No one is free from criticism. Harmful ideas should be condemned, when they are demonstrably harmful. But theist beliefs are such a vast range and diversity of ideas, some harmful, some useful, some healing, some vivifying, and still others having served as potent drivers of movements for justice; that to lump all theist religious belief into one category and attack the whole of it, only demonstrates your ignorance of theology, and is in fact bigotry.
By saying that religious and superstitious beliefs should be disrespected, or otherwise belittling, or stigmatizing religion and supernatural beliefs as a whole, you have already established the first level on the “Pyramid of Hate”, as well as the first of the “10 Stages of Genocide.”
If your religion is atheism, that’s perfectly valid. If someone is doing something harmful with a religious belief as justification, that specific belief should be challenged. But if you’re crossing the line into bigotry, you’re as bad as the very people you’re condemning.
Antitheism is a form of supremacy in and of itself.
"In other words, it is quite clear from the writings of the “four horsemen” that “new atheism” has little to do with atheism or any serious intellectual examination of the belief in God and everything to do with hatred and power.
Indeed, “new atheism” is the ideological foregrounding of liberal imperialism whose fanatical secularism extends the racist logic of white supremacy. It purports to be areligious, but it is not. It is, in fact, the twin brother of the rabid Christian conservatism which currently feeds the Trump administration’s destructive policies at home and abroad – minus all the biblical references."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/5/4/the-resurrection-of-new-atheism/
No, that’s not what I said, nor is it really implied by anything I said.
The original comment said: “Atheism isn’t a religion. It’s the lack of a religion.”
My reply was: “If you distinguish between agnosticism and atheism then this is false. If you’re an atheist in the sense of effectively replacing religious ideology/beliefs with scientific ones, then this is also more or less false.”
For the second point: This has nothing to do with worship. This is about religious beliefs. For example, believing that the universe came into being by some mysterious god in the sky is a religious belief. Believing there is a man in Montana who willed all of us into existence is a religious belief. Believing some force of nature that we can analyze scientifically is also a religious belief. There’s no worship required for this and I am not claiming atheists worship science or scientific beliefs. My actual point here is that atheists can and do often have religious beliefs, whether they actually realize it and are willing to admit it or not.
For my first point: There’s no implication of worshiping scientific beliefs here either. My point is that agnosticism and atheism are two different things. One explicitly does not commit to a set of religious beliefs, one explicitly denies the existence of deities. These are not the same thing and claiming atheism is simply the lack of religion is at best an oversimplification and at worst stupidly wrong.
Ok fine, science is not a religious belief. Better?
I’m not intending to claim science is a religious belief. Did you read what I said? I don’t think this is the gotcha against my actual point that you think it is.
If you have a better term for the types of beliefs I’m talking about feel free to let me know and we can use that instead. Better?