We missed this one back in June. In the Wokest of venues, intellectual cannibalism:
New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what’s right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.
Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may sound hyperbolic, but it’s not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy hitters in the atheist and “skeptic” communities are today. What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their cultural quest to secularize the world?
Phil Torres, “Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right” at Salon (June 5, 2021)
Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Phil Torres is supposed to be somebody in atheism. He goes after a bunch of people you’ve heard of, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Larry Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, Steven Pinker …
Well, Torres is probably not on their Santa list either. Did he miss anybody? Maybe…
This is hardly an exhaustive list. But it’s enough to make clear the epistemic and moral turpitude of this crowd. There is nothing ad hominem in saying this, by the way: The point is simply that the company one keeps matters. What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.
Phil Torres, “Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right” at Salon (June 5, 2021)
Take in for a moment that the editors of an allegedly serious publication actually sponsored an article claiming that all of these prominent atheists have “merged with the far right.” Remember that the next time someone starts caterwauling about the need to suppress conspiracy theories. We can direct them to Salon’s website for their best convenience…
Something’s obviously happening in the world of the godlessness that failed — or some people with a platform need the rest of us to believe so.
Hat tip: The Stream