Where did all the most prominent and outspoken atheists go? There was a time there—a window of terribly dull and insipid amusement—when you couldn’t open the internet without being bombarded with a slew of impassioned diatribes from some self-described polemicist, a rational thinker, a man in the middle of a debate with another man about the limitations of their god. By today’s standards, it seems almost quaint, their reveled debates about whether or not the Catholic Church was a force for good or not, or if the tenets of Islam could modernize their way into more of a universal acceptability.
This was, of course, before the real dominance of social media, where instead of having a single or few intellectual heroes you followed religiously, we are now bombarded with an infinity of garish idols, where we can all be wannabes. It was before podcasts, which is the same conclusion. And it was before Donald Trump, who then consumed the entire world. It didn’t matter any more if you thought God was real or not, if you were more of a mild-mannered deist than an utterly fulsome and war-depraved evangelical—the huge orange freak hurling over his saturated diaper with a churlish and profane neanderthal posture was now the god and the sun and the all-consuming black hole around which everything orbited. But even before Trump, the New Atheist movement showed signs of waning.
In November of 2015 The New Republic published the article, “Is the New Atheism Dead?”, citing various Pew polls that gave every indication that religion’s relevancy in this modern world was rapidly fading. “In 2007, Pew found that 16 percent of Americans identified as unaffiliated with any religion. In its latest study, by contrast, 22.8 percent of adults reported they are religiously unaffiliated.” But the article also stated that the need for the New Atheist prophets and polemicists had more or less disappeared, as those who identified as religiously unaffiliated or as nonbelievers also had positive things to say about some prominent religious figures such as Pope Francis, and that the dogmatism of the New Atheists was perhaps off-putting. Because while Americans have been progressively getting more imbecilic and brash, more loud and outspoken as a national horde of cattiness and predation, religious faith is also declining. Certainly our bloodlust hasn’t waned. The sanguine gore of religious belief used to be the obvious culprit, pointing out the enshrined scripture that justified whatever cause for war. Clearly, distancing ourselves from religion hasn’t triggered any noticeable uptick in intellectual prowess. We are abecedarian villains, just rodents of evilness willing to try on anything that gives us the excuse for our accursedness.
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