#christian antitheism

[servitum-amoris]

I FIGURED OUT THE DISCOURSE GUYS!

Cultural christianity, Christian atheism / antitheism etc. were originally terms to describe a (mostly hypothetical) state enforcement to rid the society of any form of religion or spiritual practice, making it, ironically, a theocracy.

But then the term started to broaden into "People raised Christian who are anti religion." Then to "Any atheist who was raised Christian" to "Any non Christian who lives in a Christian hegemony." To finally "If you ever went to a Christmas party without bursting into flames."

By the time it got to where laypeople were hearing about this discourse, it was already in the aforementioned late stages, so you get people genuinely trying to heal from religious trauma being told that they'll never truly leave the Church because they got Sundays off at their job.

[its-terf-or-nothin]

[womenaremypriority]

i truly can’t think of anything more evil than convincing children they’re going to hell and suffer eternal torture because of their natural attraction to other girls or other boys. every time I think of what religion has unleashed on this world I get unforgivably angry

[creature-wizard]

Something I noticed that also drives me insane is that a lot of anti-theists when they say religion what they really mean is christianity. Maybe islam if they remember it exists. And even when they say christianity, they mean fundamentalism/evangelical christianity. Why is this? My theory is that anti theists come from fundamentalist backgrounds.

Not all anti-theists, but the specific ones you're talking about? That's exactly where they come from. Many words have been written criticizing how their atheism looks remarkably like the Christianity they left - they've swapped out "gotta get everybody to turn from their worldly ways and convert everybody to Christianity!" for "gotta get everybody to abandon religion and become Rational Atheists���!"

[jessicalprice]

One of the weird anomalous things about Christianity that explains the behavior of both Christians and Christian antitheists is that Christianity requires an Other.

That’s not a given for most cultures.

[nebby-the-protogen]

how come when god tells you to do a good thing it's "what -insert religion here- is actually about" but if he tells you to do a bad thing it's just "cherry picking untrue-scotsman fundamentalist bad apples misinterpreting -insert scripture here-"

and don't get me started on "they're just using god as an excuse to be evil for no reason", it goes both ways, the desires of men become the desires of god and the desires of god become the desires of men, some are inspired to say god tells them what they want, some want things because someone else said god wanted it.

and i hear this exact same "it's not real -insert religion here-" spiel from basically every old-atheist, even moreso than theists

[becomealamp]

edit with clarification: by religion, i meant large scale, organized religion, especially abrahamic ones. my bad for not specifying.

It needs to be discussed how being raised religious doesn’t just affect what you think, but how you think, and how it is used as tool to keep people subservient to both the government itself and the capitalist system. It is undeniable that all religious beliefs have no factual evidence, and many are simply illogical and contradictory. All facts and logic point to religion being nothing more than fairy tales. However, people are conditioned into believing them, simply because it’s “how it is”. Questioning them, analyzing them, or anything of that sort is not just discouraged, it’s blaspheous. God is real because he merely is. That is the way things are. This type of rhetoric encourages a cognitive phenomenon nown as “instinctual thinking”, where rather than approaching situations with an analytical perspective, one falls behind on the things that they think are true, the things they think are true because that’s what they’ve always been told. Don’t question, don’t analyze, don’t think, merely fall back on the words that the people you think you can trust conditioned you into believing with unwavering certainty. Why can you trust these people? Why can you trust the preachers? Because they are authority. They were given a title with the fine print of having the answers for everything. To question the would be overstepping your place in the world. 

This manner of thinking is hammered into religious children, and it bleeds beyond the constraints of religion and spirituality. It becomes the way they approach the world. Authority must be right. Do not approach their doctrines with any analysis or critique, but rather undying loyalty. Their position makes them undoubtedly truthful, undoubtedly right, so there is simply no need to question, no? 

And what’s the ultimate authority? Well, the government, of course. Undying devotion to those in positions of power merely because of their stature ensures compliance. It’s no coincidence that the American Christian community is the most patriotic community in the country. 

The government becomes their new god. The law is their bible. What’s illegal is morally and ethically wrong. It becomes sin, and to break the law is to defy not just the country, but god himself. 

Instinctual thinking upholds capitalism. A cornerstone of capitalist ideology is personal responsibility. If you are poor, you aren’t working hard enough. If you are rich, you must have become so because of your character, not your daddy’s trust fund. Circumstances, context, all manners of oppression that can keep people in the slums no mater how callused their hands may be are irrelevant and ignored. This is a polished mirror of religion. Your fate, whether you end up cradled by god in the light of heaven or burned att he stake of hell is your choice. Sin is undoubtedly and indiscriminately wrong, no matter the reasons why you did so. Steal? You are going to hell, even if your thievery was merely to bring bread to your famished children. This overwhelming sense of individualism an personal responsibility upholds capitalism and snuffs out the concerns of the working class through ridicule and shame. It’s your fault that you sin. It’s your fault that you are poor. 

Remember how god is real because he simply is? Remember how the bible is true because that’s simply how things are? Well, of course that thought pattern translates to class. You struggle to pay your rent? You can’t afford food? You cannot object. You cannot direct the blame to the oppressors stealing the capital you earn through your grueling labour. Because that’s how things are. That’s merely how the world works. You work ‘til you die, but no need to complain. Hold back your tears as you slave your days away. Because that’s just life, ain’t it? It’s how things are. 

A clear mind can see he atrocities of the world. A clear mind can spot the forked, lying tongue of politicians. A clear mind can unerstand that things don’t have to be like this. And that threatens those above. An analytical mind is a ticking time bomb, ready to explode and expose the carefully constructed lies that uphold their power. They must nip it in the bud to ensure their thrones remain in tact. So they build churches and mosques and temples to make the children perfectly shaped to never question, never critique, just coast through life and suffering without complaint. 

[genderkoolaid]

the joy of living w my conservative libertarian father is him trying to argue with me about how religion is totally a universal concept in all cultures and me, someone who is dedicating my life to the study of religion, trying and failing to get him to understand the extremely basic idea that we made up "religion" and its only intuitive in Western society. because ofc if he Feels like its universal then it is right

[comradewisdom]

I don't mind if they go but I don't want them taking me with them—rapture yourself.

Christopher Hitchens

[servitum-amoris]

I think what's going on with cultural christianity meta discourse is there are people 20 and younger who don't know about the term "New Atheism" when that's what they want to criticize. Instead of knowing about the philosophy of new atheism (which I'm not blaming you for being too young to remember all that) they think every Christian turned atheist acts like a new atheist, when, n o .

Not every ex Christian are like that. I promise.

Christian atheism and Christian antitheism are oxymorons and not every secularist is an evangelical of secularism.

[its-terf-or-nothin]

[oceanicmarxist]

"Why Communism and Religion are incompatible"

Religion is the opium of the people,' said Karl Marx. It is the task of the Communist Party to make this truth comprehensible to the widest possible circles of the labouring masses. It is the task of the party to impress firmly upon the minds of the workers, even upon the most backward, that religion has been in the past and still is today one of the most powerful means at the disposal of the oppressors for the maintenance of inequality, exploitation, and slavish obedience on the part of the toilers.

Many weak-kneed communists reason as follows: 'Religion does not prevent my being a communist. I believe both in God and in communism. My faith in God does not hinder me from fighting for the cause of the proletarian revolution.'

This train of thought is radically false. Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically.

Every communist must regard social phenomena (the relationships between human beings, revolutions, wars, etc.) as processes which occur in accordance with definite laws. The laws of social development have been fully established by scientific communism on the basis of the theory of historical materialism which we owe to our great teachers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This theory explains that social development is not brought about by any kind of supernatural forces. Nay more. The same theory has demonstrated that the very idea of God and of supernatural powers arises at a definite stage in human history, and at another definite stage begins to disappear as a childish notion which finds no confirmation in practical life and in the struggle between man and nature. But it is profitable to the predatory class to maintain the ignorance of the people and to maintain the people's childish belief in miracles (the key to the riddle really lies in the exploiters' pockets), and this is why religious prejudices are so tenacious, and why they confuse the minds even of persons who are in other respects able.

The general happenings throughout nature are, moreover, in no wise dependent upon supernatural causes. Man has been extremely successful in the struggle with nature. He influences nature in his own interests, and controls natural forces, achieving these conquests, not thanks to his faith in God and in divine assistance, but in spite of this faith. He achieves his conquests thanks to the fact that in practical life and in all serious matters he invariably conducts himself as an atheist. Scientific communism, in its judgements concerning natural phenomena, is guided by the data of the natural sciences, which are in irreconcilable conflict with all religious imaginings.

In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith. The tactic of the Communist Party prescribes for the members of the party definite lines of conduct. The moral code of every religion in like manner prescribes for the faithful some definite line of conduct. For example, the Christian code runs: 'Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' In most cases there is an irreconcilable conflict between the principles of communist tactics and the commandments of religion. A communist who rejects the commandments of religion and acts in accordance with the directions of the party, ceases to be one of the faithful. On the other hand, one who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party, ceases thereby to be a communist.

The struggle with religion has two sides, and every communist must distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have the struggle with the church, as a special organization existing for religious propaganda, materially interested in the maintenance of popular ignorance and religious enslavement. On the other hand we have the struggle with the widely diffused and deeply ingrained prejudices of the majority of the working population.

N. Bukharin & E. Preobrazhenky, ABC of Communism, Chapter 11: Communism and Religion

[optimisticcannibalism]

Seeing queers desperately cling to a bullshit religion invented to enslave uterus havers as sex slaves makes me sad. Though it does inspire me to finally get going on my anti theist fantasy series about how organized religions exist to give men power and take your money.

[nebby-the-protogen]

The doctrine of hell is not only a harmful self-destructive idea, but it's just comical, absolutley silly, it sounds like something out of a Terry Pratchett book, like really i cannot stress how funny the idea is.

a dark pit of gloom and sadness where it's always raining fire and it's physically impossible to feel positive emotions and you just CAN'T leave, ever? sounds like the ending of a poorly written video game creepypasta

[antifascistqueer]

Day 10938389283747472882747271559394 of anti-theists being the most obnoxious, ill-informed, whiny, authoritarians masquerading as progressives.

[book-of-forbidden-knowledge]

This is still one of my favorite things I've read on Tumblr.

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it’s plug-and-play: you don’t have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don’t have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian–to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is… everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that’s taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We’re going to come back to how Christianity isn’t actually modular, but for the moment, let’s talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don’t have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that’s modular. It’s deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can’t just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture’s indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of “religion” full stop, it’s actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn’t actually succeeded in that–the US is a thoroughly Christian culture–but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are “religious” versus which are “secular”. That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can’t separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label “religious.” But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn’t one or the other, or neither, or both. It’s that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn’t actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It’s easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures’ colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place–the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic–and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It’s more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn’t come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn’t just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized–they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It’s the “natural order” to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you’re basically telling the person you’re proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of “that’s how everyone is, though.”

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to “fix” them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it’s definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It’s all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It’s all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they’ve accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn’t something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as “religious” and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as “neutral” or “normal” actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they’d look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN’T neutral. So the idea that that’s what “secular society” should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, “enlightened” life that most Christian atheists envision is one that’s still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don’t see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It’s obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn’t truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they’re not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it’s actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it’s invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it’s definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It’s basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from “primitive” animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that’s the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is “normal” religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren’t white and European-derived, the tacit demand is “okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem ‘religious.’”

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren’t to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity–a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture–to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just …swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s… not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism–it’s fine to just… be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence.