guys but like…not every vocal atheist is an m.r.a dudebro with a goatee and a fedora and a hard-on for richard dawkins. plenty of people have a legitimate reason for mistrusting and criticising religion and religious practices (i.e. abuse survivors, lgbt people, people from former or current colonies, many women all over the world) and atheism might actually be important to some people as a space for resistance. which is not to say i advocate black and white thinking and i think all criticism of religion should be sensitive and placed within careful consideration of context (i.e. people not using “atheism” as an excuse to be islamophobic, anti-semitic etc.) but religions are social institutions that still exert a lot of power and we should let oppressed people have safe spaces in which to criticise them
I’m still trying to understand how the Left started hating atheists, associating Atheism with being anti women’s rights, and consider religious people as a morally superior group?
Like, what the fuck? What happened to the god-hating liberals my (abusive) Christian parents despised?
The complement of Divide and Conquer: Unite and Conquer. Make alliances of convenience to gain power. Leftists aligned with Islam because they’re both opponents (especially in America) of neoliberal globalism, as well as Conservativism. Islam has money and power behind it, Atheism has none. Islam also fits into the antiracist agenda, especially in the west where Muslims are a minority that’s also correlated very much with ethnicity. Racism is a tough rap to beat and it means people who want to spread Islam and Islamic power are naturally aligned with the left, who want to hurt the same people and take their power too.
Before Islam was a noticeable group in Western politics, atheism was fine/good. But if you want to ally with an increasingly powerful Islam, you HAVE to shit on atheists. Because atheists are willing to actually attack Islam, whereas feminism and LGBT issues can, via doublethink, sidestep it, they get thrown under the bus.
They’re very much playing with fire.