Did I Learn Anything from New Atheism?

From about 2012 to 2014, I spent a lot of online time with New Atheists and the people they argue with. I've written quite a lot about it on this blog.

When I first heard that there was a group called the New Atheists, I assumed I was one, because I am an atheist, and the time was now. 

 

But very quickly I found that I had some serious differences with the New Atheists. At first I pointed out a few things, assuming that people would be enlightened, and would thank me for the info. But that didn't happen. It happened much more often that New Atheists would assume I was a Christian, because I disagreed with them, even though I disagreed about something other than existence of God. 

In retrospect, ironically, no doubt I too prematurely assumed this and that about a lot of people with whom I disagreed on this or that religious topic.

Then for a while I feuded with the new Atheists, and constantly attempted to point out that one could be an atheist, without being anything like these guys. 

Then, finally, I figured out that I didn't have to waste any more of my time on them. I just had to stop seeking them, stop joining their Facebook groups, essentially, and it would be almost as if I had never met any of them. They could be Wrong On the Internet, and I was capable of just letting it go. And none of them would hunt me down in order to continue our disagreements.

As soon as I found the New Atheists, I found other people, whom I assumed to be Christians, who claimed that New Atheism was a religion. This claim greatly irritated me at first. Then, after a while, I realized that New Atheists do share many traits with conservative evangelical Christians, which is unsurprising inasmuch as many or perhaps actually most of them were born and raised in conservative evangelical Christian families. 

But I still resisted thinking of any form of atheism as a religion. Now I don't know. I have come to accept that the term "religion" is defined very broadly by some people.Much more broadly than I ever have. And, as I have pointed out on this blog, words mean what people use them to mean, whether you or I like that those words are being used in those ways, or not.

It is hard to express how much of a shock and a disappointment the New Atheists were to me. But in retrospect, I have to admit that I had a lot in common with them in 2012. Now, I hope, I have shed at least a few of their bad habits. 

For example, like most New Atheists, I thought of monotheistic religion as the belief in the existence of an anthropomorphized creator of the universe. Polythesim, I believed, differed in that it had multiple anthropomorphized supernatural beings. The first time someone told me the Buddhists were atheists, I assumed that if there were any atheist Buddhists, they were Doin' It Wrong, and that the Buddha and other beings were worshiped as immortal beings, much as in Hinduism.

I was wrong. Buddhism is a whole different religion than Hinduism, and I basically knew doodly-squat about it, despite having read Nietzsche.

One particularly obnoxious tendency of the New Atheists, which they share with many fundamentalist Christians, is that they regard their viewpoint concerning religion to be the most important thing in the world, and they are always sharing it with people who never asked them to. 

So did I, before I met them. Now I don't. I think it was rude of me to do so. Over and over again, in my attempts to debate with the New Atheists, I pointed out that the question of whether or not there was a God or gods could be thoroughly answered in a few seconds, which left a Hell of a lot of other things to talk about. I finally took an obvious lesson from what I myself was saying. I have become somewhat less pushy and rude, I hope, when it comes to expressing my views on religion. Especially that one particular view, on the existence of a deity or deities. Which leaves a lot of other things having to do with religion which can be discussed. 

The New Atheists sometimes also refer to themselves as the Brights. They believe that they are smarter than believers. But a lot of them are just as stupid as can be. Hopefully, after the horrible experience of spending so much time with them, I am now less likely to prematurely judge people, based on that one theistic question, or on any other over-simplifying basis.