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I think it's very Protestant to write as you do here that *belief* in "ancient stories" or "metaphysical claims" are what characterize any religion. I don't know any Hindus who try to persuade non-Hindu people to assent to set of precepts or visit their temple with them or whatever. I don't know any Jewish people who try to "convert" others - trying to persuade them to give cognitive and affective assent to a set of statements about the nature of reality - they don't seek converts, actually. I mean, do Catholics actually give a shit about orthodoxy - look at Santa Muerte; did medieval illiterate peasants care about what the Bible "said" or did they care about the Passion plays and the liturgies; do Buddhists necessarily believe in a being who "judges all of us on how devout and moral we are"??

Not so much - because the liturgy is the point, the behavior is the point, the culture is the point, the embodiment is the point, the family is the point, the good smells and dim lights and great music are the point, just as much as you might say "belief" in something or anything is the point. More than anything, what it does for you and to you is the point. If it works, you're going to keep doing it. American religion and religious culture is obviously broken and impoverished, which is why it produces atheists.

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I'm mostly convinced that the deeply religious will have the last laugh, just given demographic projections (see Kaufman's "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?") due to hormonal birth control and abortion-on-demand. We already see this happening in Israel, for example.

As someone who has read far too many European philosophers writing about the death of God (from Hegel, who was the lantern that Nietzsche's madman was holding, to Heidegger and the rest), I have to say that it's incredibly amusing to think that this supposed end of history and endgame of Western thought will just fizzle out in a century or two due to secular Europeans contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. (I mean, I suppose it's also sad at some level, but after all they're choosing to do it ...?)

When you think about all of the autumnal and vaguely melodramatic things written about this topic, from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," to Eliot's line about "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," Heidegger spending a decade desperately trying to find some way to revive European religious life (through his 1930s writings on the "last god" etc.), it turns out that this was just a temporary condition, a case of certain people in certain cities in America and Western Europe turning away from God for a couple centuries, until they simply fade out of existence and humanity returns to its usual religious orientation. And the beauty of it is that even if religious populations slowly 'moderate' or secularize over time -- for example, Europe will almost certainly be majority Muslim by 2080, but let's say that these Muslims slowly secularize -- the cycle will start again; believers will have children, secularists will stop having children, etc.

Popular/nerd culture (and Vox et al.) seem to accept it as a given that the inevitable endgame of history is, like, the Starfleet Federation Council in 2342 A.D., a super-U.N. where culture is irrelevant, no one is religious, everyone is a scientist, etc., but this may not necessarily be the case . . . hormonal birth control is a hell of a drug.

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It's not true that Dawkins is a deeply unpleasant person. I saw him speak at the University of Texas during the New Atheist era. He came and delivered a nice-but-vanilla talk on some aspects of evolution. About half the audience had come to ask silly creationist gotcha questions that he had heard a million times. He engaged each of these politely and earnestly--he was not dismissive, did not demean anyone, engaged point by awful point. He's a damn saint. He's no troll, just the opposite, really. I think atheists get a bad rap--none of the New Atheists ever approached the rude arrogant condescension of the woke you-do-the-work, I-cannot-be-bothered-with-emotional-labor, haven't-you-read-Kendi? era. I don't really understand why strident atheists engender so very much deep butthurt in theists and smug non-believers alike. It's a mystery.

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I don't know of many smart and interesting people who talk about God in terms of existence. They instead talk about about meaning, purpose, values, phenomenological experience, narrative structure, etc. Despite not being religious, I think this was why I never related to the celebrity Atheist types. There are levels of sophistication in religious thinking, and they only attack the very base level, defined by a fairly unique American Christian fundamentalist version of belief. Or the Islamic equivalent. Though I am glad this is begin attacked and hopefully removed from politics.

Meanwhile, nothing of interest has been added to the conversation everyone else was having. I think a lot of this stems from different takes on 'Truth'. Your use of truth in this essay, and asserting that literal existence is the highest truth, is an idea that didn't exist until long after most religious traditions had formed. I'm friends with a Rabbi who would never make any scientific truth claims about religion. He understands that he is making a different category of truth claims.

More recently, popular figures like Peterson, Harris, Žižek command quite the following and are moving the conversation in this direction, focusing more on the meta-truths in religion and less on any scientific claims.

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This is merely noticing the triumph of American/French radical postmodernism. The Christianity as "pure canvas" and gutting of its contents, is just the crowning achievement of a wider cultural disembowelment. In Music this reached its zenith with John Cage's piece " 4'33 " in which the famous pianist plays nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage 'composed' this way back in 1952. I often play it for friends and family. In Art, Yves Klein reached the glorious dead end when he displayed Le Vide (The Void), in 1956, which was a display of, well, nothing. The gutting of Christianity occurred around the same time, but its husk and memory endures.

The reason British new atheists are such a curious breed to Americans (or were), is that they are not postmodernists. Darwkins is a 'terf'. They're creatures of the old learning. Dawkins, Hitchens et all, were brought up at highly rigorous, in some cases quite ancient, schools, in the 1940s and 50s. I can tell you there wasn't much tolerance for French or American theory at Oundle School or The Leys School in those days. Any teacher over 60 was literally a victorian. So the British new atheists actually knew the contents of Christian belief ,often very well, they were very well read, and they were well versed in rhetoric all before they went to university. Comically if not tragically, these relics of the old world actually argued the case, when all Americans had been brought up on was emptiness. That's why they caused such a sensation. But don't worry education in Britain was destroyed a few decades later in the 70s and now British children are fed a similar diet of the void, soon forgotten by each child, naturally.

If they were contemptuous it was because they knew what Christianity really meant. And for them, Christianity was something that got in their way. Something that stopped them doing pleasurable things they liked and that laid out rules. Something that the austere, strict, and discredited preceding British generations held to. The generations of the World Wars who had discredited all of civilisation by allowing them to happen. You have to recover the sense of contempt for the beliefs, mores, and existence of the older generations at that time. Christopher Hitchen's brother Peter (who is now a black-hearted reactionary Christian) literally burnt his copy of the Bible in front of his fellow peers. The cultural and moral revolution was in full throes and C Hitchens was 19 in 1968, the apex year of the cultural revolution. They were well educated revolutionaries, the very last to be.

You just have to accept that no "win" is ever going to be satisfying to any atheist of any stripe. Because atheism is built on nothing but smug contempt for the religious and/or resignation to a clown universe. British atheists were just more honest about that. As ever Americans are the fakes, who will distance themselves from the sharp end of atheism, pretending their atheism is something of little consequence, no more consequential than their favourite movie or celebrity, an accessory, and certainly not an offensive one, God forbid. As for the French, they're just existentially miserable and the British are now somewhere in-between. Although it helps massively if you are some kind of earthly utopian, such as a communist, fascist, or if you believe the myth that history as such is inevitable progress. Instant confidence boost. Or it's made easier if you make an idolatry out of politics, or money, or culture, or your self. Selfism is currently the largest religion in the 'West', and eventually the youth will revolt, the question is merely when.

I am 22 and will gladly claim that many in my age group are ready. In fact legions are already gushing over astrology, neopagan practices, and that sort of thing. Many of them are former or current atheists. They hark back to the the era before Christ, to ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Germans, they are the true reactionaries. It will all end in tears or Islam. Islam which literally doesn't give a damn about new, old, or new new atheism. Naturally there are those of us who will work towards a Christian revival (or at least survival), of its contents and its learning, but we are maybe 1 in every 100,000 and lack role models. We're learning on the job and have just had to learn that you have to write in the snarky, cynical, internet newspeak, to ever hope to get a hearing, let alone convince anyone. The civility of old is dead.

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When your Substack was introduced I was eager to subscribe but to be honest, your atheism posts were what I was looking forward to the least: everything I had read previously on subject had either been someone lamenting how hard it is living in a predominantly Christian country or some Maher/Dawkins-style smarm. I wasn’t eager for more.

Not that you need my praise, but as a practicing Catholic I found this piece original; it gave me things to think about and was all well-put. Thank you.

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Good essay. I wonder, has Freddie read any of the contemporary philosophy of religion by believing Christians? It's fashionable to say that all of these philosophers are just rationalizing their childhood upbringing, though you could say the same for most philosophers' defending their beliefs about morality or free will (and some philosophers have!).

I'm a practicing and, as much as I can, believing Catholic myself, so I bring up the contemporary, serious, philosophical Christians, not because I think they're sociologically interesting, but because I think they're substantively interesting. So, I think it would be worth it for DeBoer to read some of them--at least Plantinga, I guess, though his approach isn't my favorite.

Nevertheless, one thing that may be happening with Christianity and other religions is that for them to work, you need to be in a community of serious believers. This is the point that virtue ethicists sometimes make: virtues have ecological niches, and to the extent those ecologies evolve into something else, the virtues not only lose their point but become, if not impossible, then at least very difficult, to practice. If that's right, then we may lose the old religions but get some new kinds of religions (e.g., contemporary anti-racism, if John McWhorter is to be believed).

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This reminds me of one of my favorite essays of all time, Arthur Leff’s Unspeakable Ethics Unnatural Law. Without religion all ethical systems fall to the “Sez who” question. But the essay is enjoyable for his great writing. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://duckduckgo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3810&context=fss_papers

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Ironic that you're writing this on the way to Britain, where the Anglican Church spent most of the 20th century relaxing into a position of religion without faith. It's almost a mannerism or class signifier to attend church; you'd certainly never get evangelical attempting to convert you to their beliefs, and in general a belief in God is viewed as a minor social embarrassment. I know churchgoers who certainly don't have faith but view attending as an upholding of tradition, like a country ramble for the soul and done in the same spirit of preservation.

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Freddie, do you know about religious market theory? I'm an atheist much like you, but I think RMT is basically correct, and it predicts forthcoming revivals.

https://sociologytwynham.com/2018/05/02/religious-market-theory/

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520057319/the-future-of-religion

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Apparently you have not yet realized that this is just a computer simulation that we are all living in:

https://www.simulation-argument.com/

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It's interesting to compare your assertion that religion has become unmoored from its underlying beliefs, turning into "religious consumerism," with the "What are you, 12?" article, where you talk about modern "Marxists" being unmoored from Marxist economics. You might be right in both cases, but so far as I can see Marxist economics has no more intrinsic truth than Christian ontology. In both cases, you have to accept the underlying reality claims as axiomatic to get the full benefit of the ethics and thought systems built on them—otherwise, as you say, religious and political ideologies degenerate into clubs like any other.

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Most of the atheist discourse I’ve heard is predicated on the nonexistence of the supernatural. Unfortunately, we do not sit at the vantage point where that question can be successfully debated. The discussion feels more like geometry, in which the believer had one set of postulates, the atheist has another.

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I feel like there's been a fairly recent retcon of the new atheist movement to make it something more important and concrete than it really was. I honestly compartmentalize it in the same zone as furries - a small group of weirdos who maybe had more of a visible presence online in the early 2000s because the internet wasn't 'everyone' yet. I think the retcon allows some interesting arguments to be developed, but it just doesn't reflect the reality of the time - that 'loudly atheistic people' were an extremely marginal group in every sense.

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good read!

if the new atheists won by losing, how come the secularisation trend in america seems to have been going steady since the late 80s? in fact, from what i can tell, the new atheist period doesn't seem to have made a dent in this trend at all. maybe new atheism was just some temporary, ephemeral and ultimately impotent phenomenon caused by deeper structural, material or demographic forces?

=> https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/figure3.3-generational-change-religious-disaffiliation.png

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