I am alarmed by this. Bang on Michael. Thanks. Kathryn from Brooklyn.
My ancestor, John MacGowan, a Scottish Baptist preacher, wrote a book called "Dialogues of Devils" in the Eighteenth Century. It's still in print.
It's available on Amazon and now in Kindle. The original is hard to read at first because of the Fs for Ss but after you read awhile, you get used to it. The Kindle version is modern English.
It's good to be skeptical, but I'd like to point out that atheists are not immune to religious fervor. Almost every atheist I know (I've spent my life in the counterculture; I know a lot) fell for the Covid-19 mass hysteria. They demanded that everyone wear their talisman and take their sacrament to ward off demons.
Now that the empirical evidence is in, we know their models and projections were absolute crap. But they all had faith in the god Science(!).
You broke off Part One because it was getting too long, and we have to pay if we want to read the end of it? Wouldn't it make sense to give us the full Part One before trying to shake our pockets?
Uh, I gave you the full "Part One" here. Soon to come will be "Part Two," which I am going to paywall. Weird nitpick. Also weird to pejoratively accuse me of trying to "shake anyone's pockets," for VERY OCCASIONALLY making certain material only available to paid subscribers. Like that's a really controversial concept these days. MANY other Substacks paywall FAR MORE material than I ever do. In fact, I have definitely LOST a lot of money over the years for being averse to excess paywalling.
I was replying to the words, "This article got much longer than I expected when I first started writing it, so I chopped off the (forthcoming) second half." which made it seem unfinished. I beg your pardon if my frustration at paywalls I can't pay seems unappreciative of what you put out that is not paywalled.
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Maybe Jeffrey would come back as the messiah and save us from the conspiracy Armageddon! I hear he's still alive, out there somewhere, watching over all of us, as Mossads usually do.
Great article. I was inspired to sign up as a paid subscriber. I admire your courage and critical thinking. I haven't seen anyone else directly tackle this important subject. Yes, many are apalled at Hegsdeath's blood-thirsty "prayers" but no journalist has just stated the obvious truth. It's frightening how so many insane ideas and actions are being normalized.
Thank you for subscribing!
I also appreciate Michael's fearlessness on more than one subject.
Excellent start to your series. Inspired by your thoughts, I offer the following possibly imminent scenario: The Iran war descends into a deeper disaster for the global economy with markets finally plunging, and even the most diehard MAGA supporters begin to turn on Trump. So the president calls in his "spiritual adviser" to perform an exorcism (she does these things) on live television.
As she hovers over Trump in the Oval Office, thrusting her hands and blowing into a microphone (her signature method), the president reels back in his chair, his eyes roll back and a rather strangulated voice hollers "We are legion!" At which point the (invisible) demons issue forth, apparently occupying Vance and the entire Trump cabinet as they run off and plunge into the Tidal Basin.
I'd be willing to suspend any "secular" preferences to witness that.
You’re saying the cabinet is actually a herd of pigs? The Israelis will definitely have some buyers remorse when they find out.
So you are really not talking about Christianity per se so much as some crazy forms of it. Of course similar critiques can be made of some crazy forms of non-belief, as I am sure you would not deny.
What it comes down to in my opinion is whether one feels a need to believe in the Hebraic idea of a God who is just. Some do not (including my own dear father or Steven Pinker for example) while most Americans at least do. Count me among them, or at least among the tortured agnostics.
For those who think it impossible, here is my poor attempt at an argument for the plausibility of a proposition that at least comes close to being equivalent to the existence of God in a scientific age: https://shorturl.at/aOzEY
Tardigrade "The Blind Watchmaker" is a pop psychology piece of propaganda that has been made totally obsolete with the science that has occurred since then. Have you heard of the Encode Project? If not, you may want to take a read. This is a good starting point: https://www.encodeproject.org/help/project-overview/
Dawkins is also a very ignorant person (in the original sense of the word) and has admitted this. He knows nothing about counter arguments against Atheism and arguments that are pro-Christian.
A fair amount of "satanic panic" stuff back in the day was based on reality, albeit hysterically exaggerated in some cases - but in some cases not.
Think of what happened re. some people toying with various forms of Satanism, real or imagined, roundabout the 80s, as the tail end of the narcissism and exploration of the 60s, turning dark in the 70s (heroin in Haight, Alamont, etc., big recession), and ending at the ultimate form of rebellious, narcissistic exploration, the ultimate "edge" or chasing the ultimate "high." (And this would be people who were in their late teens or early 20s in the 60s, hitting the wall of their ultimately useless lives in their 30s and 40s.)
There was definitely Satanism around, and there's a fair bit of solid evidence for it (there are a few deep dives on some of the famous cases by Black Pilled (Devon Stack) on Odyssee).
The enduring domination of Microsoft office products in professional environments is strong proof that demonic posession is real.
I couldn't agree more.
I wish we had goblins.
Good this, similar to my own present thinking. Look forward to part 2