Reddit atheism is white nationalism under the pretense of philosophy. Famous examples are Asmongold going on a rant about inferior cultures. Richard Dawkins recently said he is a cultural Christian and there is no genocide in Gaza.

What they meant was “we hate brown people” but they wrap it in a few layers of pretend.

It is largely a consequence of liberalism and the focus of trying to prove the white man is scientifically superior by figures such as Darwin.

Here is a large video addressing it https://youtu.be/xPgTeq8d8tg?t=31m25s

“Reddit” Atheism is when you’re stuck dunking on young earth creationists (who deserve it but are extremely low hanging fruit) while also being islamophobic.

I was raised YEC so reddit atheism was good for me to an extent, but then I had to shed the islamophobia. fortunately I also came down on the right side of “Atheism+” schism, which deserves its own writeup but I’m not doing that.

I feel confident saying I know, as a fact, that the Abrahamic god does not exist. That said, I don’t know how or why the universe exists. Life & consciousness seem to be phenomena which arise naturally out of laws of physics so I have no reason to believe in survival of the self beyond the physical body. It is literally true that we are “the universe experiencing itself” and not something separate from it. That idea is a form of monism which has a rich tradition in eastern religion, and even Marxism!

There are even forms of the idea of reincarnation which I find somewhat compatible with a materialist, monist view of the world. This is a powerful essay on the subject.

Reddit atheism was just thinly veiled islamophobia. Everyone showed their ass after 9/11

To dissent from most people, I don’t see any real separation between the two, or more accurately, I don’t see a real separation between Reddit atheism and Western atheism, as in atheism as understood and adopted by Westerners. This becomes very obvious when you talk to and observe Chinese atheists. Pretty much the only thing your average Chinese atheist and your average Western atheist have in common is that they don’t believe in any gods. That’s pretty much it.

But your average Chinese atheist believes in the concept of luck on par with any religious belief. The concept of auspicious days or finding some fortune teller that will give their newborn a name that brings good fortune or diving into numerology isn’t something that Western atheists would do. Feng shui, which many Chinese people believe on some level, boils down to how much luck you could generate by optimizing the arrangement of your home and the location of your building (funny aside, there was some Taiwanese politician who apparently bought some house and did everything he could to maximize the amount of luck it would bring to him through feng shui except he didn’t even live in the fucking house. And it wasn’t an empty house either. It was filled with like statues and other random shit that apparently brings good luck.)

Would your average Western atheist even consider them atheist? I honestly don’t think so because there’s a lot of additional beliefs baked into Western atheism just like there’s additional beliefs baked into Eastern atheism. Western atheism espouses a materialist reality, the disbelief in an afterlife or a soul, an empiricist/skeptic view of the world, confidence in science as the best methodology to understand reality, confidence that there’s almost nothing conceptually out of reach of the human intellect, a strict separation between religious belief and religious practice, and centering religious belief over religious practice. None of these have anything to do with the belief or disbelief in a god.

Reddit atheism was called out at the time for being a veil for Western (and even Christian) chauvinism. It was mainly used as a justification of imperialist wars on Muslim countries.

This critique has born out, as Reddit atheist types (Dawkins, Elon) have since self identified themselves as Christian Chauvinists.

“Reddit Atheism” is a type of “crusader atheism” (I’m pulling this term out of my ass). When atheism takes on the form of a “civilizational” project, that we, the enlightened, must impose on them, the backward superstitious hordes. As a social mechanism it isn’t much different from how Christianity was used as a justification to bulldoze indigenous cultures, to justify colonialism as a righteous project to “save” the nonbelievers.

First sub to ban me, my offense: saying we should take anti-atheiests at their word and get them before they get us.

While I agree with the other posters on here that “Reddit atheism” has become synonymous with a brand of cantankerous old white guy western chauvinism with godless characteristics, I take issue with the definitions that stop at “smug assholes about it” because that definition frequently gets wielded against users on this site, including in the linked thread.

Guys, gals, and enbies, I don’t know if you’ve read some of the things the rest of the fediverse has to say about us but we are frequently accused of being smug assholes because we refuse to mince words or follow liberal rules of politeness when calling out bad shit, and it shouldn’t be controversial here to acknowledge that religious institutions generally are responsible for some bad shit and apply the standard Hexbear irreverence.

I agree there’s a time and a place and said time and place is when the religion is a culturally dominant force enabling oppression as is absolutely the case with Islam and less so when it’s a cultural identity of a group fighting extermination, as with the Muslim Palestinians and the Rohingya, for that matter. I think certain users have trouble navigating that distinction but I’m not interested in going to the mat about it so I’m not calling anyone out specifically. Y’all can figure it out, look for the

smugness, islamophobia, these are the distasteful traits that gave reddit atheism its bad rep.

BI (before internet) being an atheist meant being in complete ideological isolation. If you tried to discuss it with anyone you would be ridiculed and sometimes even physically threatened. Theists had complete domination. Atheist = devil worshiper/commie. These people developed a persecution complex that dates back at least to Giordana Bruno but probably much earlier. The first real online social networks were newsgroups which were almost entirely academic and darpa techie nerds. I got my first internet uni account around 1997 and gnu atheist rationalists were already controlling the online (newsgroup) narrative by then. For the first time in history they had an advantage and they kinda went mad with power. Reddit and other early social forums were just the graphical web extension of newsgroups.

Iirc there were some obscure social networks BI like Center for Inquiry and James Randii foundation and they quickly took control of the atheist/rationalist online narrative. People like Michael Shermer, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins etc. As a 90’s kid I was initially excited because I thought I found my people but I was also becoming a baby leftist and I noticed the far right influence. I believe the right/left split was already there ( Feynman/Randii vs Carl Sagan/Steven Gould) but there was a sense that control of the internet was at stake. A massive war for control raged during the naughts (some really funny shit happened lol) and finally came to a head around 2012 with ElevatorGate. The scorched earth take no prisoners nature of ElevatorGate pretty much destroyed whatever was left of the internet atheist power structure.

To me, “reddit atheism” is basically just another name for what was once called the “new-atheist” movement. The problem with that movement was that it was a rejection of religion, but not specifically of religion’s reactionary aspects.

Several of the figureheads of new-atheism would go on to become “cultural christians” and bullshit like that, because for too damn many of them, their only real issue with religion was that they thought religious people were annoying and stupid, and the rest was just dressing up their contempt as something more.

The new-atheist movement also served as a way for people with liberal / left affectations to mask their complete internalization of Bush-era war-on-terror rhetoric and islamophobia as a principled opposition to religion rather than bigotry and chauvinism.

If you don’t do the dew them it’s not real reddit atheism, just being a sparkling gentleman

Reddit Atheism: I don’t believe in God/Religion and anybody that does is stupid and smells bad.

Atheism: I don’t have any particular need to find a God(s) or Religion to make my life feel meaningful.

The key difference is that there’s a certain type of atheist that is essentially Christian in every sense aside from actually believing in God. They tend to have a lot of racist ideas about any religion that isn’t Christianity and criticize them far more harshly than Christianity. I think these people are worse than your average religious person, and I would most accurately describe myself as a staunch anti-theist.

Reddit atheism requires you to be a smug asshole about it.