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I'm a little older and found my path to atheism earlier than atheist youtubers.
I remember absolutely hating Ayn Rand and thinking "Why would an atheist think the best thing is to be completely selfish and shit on community?" Then Richard Dawkins, who I had previously respected, started running his fucking mouth, and then Sam Harris came along and shat things up some more, and then came the edgy youtube atheists.
For fucks sake man, made me legit embarrassed to admit my atheism for a while.
I went down the r/atheism rabbit hole when Reddit was new. It hit at just the right time for me, when I was getting into an angry phase with how much religion seemed to dictate things in the country that I didn't agree with. Then I dipped out a few years later when it just got too cringey and ironically holier-than-thou.
That said, I remember seeing a lot of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins in the earlier 2000s and I don't recall acting that seemed particularly bad. What happened?
Dawkins and Harris both struggled with Islamaphobia and hiding behind a critique of Islam that leaned heavily into racism, a charge which both Dawkins and Harris were upset about. Yet... in my opinion it's not a charge that is incorrect, especially as it was their works which laid the groundwork for the "edgy atheist youtuber" movement that "somehow" manifested itself as right-wing.
For examples, here is when Richard Dawkins basically said that letting kids read supernatural fiction was dangerous because it made them less likely to understand the difference between fantasy and reality:
He suggested children should be taught scientific rigour from an early age.
“Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism?” the Daily Telegraph quotes him as saying.
“I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway.
“Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it's statistically too improbable.”
And here is a really good breakdown from Daniel Schultz on Sam Harris' blind spots that reveal his critiques of Islam to be less biased than Harris thinks they are (it's also highly amusing that the referenced exchange was with Glenn Greenwald of all people). Emphasis is mine:
One of the critiques, advanced by Hussain against New Atheists like Harris, concerns the way in which their rational thinking is not as free from history as it presumes; on the contrary, it often exhibits the tendency to rehearse oppressive (at times racialized) features of colonial thought. Harris’ phrase “this iron age madness” functions as a clear example of the way in which he codes ‘non-Western’ as traditional, backward, and repressive, allowing the West to represent itself as modern, forward thinking, and free.
This form of reasoning confuses its descriptions with its presuppositions, using the former to covertly ground the latter.
In a notable example of such confused reasoning, Harris asserted, in a Huffington Post piece quoted by Hussain, that “the outrage that Muslims feel over US and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns.”
Here we see Harris’ assumptions: 1) theological concerns cannot provide a basis for reasonable claims; 2) theological concerns are symptoms of a mistaken (traditional, backward, culturally determined) understandings of oneself and the world; 3) non-theological (atheistic) concerns as the only kinds of concerns capable of grounding an accurate view of oneself and the world.
Harris’ assumptions mask the vast differences internal to modes of religious thought (an oxymoron for Harris) and religious life. It also obscures the fact that there might, in fact, be non-theological reasons for Muslims to feel outraged over US and British foreign policy.
Harris’ new form of atheism sounds very much like an old form of colonialism.
This is seen most clearly at those moments when Harris shows us the ethical character of his thinking. He writes, in the e-mail response to Greenwald, “one of my main concerns is for all the suffering women, homosexuals, freethinkers, and intellectuals in indigenous Muslim societies.”
Appealing to the discourse of Western moral superiority, Harris invokes their plight as a way to justify belligerent attitudes against Islam. His reasoning predicates the West as the source of salvation and precludes the possibility of thinking meaningful social transformation outside the framework of an atheistic liberalism.
When I was in college I met an exchange student from Palestine (he had to actually say he was from Jordan, but he was originally from Palestine, he lives in Jordan now), and I quickly learned that not everyone from an Islamic culture is some backwards radical religious nut. It might have behooved either Dawkins or Harris to actually meet someone from such a culture like my friend. My friend also eventually became an atheist, but he also struggled and grappled with the fact that this would be viewed damningly in his home country. The point being he was thoughtful, smart, and was able to come to his own conclusions about life, just like I was, despite being from wildly different cultures. His culture did not make him "backward" or "iron-age."
This just in, Atheists bash on the fundamental problems of religion and Islam has fundamental problems just like Christianity does, religious people can be good people obviously, but if they're fundamentalists they've got some very fucked up views.
Sam Harris seems like he was perfectly engineered in a lab to be the first step on the fascist pipeline.
Got into the Atheist youtubers, then they moved onto anti-SJW and I stuck around. Thought I was being an enlightened logical centrist, "both sides are bad" and all that. So I figured modern feminists were overreacting.
Then the MAGA movement ramped up, now abortion rights are gone. Also since then I discovered I'm trans and now LGBT rights are at stake.
What a ride! Honestly glad you are better, even if the world is not.
Really makes me look back on the days of us making fun of women with dyed hair shrieking over Trump winning. They were right, they were reacting appropriately and I was a fool to not see it. (Just want to emphasize that I'm not a Trump supporter, I just didn't think things would get this bad)
Wow, something very similar happened to me! Instead of realising I was trans, I got a lot of queer friends and felt actual love and suddenly I was 100 times more empathetic which horrified me when I thought of how nasty I’d thought of people before.
HRT helped me actually feel again, and empathy made me realize that thinking "logic is superior" is really stupid and even thinking there's a seperation between emotion and logic in politics is really stupid. Oftentimes logic is just justification and obfuscation of an emotional opinion.
The final nail in the coffin for me was when I stumbled on this Martin Luther King quote about how the moderate is the true obstacle for civil rights, those "who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom".
It made me realize how stupid it is to negotiate with fascists and bureaucracy. That we should get angry, we should get emotional, we should get active and maybe violent, when we see human beings stop being treated as such.
Yeah, I was on that slide for a bit, probably around that age as well. Luckily I was too socially awkward to ever bother anyone with it, just kept to myself and watched that garbage.
Wanna know the slightly embarrassing thing that made me reevaluate? One of the channels I watched, which up to this point had almost exclusively made anti-feminist videos, suddenly made a video bashing furries in the same way. I wasn’t a furry, but I had friends who were and it’s usually a very friendly space for a harmless hobby. So I thought, “this is stupid, why would he make a video bashing these people who aren’t harming anyone?” and then it clicked. Took a break from that space and never went back.
So, thanks furries
For me, I always considered myself egalitarian, but what happened is I bought into their talking points that SJWs and feminists were actually just misandrists seeking special treatment. I don't think I was truly in danger of becoming a hateful bigot or voting for hateful bigots, but I certainly carried some of their talking points.
What snapped me out of it was one day watching one of these chuds do a video where they took like a politics or social values quiz of some sort, and I saw they didn't truly believe in equality. It was that that made me realize, "Wait, these guys actually believe some things I fundamentally disagree with." Basically they showed their power level.
So thanks, random misogynistic youtuber for showing me your true colors.
Like you with the furries, it goes to show that all it really takes is one moment of what they're saying not matching up with what you know to be true.
Honestly, this is a huge mistake on their part. The right's been testing anti-furry messaging, complete with breathless misinformation (litter boxes in the bathrooms, anyone?), and I don't think that it's going well because it never seems to stick around for long. Furryism is popular enough that most working age adults and teens know someone who's a furry or are one themselves, and they, like most folks, are generally nice people who just want to be left in peace. By contrast, I don't think most folks know or know that they know a trans person, so it's easier to sell fearmongering bullshit with regards to them.
I doubt most people know an open furry. But there's always been antifurry hate since they're kinda weird and niche and you can always try and link them to bestiality but just like now its always just been a thinly veiled wedge to start hating on gay and trans people and really anyone different. I think a lot more people understand intellectually someone who was born male but identifies as a woman than the whole fursona thing. Honestly antifurry rhetoric seems like an easy predictor to all kinds of minority hate. Love the litter box in the bathroom one have to tell people that's obviously stupid all the time.
It's interesting to look at cultural values now versus the past and wonder what the future will be like and what we (as in folks in the present) will be embarrassed about or scolded for. I definitely think Furries are one. (Edit: hating Furries I mean.)
So many people think it is about beastiality. Sure, some Furries have fetishes related to being in fur suits and sure I bet there exists at least one Furry who is into beastiality but that's not the norm at all. I think because people don't know people who are Furries they either find out about them through fear mongering lies or they hear about the few times that actually bad Furries do something and assume it's the norm.
I fully expect my descendants to be embarrassed to bring their robot friends around me when I'm old because I'll say something like "I used to be a programmer" and they'll be like "you can't say stuff like that, they take it as you saying you want to control them" and I'll just be confused and apologetic.
My best friend had this happen to him. Except he's over 30.
He now worships T×m P×ol, El×n M×sk, and J×e R×gan. He also thinks that Tr×mp is "the ultimate epic troll".
He finally started saying that c×vid is fake & trans folks should be "purged". He also still thinks that you can catch AIDS from a toilet seat or a handshake.
His critical thinking skills have eroded to the point where I don't even recognize him anymore. He just parrots talking points from grifter podcasts.
We are no longer friends. I miss the "old" him everyday.
Why the fuck are you censoring what you post? You're not going to get banned for wrongthink, this isn't reddit.
Because bad actors will search these terms and harass you for speaking ill of them, no matter the platform.
Not sure why you're being aggressive over someone taking precautions to protect themself.
Maybe they just find their names distasteful.
It's to protect myself from folks who will inevitably search these terms and harass others who criticize these people.
This platform is growing, and I will take precautions to keep myself safe.
I want to say in advance that I am happy for everyone here who exited this pipeline, especially if you were just a kid. But I gotta say - it is creepy to me how many people there are who think so little of women that the gamer gate arguments could convince them at all. As a little kid I thought that someday men and women would all realize that we're in this together and we'd learn to respect each other as human beings. I was so wrong.
I was attracted by it in the beginning because they were talking about things I was interested in: somebody who had personal relationships with game journalists was given good reviews for their shitty game, certain sanctioned video game sites appeared to be forming anti-competition cartels to eliminate up-and-comers, publishers were clearly trying to capture/recuperate the consumer reporting industry with review embargoes and sponsored reviews, etc. To me, the big looming questions were stuff like "can journalism ethically report on the industry they sell ad space to?" and "was it an isolated instance that Jeff Gerstmann got fired from Gamespot over his review of Kane & Lynch, or was it a symptom of a widespread culture of bought-and-paid-for review scores?".
And then I checked out what other people were worried about, and it was brain-meltingly stupid. And I don't just mean the eternal dogpiling on Zoe Quinn long after it had become apparent that she was a relatively minor player in amuch larger game. They became obsessed with nobodies like Anita Sarkisian and other agitprop "internet personalities" on both sides, all of whom seemed exclusively concerned with clout chasing. It became a massive glut of creepy stalking, neofascism, and eventually flopped around till it landed on Red Pill shit.
It all accomplished nothing except poisoning the phrase "ethics in gaming journalism", when industry and special-interest capture of journalism is a threat in all sectors, not even just entertainment. And that's not even mentioning the anti-competitive practices in the industry itself—imagine if a film rewiewer got blackballed from every major publication in their entire industry because they gave an Avengers movie 2 stars. Now bringing that up associates you with neo-nazis. Thanks gamergaters, thanks for the mulitple times I've been accused of being alt-right for saying Kotaku sucks.
These fascists do that with everything. They take a real social issue people are upset about and then use it as a pretty container to fill with their bullshit. I was around then and I don't even remember the original controversy just the weird backlash against women as gamers.
Bro. The gamergate argument was that the corruption and nepotism in games media was and still is out of control. Just because it started with one shitty Indie "game" dev sleeping around for good press doesn't mean that was the entire focus.
I wrote "arguments" instead of "argument" because it was pretty clear to those of us outside the drama that for a lot of people it was about hating on women who had the audacity to make shitty indie games like any other shitty indie developer. There was a point hidden in there somewhere about unfair practices in the game industry in general, but I'm skeptical that most people really remember it for that today.
This is a whole thing. There's been research that shows that if you just randomly follow videos on YouTube, you'll more than likely end up at hard-right talking points. There's also a deliberate effort by Nazis to build a propaganda pipeline, particularly on youtube. Adam Something did a good video on his own personal experience with this.
You have to use "don't recommend channel" on anything even remotely sus to keep YouTube from trying to alt right pipeline you
Or not watch them because they're shit and the algorithm changes what it recommends.
Oh, definitely don't watch them. But if I see a title/thumbnail that looks iffy, I check the channel page and block the whole channel if I don't like the look of it. Only way to keep that shit from overwhelming the whole feed.
Being raised as an atheist makes life so much simpler. Never had to spend time with those parts of YouTube, life was simple and clear.
I was also raised atheists but I found myself being entertained by the bashing of ridiculous claims of fundamentalists. Things like thunderf00ts "Why people laugh at creationists" or anything by Darkmatter2525 were just poking harmless fun. As time progressed, some of these YouTubers started making more podcasty stuff where they would rant and rave about the evil effects of religion on daily life and I was still on board.
When they all switched to bashing feminism I left pretty quickly because I had a good friend who was an outspoken feminist and I realized that the videos portrayed feminism all wrong. Who knows where I would be if it wasnt for her.
I skipped edgy atheist and went straight into anti-sjw during gamergate. I had some upsetting opinions for a couple years. Then I smoked weed, did some shrooms, realized I'm bi, and became an atheist. Quick little 180°.
Couple years ago I went back through my YouTube history to see what I was watching. And holy fuck that shit was fucked and escalated quickly. Glad I got out.
I fully believe that psychedelics are criminalized because people who take psychedelics are shown to have fewer authoritarian views after taking it.
Churches and governments generally dislike this. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881117748902 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2017.1312643
Yeah, gotta say my time doing psychedelics was life-changing. I had been exiting that anti-sjw phase of my life for a while, but smoking weed made me chill the fuck out and psychedelics made me internalize the chilling the fuck out long term.
Wouldn't say they made me an atheist. I've made some bad decisions with drugs and have had a near death experience with the full psychedelic release. It's VERY similar to DMT and whippets. They're extremely creepy, you realize you're dead and come to terms with it within 15 minutes of real time. The benevolence of most mammals having that final 15 minutes even though at that point you're dead, makes me believe there's something or someone out there that serves as a grand architect. It's the only way I can personally rationalize my brain doing THAT a few times.
Me crawling out the other side bloody and bruised but smiling, now a socialist after realizing "wait, people just want to live their lives. What's the actual problem here?"
But they're cRiNgE, therefore they must be stripped of their rights and imprisoned forthwith! /s
In all seriousness, though, it definitely seems most of us who went through that have either gone full neo-nazi or pulled back and become flaming progressives of various sorts.
I'm so glad that I had my edgelord phase just a little out of sync with most of my generation.
Haha woops happened to me almost. I still (painfully) remember spouting anti-hillary pro-trump rhetoric in my computer class 😐
TBF, they appealed to someone with the maturity level of a 15 year old.
I was somewhat inoculated against the pipeline for two reasons:
I was in my 20s when I finally stopped going to church and had enough perspective to be skeptical of the anti-feminism content.
By the time I started watching atheist YouTube videos the split between left and right was well-established, so it was easy to filter out the culture war stuff.
That didn't stop YouTube from recommending Carl of Swindon's channel every chance it got.
asdqwe
Do tell.
I almost. Thankfully I caught on quick that these people didn’t care about the truth but rather pushing a narrative.
I have a couple points in my past who if I met I might punch
Unfortunately I brought home the God Delusion while I was questioning religion in my late teens, I ended up in the "New Atheism" Skepchick and PZ Myers side of things, unfortunately my high school aged brother picked it up and went through Thunderfoot and seems to have ended up in some alt right bullshit and hasn't really found his way out yet.
I remember about a decade ago there was sort of a split among online atheists over feminism. When gamergate started, I remember seeing some of the same names from the “non-feminism” side of that split popping up.
Both ultra alt-right and far-left are cringy weirdos imo. A healthy diet consists of laughing at both sides. Otherwise you end up on one side or the other /shrug.