Sunday, January 28, 2018

A United Atheist Community Is Impossible


It's been nearly a month now since The Atheist Conference collapsed and I've been thinking about the fallout and it's implications for the broader atheist community.

First, I want to clarify a misconception. It seems that many people thought that having Steve Shives at the conference lead to its demise. This is not true. What killed TAC was entirely due to the director's immoral behavior, which lead to many of our major speakers pulling out. Shives had nothing to do with it.

Second, the rift created by having Shives at our conference has lead me to completely abandon any hopes of atheist unity. The atheists community is irreparably divided and this is an inevitable consequence of the individualist atheist mindset. We're not divided over doctrine like the religious are, we're divided over politics and social issues. Since atheism has no doctrine, there's nothing to unite atheists other than disbelief in god. But that's hardly something to be united under. There's no organization or community dedicated to non-basketball players, or non-chess players, nor is there any reason too. It just isn't a thing.

The only thing that unites an atheist community is extreme persecution by the religious, like the kind happening to atheists in Muslim majority countries. But atheists by and large just don't experience that kind of persecution in the West. This is why there is little reason to have a strong organized atheist community in irreligious parts of the world like Denmark or Sweden, or New York or San Francisco. It is only where religion dominates and persecutes the non-religious that atheists feel the motivation to unite, which is why atheist communities in the American South tend to be much stronger than those in the North.

As atheism becomes more and more normalized and the rights of the non-religious become more and more secured, the need for an atheist community becomes less and less. Basically, the goal of the atheist community is to make itself obsolete. Perhaps the efforts of the atheist community for the last 15 years, which saw the rise of the New Atheism cultural movement, has become a victim of its own success. It's become so good at normalizing atheism that the need for it to continue existing at the size it was simply isn't there. And once religion ceases to be the threat that it once was to atheists, other issues will take center stage, and that's exactly what happened.

We were hoping that Trump's election would have a uniting force on the atheist community, and the main goal of TAC was to help facilitate this. But it didn't. The persecution of atheists even under fundamentalists like Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions just isn't bad enough to warrant such a unity. Most atheists across the US saw no difference in their lives once Trump took office. On top of that, the social issues that divide atheists today, like radical feminism and extreme political correctness, only seem to be getting worse by the day, and they have a much greater tangible effect on the live of most atheists in the West than religious fundamentalism does.

I've accepted this reality and I will no longer call for the futile idea of atheist unity. A united atheist community is impossible; that's just the way it is. But I'm definitely not going to stop being an active atheist. With TAC out of the way I can now focus on other projects. I will continue writing on this blog about atheism and related issues. I will continue working with my local atheist community in making more atheist related content, especially video content — something I haven't explored deeply. This will be in the form of documentaries and videos about atheist related subject matters, science, philosophy, and social issues, in both a scripted and unscripted format. I'm also planning on making a documentary about free will this year, something I'm uber excited about. This will necessarily reduce the number of blog posts I can make, so my frequency might be reduced, but there will be videos! Stay tuned.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Share

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...