The problem with that was that it was more "oh you believe in magical fairy tales instead of pop science youtubers and NYT/WAPO oped pieces? How cringe. How silly and dumb and cringe you are for believing in silly cringe things you silly dumb dumb cringe person. rofl rofl rofl" aesthetic shit as opposed to any sort of actually principled opposition to the horrifying cruelty, chauvinism, and hatred that runs through nearly all religious traditions with the only exceptions being the odd modern heresy that tries to just take all the harmless silly magic stuff and attach it to acceptable egalitarian and humanitarian ethics instead.

Like it was always a bunch of "culturally christian" atheists who thought that all the demonstrably false or absurd parts of the doctrine were embarrassing and contemptible and even worse were used as justification to commit the unforgivable sin of trying to deny cishet white men their precious tasty funtime treats, while still otherwise believing in all the toxic chauvinism, racism, sexism, and homophobia stuff.

You can even see this reflected in media, where it feels like most "criticisms" of christians were that they were just sort of cringe fuddy duddies who didn't know how to have a good time and they did cringe things like spending time with their family and community instead of having fun, and almost never that they were domineering, hateful, abusive monsters who violently enforce conformity and obedience to their deeply bigoted patriarchal white supremacist social mores.

[–] TreadOnMe@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

Exactly. While alot of my friends, online and otherwise, spent their time making fun of (under the guise of critique obviously) Christians and Muslims, I usually spent my time arguing with other supposed atheists, because I mistakenly thought the point was to interrogate poor thinking, not just dunk on obviously stupid ideas.

Like, the largest problem for me was that people would treat the Bible as some sort of unerring word or first hand account, when any honest Biblical scholar knows and talks about how that clearly isn't the case. But the fact that it isn't the case makes the world a much more rich and complex place, as opposed to flat and simplistic. In the same way, many online atheists were bound and determined to make Christians and Muslims into flat and simplistic caractures as opposed to trying to understand the logic and mechanisms of social faith. This limited perspective is what made me think the movement was doomed to fail and sputter out, even as a high schooler. We had abandoned philosophy in exchange for science, without understanding that science is a method of philosophy, thus making our understanding more incomplete.