• davel [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 month ago

      He was (is?) one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism. With the possible exception of Dennet (because I don’t know him), these guys used New Atheism as a platform for racist ideology to manufacture consent for the War on Terror in West Asia.

      This is a bit of a tangent, but I think these videos by philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller are salient to materialist vs idealist philosophy:

      • supersolid_snake@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 month ago

        Oh thanks, I will go through these. Yeah MRIs were the new brain calipers. These frauds, and people like bill Maher that gave them prominence were just trying to find an acceptable avenue for their genocidal racism. And liberals ate it up. People think that people all of sudden hated jews because of a few Hitler speeches, but the groundwork for the holocaust was laid down by people like Harris, Maher, etc.

        • davel [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 month ago

          As a lifelong atheist, the New Atheist movement was profoundly disappointing—disgusting even—to me. It was almost exclusively angry, racist, misogynist techbros.

          • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 month ago

            It’s frustrating for sure. Prominent western atheists seem to suffer from much the same problems as other western “thinkers” who don’t have any political education in liberation, in that they tunnel vision on a narrow lens (in this case, atheism) and think they’re deriving everything from it, when they’re really just doing imperialism, colonization, racism, etc., “with atheist characteristics.” And they don’t see it because the other parts are so normal to them and they’re so unaware of any alternative that it simply doesn’t occur to them their thinking is 90% the propaganda they are immersed in and only 10% atheism (to put it roughly, I’m not saying the percentages are exact). This is not to give them an out though, some of them probably are at least partly aware and are grifters and ghouls in their own right, but I don’t get the impression they are all aware enough to be malicious; I think some of them are just really overly focused on atheism as a lens in itself.

            I know one of the main takeaways I had in becoming more politically educated, was realizing that I need to make a distinction on colonizer religion vs. the religion of the colonized. That I’ve been almost exclusively exposed to colonizer religion and although it’s likely nothing would change whether I believe in a god or gods at this point, I don’t need to have any opinions about any particular religion I don’t understand, especially among peoples who are being vilified by empire. And I am consciously more open-minded to the religions of colonized peoples, knowing I’m going to be dealing with a lot of lies to get through to the heart of how they are actually practiced and by who, and what factions and sects they have now or historically.