Something that’s has irked me for some time now is how many people latched onto the Atheist movement as an edgy teen but now look back on it in reverence and not shame. This seems to be a common theme in academia and is prevalent even in communities like this one. The lamentation of the “golden-age” of atheism is peak hubris. Dawkins, Hitchens, and crew were deconstructionists of the critical theory variety. Their lives were consumed by the need to disprove God and religion. However these were the shortsighted desires of pseudo-intellectuals, they accomplished nothing productive, and if anything, opened the door for the screaming children that replaced them. I don’t think Dawkins, in his wildest dreams, ever saw his fall come from his own hubris. The intellectual argument over dismantling religion somehow disproving the existence of a god is what fueled the SJWS and their own brand of hubris in the early 2000’s. BTW Dawkins, this is what happens when you remove the “tumor” of religion, you hack. As you see today, Dawkins was swallowed by the stupidity he helped bring about, the Maximilien Robespierre of the modern era, begging for trannies to not cut off his head.
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It was christianity's fault for producing such people in the first place.
You have to have experienced growing up in a bible thumper family (or seen it happen to friends) to understand just how fucking obnoxious the evangelicals got in the back half of the 20th century.
It was their excesses that created people who were dead set on knocking their joyless, harping parents down a peg by destroying the institution they forced on their kids.
The edgy "i don't believe" phase was nothing new. What was new was how much the evangelical parents hectored their kids to the point where it was no longer a phase that people grew out of, and more of an all-consuming wrath that wanted to see the entire institution burned down for what it did to their childhoods.
You get Christopher Hitchens when Ned Flanders and Sheila Broflovski are ACCURATE stereotypes of religious parents.
This is true. Christians did a shit job of defending their ideology from secularists, to the point where we had to wait for Jordan Fucking Peterson to make any sort of secular defense of Christian principles and their role in creating Western culture.
And this isn't a problem exclusive to Christians either. To the extent they were the dominant culture there was no pressure put upon them to have good arguments for why their principles out be followed and preserved. Much like secular leftists today have no pressure on them to justify their principles.
If you were like me growing up in this world a bit skeptical of all the tradition and ritualism in the church and wondered what its relevance was to modern life, it was very hard to get a satisfactory answer.
Well, MY experience was rather atypical. I grew up ostensibly Quaker, but I was close enough to wishy-washy moderate protestants, batshit crazy evangelicals, and ACTUAL BUGGY RIDING AMISH to understand what all the worlds looked like.
See, for me, there was never any question about the tradition. John Brown drilled his men for the Harpers Ferry raid a couple miles from my house. The honor roll for my hometown's dead for the Civil War is longer than it is for the Great War. I always knew what faith was. Quakers follow Christ's example; if you want to fight for a righteous cause, you don't call yourself Quaker and you go into it knowing that you might not actually be righteous.
The "Bible-thumpers" were a group largely made of parents (most adults were parents back then) that saw the traditions that build a happy community and life for them and saw a subversive culture that was gunning to take that away. They did their best to enforce their culture but failed to safeguard against the anything goes attitude of the Boomers.
The lessons they tried to enforce through dictate are the lessons that Godless/fatherless men are "discovering" today (Clean your room, pull your weight, gatekeep your tribe or subversive elements will destroy it from the inside).
I'd say the problem of the "Bible-thumpers" is that they didn't go far enough in instilling those values. The message was right but their methodology wasn't prepared for what they were facing.
That’s adorable, your first sentence shows that you still have the edgy teen mentality. You know why evangelicals were so strict? Because it has always made more successful people. You know why Jewish and Asian cultures have outpaced “whites”? While our society became indulgent and cried about Ned Flanders, they emulated him. Crying about insufferable evangelicals is what the blacks and Irish did when they wanted to drink all day and be irresponsible, feckless vagrants. So congratulations on being regressive?
But these weren't successful people.
These were white, poor, evangelical nutters who were failures in life and took it out on their kids by making their lives as joyless and shitty as theirs turned out to be.
I do not think you are familiar with the archetype of person I am describing. From what I've seen it's a uniquely midwestern phenomena.