That’s an interesting idea. I suppose here it serves a similar purpose as philosophical skepticism; acting as universal acid, it attacks the philosophical justification of the existing system, letting the new movement come in and take power based on no philosophical justification other than “because I have all the guns”.
The next consideration is that believing things (in general) is actually good, and a philosophical universal acid is therefore a bad and noxious thing.
You don’t need Theism to believe in things. Theists are generally the ones who claim that you do, seeing as their belief system works that way.
The other problem is that Atheism is most-likely just plain true. Its prediction - “there will be no divine intervention” - pretty accurately describes the world we all live in. Every instance theists cite is unclear or not sufficiently provable - which is exactly what you would expect from someone whose god isn’t real that has to make excuses for something that’s supposed to be all-powerful.
Worse, the reasoning used is “don’t test God, you have to show faith.” That sets off my internal memetic defense intuitions something fierce.
That’s setting aside how unforgivable the entire Hell thing is. And that’s what really gets me more than the rest of it, seeing as it’s so incongruent with “ultimate perfect good.”
Some conceptions of Ultimate Perfect Good could look pretty fucking alien, but they wouldn’t look like that.
Now usually, I let religious belief slide for what you might call Utilitarian reasons - some people use it to keep themselves out of jail, others to keep themselves alive, there are various charity things, and so on.
Plus farther back there were things like monks copying and preserving texts. Overall, I’d say it’s difficult to determine the net moral impact of religion.
But then we get to things like “we’ll be cheering putting the New Atheists in camps,” and I feel the need to prod back a bit.
(also, worth asking why ~every stable and non-atrocity-generating power structure in history has used religion of some kind as part of its base.)
Now see, I know this must be bullshit, but I’m not enough of a culture warrior to give a firm rebuttal.
However, first you have to consider that most of human history is religious, therefore you’re limited to stuff from, essentially, the 1700s onward, otherwise there’s a massive selection bias.
Then there’s the fact that many of the “religious-based” structures also committed atrocities - unless you selectively handwave away the Divine Right of Kings type stuff.
And then you can count something like America as having committed atrocities and not being religious on the grounds of the founders’ Deism being closer to Atheism than other belief structures were at the time, but then you can’t count it as stable and religiously-rooted in opposition to all those medieval wars of succession.
I strongly suspect there’s going to be strategic equivocation of that kind somewhere in any such argument.
This is where there’s a bait and switch happening.
I’ve seen the anecdotes from people abused under a religious justification. I don’t begrudge these people their bad impressions of religion in general, even thinking they’re mistaken. I also don’t believe for a moment that the real driving force behind major societal-level pushes like this one is actually people who were abused and therefore have an instinctive animus. There aren’t enough of them. And the message behind these societal pushes is not “we must disempower religion because it led to these concrete abuses” (except occasionally, from a very few people, as a motte). It’s some mix of “we must destroy religion for its own sake” and “we will define this perfectly-okay thing as an abuse, then use it as an excuse to tear down religion”.
The people behind this by and large don’t have any such concrete and morally-justifiable motivation for their advocacy. They’re attacking religion for its own sake and/or because it’s in the way of their powermongering. We are called to love our enemies, but it’s with relation to this that I can sympathize with the urge to shove them in camps.
Oh come on, like those instances aren’t supposed to be able to motivate others?
You surely don’t think all anti-Communists are supposed to be those who personally suffered under Communism, do you?
And besides, some of those “perfectly okay things” really aren’t so okay.
