The atheist community has an arsehole problem

The following is a disconnected, stream of consciousness, collection of factors I think contribute to the atheist community’s current arsehole problem. I’m going to make some claims and I can’t be bothered to site them so dismiss it all as nonsense if it doesn’t jibe with your worldview.

#NotAllMen? #NotAllAtheists? Well done, have a cookie.

I’ve got to caveat this by saying I’ll be thinking a lot about my perceptions of American atheists while writing this, which may be, and probably are, massively wrong.

This is for several reasons:

1. I live in the UK where most people are fairly mellow about their religion or lack thereof. It doesn’t seem to provide the same level of social building block as it does in the US. Skeptic and atheist meetups, groups and conventions don’t seem to have taken off in the same way as they did in US, at least, outside of London. In fact, when meeting someone, their religion is of very little importance to me, and the vast majority of Brits. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair was told when he considered going public with his Catholicism, “we don’t do religion.”
2. Due to the outsized influence of the US on the Anglophone internet, chances are, a given atheist you meet online is likely to be a yank. And the online part is important.

So without further ado, lets get into some reasons why we have an arsehole problem

Americans!

I am by no means suggesting that Americans are by default more arseholish than the world at large. I want to make that clear. I do think, however, that the nature of the US atheist community may lend itself more to arseholedom than normal.

 

We’re all aware of the disproportionally large role religion plays in American life and politics compared to the rest of the Western world. Outing oneself as an atheist in such an environment can be traumatic (if not as fatal as the wholesale butchery going on in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world). One can risk cutting oneself off from family and friends and the attitude of society at large are not friendly. Americans may now be getting the message that atheism =/= devil worship and that it’s here to stay in political discourse (Bernie was an atheist right?), but it’s still not a entirely safe endeavour.

This can lead to a siege mentality. I remember watching a video of some people arriving at an atheist convention somewhere in the US, with the fundie Christians telling them they’d murder them on one side, and the fundie Muslims doing the same on the other. If your reaching out to other atheists via the internet, or going to these conventions, they are likely to share these anxieties.

People!

It goes without saying that if you were an arsehole before you became an atheist, you’re probably going to be an arsehole afterwards. Becoming an atheist doesn’t make you a good person, it just means you don’t believe in any gods. That’s it. Sometimes I think we need to step back and remember that. There are no commandments, no guarantees that you’ll be a better person, there’s just one less excuse for being a racist/misogynist/homophobe/transphobe/arsehole (delete to taste).

When we find people who are atheists who hold such beliefs, chances are they were a shitty person to begin with.

But wait, you say, you seem to be exclusively talking about people who de-converted! To an extent, I am. I suspect that the majority of American atheists were born to religious parents. I’d be less likely to make this claim about European atheists, but I think we’ve witnessed an explosive growth in atheism in America, that hasn’t quite been matched in the UK and Europe (because we were already quite irreligious/apathetic to start with – maybe there’s something in the water)

But there has been a technological and social revolution that has mirrored the growth of atheism in America:

The Internet!

I think that the internet has a lot to answer for when it comes to the growth of atheism, not just, but more markedly, in America, as it has for other subcultures like Harry Potter fanfic writers, furries and child sex offenders. Maligned groups finally have a way to reach out to each other, discover that they’re not alone, and take the first steps into atheism and skepticism. If I were an atheist living in a country where it was repressed, I could not imagine how great it would be learning that I was not the only who thought that religion was nonsense.

Of course, this is where things get weird. Bitterness would be an easy resource to tap into, as would contempt for people who believed in "fairy tales". One can easily imagine how such a community could turn toxic, but for now, it’s still focused on “the oppressor".

I also don’t need to explain to anyone reading this that internet makes arseholes of us all. It’s not just GIFT working on us, it’s the fact that writing takes time, and it’s easy to cut corners, meaning that nuance is lost, especially when “debating” online; “you’re an idiot” is easy to write when you’re tired and just about to reach your stop than a nuanced response. It’s also the fact that body language and tone of voice is not carried across in writing, meaning that often we read combative posts in the worst voice possible. I once had a go at someone in this group because, in reading his post, I missed a preposition and it suddenly read as extremely patronising.

 

So how has a vocal segment of the atheist community become so toxic to people who aren’t straight white cissexual dudes, and should really see many religious institutions in the same light as the atheist community? Well that’s how we get to:

Privilege!

Think of the early adopters of the internet. They are likely to be young, white, male and probably cis-het as well.

Imagine the first flush of commercial users hitting the various newsgroups and chatroom of the early internet, reaching out to their new-found brethren. It’s not that gay non-white trans-women aren’t technically savvy enough or inherently less likely to be atheists (as one editorial I recall reading claimed). It’s that they’ve got other stuff to worry about rather than exploring atheism. The internet develops – remember, there are no girls on the internet, and any girl who identifies herself as such has GOTIS. The online atheist community is primed with privilege.

As the internet becomes more accessible and other groups start to join atheist communities, but the fun doesn’t really start until we hit the new social justice movement. Suddenly female atheists start demanding not to be sexually harassed, trans atheists want their fellows to acknowledge their new identity, non-white atheists want… um… Ok I’m not actually aware of a racism problem within the atheist community – unless it’s just plain old privilege blindness – actually let’s roll with that.

There’s just a general thorough distaste for social justice issues in some quarters of the atheist community and I think it stems from unexamined privilege.

But privileged atheists also like other privileged things, like Libertarianism; the “fuck you, I got mine” of economic models, climate change denial; perhaps the ultimate privilege and, of course, video games*. So it’s not surprising when if one runs into one of these people who also proudly flaunts their disbelief in god as a marker of their rationality.

Because for some, that’s all this is, a marker of their rationality, and it leads to an enormous amount of smug self-satisfaction; I know, I’ve been there. After all, if you’ve rid yourself of religion, the cause of all that ails the world, you don’t have to change; it’s everyone else thats at fault. You don’t lynch blacks like the Christian KKK. You don’t mutilate and murder women like various Muslim groups. You don’t persecute the LGBT community like basically every religious group out there. That’s what racism, misogyny and homophobia look like, and you do nothing like that, so who is this crazy black lesbian trans-woman telling you that proposition her in a lift is inappropriate, criticizing your computer games and demanding to be listened to

Which finally brings us to:

The Myth of the Oppressed White Nerd!

So basically, the theory goes, that a lot of mostly white, mostly straight, nerdy dudes have bought into a myth of oppressed white nerddom, and this is expressing itself loudly through the Mens Rights Movement (especially MGTOW and the incel community) and of course the frothing insanity which is GamerGate. It has been noted that there is a substantial overlap in the latter.

I read a great article on the subject, which I‘m not going to look for because I’m lazy, so go google it yourselves. Basically, pop culture is full of white male protagonists - from Revenge of the Nerds to Stranger Things - who are picked on by assorted bullies but eventually overcome and get their popularity/spaceship/trophy woman. This narrative chimes with the white male nerds who spend a lot of time consuming this media. They may well have been bullied, and maybe life has failed to deliver the promised rewards, especially in the current economic climate. But their world view is still blinkered by privilege blindness. They’re the oppressed ones. To the MGTOWs, they’re victims of an evil female conspiracy to starve them of poon. To the GamerGaters they’re being encroached on by the very people who mocked them for their interests. And to the libertarians, there’s no such thing as privilege because they got where they were on their own and everyone else just wants handouts, damnit!

Being an atheist has already given them a superiority complex. Being a nerd has given them a victim complex.

So when the newly minted but thoroughly amateur social justice movement collides with them head on, what we witness is nothing but a defensive reflex.

If you’ve never engaged with feminist theory, a critique becomes criticism and Anita Sarkeesian really is here to take away your vidja garmes. The mere presence of a black female character in a video game is a sign that the SJWs are taking over the industry (no really). You have to demand that a switch be added to RPGs to turn of the gay (NO REALLY). Having explicitly feminist themes in Mad Max really would be an awful thing and a black spiderman is terrifying, because you’re the victim and your persecutors are taking all your white male nerd things.

You don't want to know how constant objectification of the female form makes female nerds feel, or how under-representation makes non-white nerds feel or how gay jokes make gay nerd feel. This is your stuff, and they can all go back to whatever it was they did before they started getting all pushy.

And you know how you’re right and they’re wrong? Because you’ve already proved yourself rational by rejecting religion. (But that’s all you’ve done.) You must be the rational one, so the argument is already over.

In return, women, people of colour, members of the LGBT community and atheists who are allies of the same are turned away from a hostile online atheist community and either don’t join them, or join other, quieter and less obnoxious sections.

And it is my firm belief that arsehole atheists are only a loud minority.

Summary!

So what are the takeaways here? Well:

#NotAllAtheists. Duh.

The internet is a useful tool, but we should probably all view it as a less than ideal avenue to change people minds. I can guarantee that we’d have a more productive conversation face to face with any of the “nasty atheists” than we’d have in a lifetime in a facebook thread. What someone manages to squeeze out in 140 characters or less probably can’t sum up their whole personality, and we’re all probably a lot kinder than we often appear online.

This is probably a transient phase. As atheism and irreligion continues to rise, and the new social justice movement matures and starts to co-opt atheist and secular spaces the arseholes will reform or be drowned out. The internet atheist scene has, by virtue of its privilege and blindness of the same been allowed to wallow in an extended adolescence for a while now, but now its bratty little sister has got the first year of uni under her belt and is sick of its shit.

Sometimes we need to step back and realise that it’s not atheism that makes an arsehole, it’s just that a particularly vocal part of our community is currently at loggerheads with another part which will in time also be ours; it’s just busy exploring other, more pressing parts of its identity. Because in the end being an atheist doesn’t make you a good person, and it doesn’t require you to be. Not a feminist, not an LGBT ally, not an anti-racist.

All it means is that you don’t believe in gods.

*Special case: it's not that video games are especially privileged, it's just that arsehole atheists and the GamerGate movement seem to have a lot in common, and almost certainly have a lot of overlap.