I've seen a sort of revival of sorts, over the past few months, and particularly in the light of the Dobbs decision and the takeover of the American court system by glazed-eyed and cross-clutching dipshits, of the Internet atheism of my teenage years. All those words I hadn't seen in any meaningful way since then – “sky daddy,” “fundie,” and all the rest – have come back, and by golly, we're just one rage comic away from a Flying Spaghetti Monster and it's 2006 all over again. It was a simpler time. The transcendental evil was still Dick Cheney, and Kanye was still dope, when a great many of my high school classmates could still see their penises.
But the thing is, I hated that shit back then. It's only with the revival of Christian nationalist nonsense of the sort I thought had been left behind in the Dubya years that the thought has crossed my head, again, that organized religion is a pox upon the planet.
Unlike many who think this, I never had any kind of grand epistemic break with God. I was fortunate enough to have been raised in a household where the desert faiths that informed what we loosely call “Western civilization” had largely been left behind, leaving only a body of literature, art, music, and architecture that could and should be appreciated on its own merit, absent any faith. I was the product of a socially Christian father who didn't believe in much of anything, and a mother who had fully turned her back on an upbringing rooted in the frigid and haunted form of Catholicism that thrived on the banks of the Moselle before being exported to the Kansas prairie. So I was pretty much left to figure out what faith meant to me, personally, and the whole god-or-gods thing never made much sense. My faith in Santa Claus lasted much longer – at least he provided evidence.
The main religious influences on me in my childhood were the rites and prayers of my still deeply Catholic extended family, which never made any more sense to me than Egyptian or Greek myth, and those stories were way, way cooler. After all, how could the Ten Commandments and the Stations of the Cross compare to a jackel-headed god of the dead, or to the celestial Days of Our Lives playing out among the pantheon of Mount Olympus? Furthermore, the religious beliefs of my classmates, many of whose parents had instilled in them the full-bore Satanic Panic of the late '80s and early '90s, seemed downright creepy, as if El Diablo could be summoned by a game of D&D.
I did my best to respect other faiths – growing up in Middle America, where the vast majority around me were Catholics or Protestants of a predominantly Lutheran flavor, I certainly saw plenty of decent Christians around, even if Christianity writ large seemed remarkably indecent. And of course I knew that despite the Falwells, Netanyahus, and Khomeinis of the world, there were plenty of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who wanted nothing to do with their weaponized bullshit. And those who were informed by their faith to do good works and advocate for a more just and peaceful world.
Which is a big reason why the fedora atheists of the late oughties did nothing for me. Richard Dawkins' evangelism on the subject just seemed like an earnest effort to kill everyone's buzz, Steven Pinker is/was the smuggest man on the planet (and I'll bet he was even smugger on his trips to Epstein's island), Christopher Hitchens was a master rhetorician whose distaste for religion overcame his erstwhile left politics, leading him to Bush and Blair's field of rakes in Iraq, and Sam Harris revealed himself to be very, very, very dumb, whose books – even then – felt like they were written by a smart 8th grader.
Which is to say nothing of any of their army of interlocutors and stans.
A remarkable number of online atheists of the era discovered that they hated feminists just as much as Jesus freaks, and were shockingly willing to get into bed with drooling Christian nationalists, given their shared revulsion at not just Islamist militancy, but ordinary Muslims. Only a handful of the professional le skeptics and le rationalists of the era managed to escape this idiocy, and the few I can think of were all associated with The Young Turks to some degree. This handful – Ana Kasparian and Kyle Kulinski coming immediately to mind – truly had a commitment to the higher virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity (as opposed to just dunking on slackjawed yokels), and this manifested itself in a commitment to democratic socialist politics.
I'd like to think that I've matured concordantly. As I've said a million times before, the oughties were a particularly bovine time. Maybe it's because I was a snotty smartypants teenager at the time, with a more or less universal contempt for mainstream culture, but solidarity seemed like a waste of time when compared to reading Foucault and doing all the drugs. My copout may not have been Dawkins, but it absolutely was Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil saying “if God had chosen to write the Bible in Greek, why did he choose to do it so poorly?” Just as edgelord, but the hipster version. The Pitchfork Festival version as opposed to the Comic-Con version. I was probably a dick – cue cloying reality TV voice – but I just need you to like, respect my jourrrrrrrrrrrrrney.
The wave of course receded. I grew up, and for a time, the Christian right became less of a threat compared with the numerous other stupidities.
Which brings us to now.
So I have to ask. How many adamant new atheists I see cropping up were cognizant humans in the original wave, and how many are simply teenagers? How many fellow oldheads are out there, still somehow immature? How many are still meme'ing on r/atheism like it's 2007?
My stance is the same, assholes gonna asshole, no matter what. I'm sure that dude who stabbed Salman Rushdie would have had no trouble finding some other god than Allah to glom onto.
Because the root of the problem is, I maintain, the authoritarian personality, the personality that commits to a higher figure and will do anything to defend its honor, submissive to those in higher positions but dictatorial towards those in lower positions – whether that is the yahoo with a Don't Tread on Me flag back home, or the sage and peaceful Buddhists who feel at their duty to participate in the genocide of Rohingya next door in Myanmar.
But there is a flipside for religion for me, one I find truly appealing. The idea of faith not as a submission, but as a painful struggle. When I read the mythologies of the world's religion, what appeals to me is the Jewish prophets who screamed at and cursed out God, or the long dark night of the soul of Saint John of the Cross fleeing the Inquisitors. It is the gloomy Paul Tillich, standing in the ruins of his native Germany after the Second World War, pointing out that to ask whether God exists is an absurdity – a question meaningless to God, who is beyond such trite distinctions. The gentle and loving god of the Precious Moments coloring books my grandmother tried to give me as a small child never appealed to me. The idea of an unknowable other, a hope beyond all hopes... well, that I can relate to.
However, what I don't have is faith. All I have is that grand agnostic question mark.
The only thing I know is what I oppose, which is that very same authoritarian attitude, whether it clothes itself in the language of nation or religion or whatever. And I know what the appropriate response to the authoritarian personality is at all times: to raise my middle finger and tell all y'all to suck my motherfucking dick.
