#New Atheism

[animeandcatholicism]

"Atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism, burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found in the great deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ…"

~Fr. Seraphim Rose

[third-nature]

Thanks anarchospirituality, for condensing my 2012 new atheist thoughts about God and my 2024 dionysian-panentheistic thoughts about God into an easy-to-digest doge meme with silly little guys in it

[hyperions-fate]

Along with serving as ideological cover for the War on Terror, what made New Atheism pathetic was that it used shallow criticism of the few straggling remnants of organised religion in order to distract from and legitimise post-industrial society's new priesthood of advertising executives, Silicon Valley tech barons, and neoliberal thinktank cretins. Theirs is the real cultural despotism of our times, and a modern Jean Meslier or Spinoza would identify them as the clerics to be hanged.

[liskantope]

I've mentioned a bunch of times in this space that I used to be really into lucid dreaming as an early teenager (peaking when I was 13-to-14) and was pretty good at it too; then I gradually lost something (interest? or opportune circumstances/lifestyle?) and had mostly stopped doing it by the time I became an adult, and I often wish I could get back what I lost.

I was rereading a bit of one of my old lucid dreaming books (the copy of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge, which I got when I was 14) and it was describing the DreamLight mask (cutting-edge technology of ~1990 to detect REM sleep and flash lights that will stimulate the user to realize they're dreaming) and began to remember how I'd always been curious about these devices, and also about lucid dreaming retreats in (I think) Hawaii that I knew of at the time, and other things which I couldn't imagine having the money to buy. And now that I do have enough money that I could at least consider buying a new toy like one of these DreamLight-like devices and surely technology will have improved since 25-30 years ago, I wondered if I could find a place that was still selling stuff like that. And of course, I found out that the DreamLight and the NovaDreamer and most other such products have been off the market for many years. Somehow I'm not shocked by this at all.

I can't say that there has ever been any kind of widespread interest in lucid dreaming as a cultural phenomenon at any point in history, but I can't help feeling that there somehow was stronger collective interest in it between 20 and 30 years ago than there ever has been since. A good bit of my vivid recollections of the first-half-of-the-00's internet comes from memories of lurking on a lucid dreaming forum that was connected to the Lucidity Institute -- some years later, the Lucidity Institute lost funding and was shut down. I don't think they're doing those retreats anymore either. Stephen LaBerge (the foremost founding scientific expert on lucid dreaming) is still alive AFAIK but well past retirement age now and maybe no longer active. I don't know of a place where many people talk about it (okay, I checked and there is an active Reddit page which doesn't look to be great quality so far, but as far as I know there is no Lucid Dreaming Tumblr). The topic of lucid dreaming has just fallen long past its peak in our collective pool of cultural interests. There is no "market" for it any more, either in the literal sense of production of lucid dream -stimulating technology or funding for scientific research or in a more metaphorical sense.

The funny thing about it is that this parallels pretty well my own intense interest and engagement with lucid dreaming: peaking around 2000-2002 and then diminishing gradually until it had reached near-oblivion by the end of the '00's and then I haven't quite been able to revive it since. (Of course it's not a precise parallel: I imagine there was a lot of collective activity around the 80's and 90's, which is for instance when LaBerge's seminal books on it came out and the Lucidity Institute was at the height of its powers. But that was pretty much before my time.)

It makes me think of my own personal interest in atheism and related topics, which peaked only slightly after my interest in lucid dreaming (2003-2006-ish) before lagging slightly and then dropping sharply in the early 2010's. (One of my other main sources of memories of the first-half-of-the-'00's internet, even more vivid, is of hanging around atheism-related forums!) And this almost precisely lines up with the New Atheism movement and prevalence of atheism as part of the culture wars (I consider this era to have begun around 2003 and ended definitively in 2011). Now obviously this isn't a coincidence: the fact that everyone was arguing about atheism a lot circa 2005 clearly contributed to my continuing to think about it a lot. But it still feels like kind of an individualistic personal journey for me: my mid-teenage self was ripe for sinking my teeth into this particular kind of social and philosophical question, getting really indignant about it, eventually finding hours to discuss it with semi-strangers as a college campus (an environment very conducive for that!), then eventually feel like I was "growing out of it", had burned myself out mulling and discoursing over something that was never quite going to be resolved across large groups of people (I do feel like my side -- the pro-secular side -- by and large won those culture wars though), and... meh. That arguably sort of is what happened on the broad society-wide scale, in fact: a bunch of people got obsessed by atheism and then kind of collectively "grew out of it", but it feels like something that could only happen to me at those particular ages which makes it feel like a significant coincidence that the particular ages coincided with society's arc here.

[erebusvincent]

Isn’t Christianity better than wokeism? Don’t we need shared systems of belief to have community and meaning? Isn’t it clear that atheism has failed? Hasn’t atheism, in fact, brought about wokeism?

These are the questions that are repeatedly being asked of anti-woke atheists. Underlying them is the Substitution Hypothesis of Wokeism. This holds that people need a religious structure to bring them community, purpose and meaning, and, as religion declines, they seize onto another quasi-religious structure to take its place, and this is wokeism. As we (anti-woke atheists) clearly see that wokeism is terrible for society, can we not admit that Christianity was better and consider going back to it?

Absolutely not, no.

The Substitution Hypothesis is coming overwhelmingly from the United States, but if the decline of religion really did bring about wokeism, the last place we would expect it to arise is the United States. The US has degrees of religiosity much closer to that of Iran than the rest of the Anglosphere. When a country has the highest level of religiosity of all the wealthy countries and the highest degree of wokeism, we can be pretty confident that the cause of wokeism it is not the decline of religion.

It makes little sense for American anti-wokeists to perceive the choices before us all as Christianity or wokeism when it is quite clear that the US has astoundingly high degrees of both. It makes even less sense to blame atheism for wokeism when the US has so little of it and the countries that are predominantly atheist don’t have the same problem with wokeism.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Matt Johnson

Published: Jul 24, 2023

Remember “New Atheism”? In the mid-to-late aughts, public debates over religion suddenly expanded in scope and intensity. University auditoria, theaters, and even churches drew capacity crowds for public discussions about the existence of god and whether or not religion is a positive force in the world. Humanist and secular groups proliferated, particularly on campus and online, and a series of blockbuster books by authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens sold millions of copies worldwide, catapulting atheism into the mainstream. In their turn, these books inspired a constellation of other writers and intellectuals who believed that an explicit attack on religion was long overdue.

One of those writers was Konstantin Kisin. In a recent Substack article, Kisin explains that he was drawn to the New Atheists for their ability to “re-articulate the importance of Enlightenment values of truth, science and liberty from religious dogma.” He describes them as “daring, counter-cultural figures who could use their erudition, wit and refreshing honesty to effortlessly take apart the tired old arguments for a religious worldview” He says they were “smart, charismatic and, above all, they were cool.” He adds:

The new atheists were exciting because they were saying something new, challenging the dogma of their day and speaking truth to power. Not content with proving that religion wasn’t true, they ventured further in attempting to prove religion was, at best, unnecessary and, more likely, harmful. To this end, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion in 2006, with Hitchens delivering God is Not Great the following year. The argument was no longer about encouraging religious people to calm down and leave the rest of us alone, it was increasingly that religion was inherently wrong and bad. It was around this point that I began to lose my faith in atheism.

So, after praising the New Atheists for the courage and honesty with which they confronted religion, Kisin declares that this combative approach was, in fact, the source of his disillusion. It’s a strangely uneven passage. Kisin acknowledges that the appeal of the New Atheists—what made them “daring, counter-cultural figures”—was their willingness to deconstruct “tired old arguments for a religious worldview” and fight for “liberty from religious dogma.” He’s probably right about this—it was difficult to be a fan of the New Atheists without seeing some value in their claim that religion is “inherently wrong and bad.” They aggressively violated social taboos that protected religion from forceful criticism. They described religion as a powerful engine of irrationality, a source of tribalism, hatred, and conflict, and a generally noxious force that (in Hitchens’s words) should be relegated to the “bawling and fearful infancy of our species.”

If Kisin didn’t like this sort of rhetoric, it’s difficult to see what he admired about New Atheism in the first place. As he explains his reasons for rejecting New Atheism—he now describes himself as a “lapsed atheist”—his rationale becomes even more opaque:

First, it was clear to me that to attempt to challenge Islamic extremism with facts and logic as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris had done was to fail on purpose. Despite their efforts, most of the Western world today operates under de facto blasphemy laws which are enforced not by religious activists lobbying for censorship but by knife-wielding fanatics and suicide bombers.

It’s bizarre to criticize the New Atheists—and Harris and Hitchens in particular—for the existence of “de facto blasphemy laws” in the West, as it would be difficult to find two figures who were more vociferously opposed to self-censorship and liberal capitulation in the face of Islamic extremism in the 21st Century. And surely the New Atheists’ use of “facts and logic” to resist theocratic encroachments on civil society shouldn’t be a point against them. Given Kisin’s position on the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, shouldn’t he be a little more tolerant of the New Atheists’ unsparing criticism of religious violence and extremism? Instead, he writes:

The liberalism that the new atheists so enthusiastically espoused, the idea that we should be free to criticise, mock and satirise anything, including religion, only works when the Government is willing to protect you from the consequences. In seeking to liberate us from the tyrannical instincts of dogmatic Christians, the new atheists delivered us into the hands of a different and far more pernicious religious zealotry from which the ordinary citizen has no security at all.

Of course free expression in liberal societies is ultimately dependent upon legal and physical protections from the state. When homicidal theocrats bearing automatic weapons show up at the offices of Charlie Hebdo or an acolyte of Ayatollah Khomeini jumps onstage and repeatedly plunges a knife into Salman Rushdie, the confrontation with religious violence is no longer a matter of ideas, it’s a matter of law enforcement. Kisin’s argumnt recalls the line taken by British reactionaries who complained about the taxpayer-funded protection that Rushdie received after Khomeini first issued his fatwa in 1989—a cringing complaint Kisin understands well, as he has criticized it before. Kisin’s second sentence implies that the New Atheists’ attacks on Christianity somehow increased the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, but as noted, New Atheists like Hitchens and Harris were every bit as critical of Islam, if not more so.

The title of Kisin’s article is “The Atheism Delusion.” He now regards religion as “useful and inevitable.” The argument that religion is inevitable is one the New Atheists have always taken seriously: Hitchens described religion as “ineradicable”; Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell examined the ways in which religion evolves and survives over time; a central part of Harris’s career is channeling the religious impulse into secular forms of introspection and mindfulness; and Dawkins acknowledges that religion may reflect a deep psychological need among many people. Where the New Atheists part company with Kisin is over his argument that religion is useful—particularly in the third decade of the 21st Century.

The religious impulse may be ineradicable, but that doesn’t mean the level of overall religious commitment in society is stable. When Harris published The End of Faith in 2004 (the first of the major New Atheist books), membership in religious institutions among American adults was around two-thirds—a proportion that had collapsed to 47 percent by 2020. This means that the percentage of American adults who said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque fell below a majority “for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend” a few years ago.

Recent Pew surveys reflect this trend: since 2007, the proportion of Americans who identify with Christianity has fallen from 78 percent to 63 percent, while those who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” surged from 16 percent to 29 percent. The share of Americans who say they “seldom or never” pray has jumped from 18 percent to 32 percent, along with a corresponding decrease (58 percent to 45 percent) in the number who pray daily. While 16 percent of Americans said religion was not at all or not too important in their lives in 2007, one-third now say so. Meanwhile, the proportion who describe religion as “very important” is down from 56 percent to 41 percent over the same period.

There has been a similar phenomenon of secularization in Western Europe. Although the majority of Western Europeans identify as Christians, the prevalence of this identification varies greatly—from 80 percent in Italy to 41 percent in the Netherlands. Across the region, there have been significant declines in the populations who say they remain Christian after being raised Christian: 83 percent to 55 percent in Belgium, 79 percent to 51 percent in Norway, 92 percent to 66 percent in Spain, and large decreases in a dozen other countries. At the same time, the proportion of Western Europeans who are now religiously unaffiliated shot up: just 15 percent of Norweigians say they were raised unaffiliated, but the proportion who are unaffiliated now has risen to 43 percent. In the Netherlands, the increase was 22 percent to 48 percent; in Belgium, 12 percent to 38 percent; in Spain, five percent to 30 percent.

As traditional religion declines in the West, it has become increasingly fashionable to argue that new secular religions are taking its place: hyper-tribal and increasingly intolerant political factions; conspiracy cults like QAnon; the “transhumanism” movement (which looks forward to a day when technology will help us live forever); environmental movements that warn of apocalyptic consequences if their counsel isn’t heeded; and social justice activists who decry the original sins of racism and other forms of bigotry.

According to Kisin, the “absence of old religion seems to produce only a vacuum into which a new religion rushes in.” Kisin believes “old religion” is a bulwark against what he describes as the “woke warriors who think every problem in society is caused by an ‘ism.’” He argues that wokeness is a “new religion [that] has just as little regard for the truth as the old ones. That’s why Richard Dawkins who spent his best years arguing with creationists is now increasingly forced to explain basic biological concepts like the inability to change your sex by incantation on national television.”

Yet again, Kisin has picked a strange fight with the New Atheists. As he notes, Dawkins is decidedly anti-woke—he’s often critical of the language used by trans activists (which downplays the biological reality of sex differences), he argues that there’s no such thing as “Western” science (which is often presented as somehow racist or neo-colonial), and so on. Meanwhile, Harris is concerned about what he regards as the “woke capture” of major institutions, and Hitchens warned readers of his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian that they should “have nothing to do with identity politics.”

By undermining traditional religion, Kisin believes the New Atheists opened the door to the emergence of new progressive dogmas. This idea is increasingly pervasive: “The rise of this new religion,” writes Toby Young in a recent essay for the Catholic Herald, “has coincided with the decline of Christian worship in the English-speaking world … which suggests it’s filling a ‘God-shaped hole.’” In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, Douglas Murray argues that the collapse of “grand narratives” once provided by religion has driven efforts to “embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.” Books like John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos make similar claims.

It’s true that contemporary progressivism has acquired certain religious characteristics: zealous adherents, rituals of excommunication, a concept of original sin (in the form of racism or other types of bigotry), and ways to atone for that sin (such as taking the knee). But the same could be said of many social and political movements throughout history. Godless communism, for example, has often been described by former adherents as a religious phenomenon—a 1949 collection of anti-communist essays by André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and Louis Fischer was titled The God That Failed. It isn’t easy to adjudicate what constitutes a secular religion.

The notion that we abandoned our old faiths and replaced them with the new alternatives is too tidy and simplistic. For one thing, the process of secularization has been gaining momentum for decades, long before the “Great Awokening.” For another, unlike the Pew researchers who ask respondents how their religious views have evolved over time, the critics of progressive dogma don’t provide much evidence for their claims about the ways in which religion is supposed to have been supplanted by this new faith. Isn’t it possible that many religious people identify with elements of progressivism? Black Americans are disproportionately religious and far more likely than their fellow citizens to support the Black Lives Matter movement (81 percent versus a national average of 51 percent). However, they’re less progressive when it comes to issues such as gay rights—black Protestants are considerably less likely than their white counterparts to support gay marriage. Young even admits that wokeness has “made converts within the established Churches, particularly the Church of England.”

Kisin, Murray, Peterson, and other figures who decry the religious aspects of contemporary progressivism are making an implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim: that the restoration of traditional faith would keep other forms of ideological commitment in check. But there’s a long history of Christian compatibility with a vast range of social and political movements—some good, some bad.

Many Nazis were Christians, and there were strong links between Catholicism and fascism in Europe during World War II. But some priests and other religious leaders resisted the Nazis, while the Western countries that fought fascism were predominantly Christian. In the early United States, Christianity was used to justify slavery. But John Brown’s Christian faith led him to wage war on slavery, and many early abolitionists (such as William Wilberforce) were evangelical Christians. During the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and other leading figures in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference invoked Christianity to oppose racism and advocate for freedom and equality. But secularists like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph were instrumental in this movement as well.

European powers rationalized their imperialist domination of countries in Africa and Asia with the belief that they were bringing Christian civilization to the world. The United States did the same in the Western hemisphere with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Yet many theologians in Latin America developed liberation theology in opposition to colonialism, racism, and other forms of oppression. Christianity is embraced by conservatives and libertarians who believe the Bible teaches thrift and personal responsibility. But it’s also embraced by progressives who think the central message of equality in the eyes of god is an argument for redistributive policies and greater support for the poor. The abandonment of religion isn’t a prerequisite for fervent commitment to any political cause or movement—including “wokeism.”

No matter how exhaustively the word “religion” is redefined, there’s plenty of evidence that secularization has taken place across the Western world. But there’s far less evidence for the opportunistic claim that this shift is responsible for the emergence of another socio-political movement. Those who say otherwise may have a “god-shaped hole” in their own lives, but they shouldn’t assume that everyone else suffers from the same affliction. More and more commentators are attempting to resuscitate religion under the guise of anti-woke politics, but they’re just exchanging one dogma for another.

[ Via: https://archive.is/PAij8 ]

==

The solution to the problems caused by one religion is not another religion.

[jasonpjimenez]

The Downward Spiral of New Atheism

Atheism has seen steady growth, particularly in the West, with influential figures such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris shaping public opinion towards naturalism. However, there are signs of change on the horizon. People from diverse backgrounds are rediscovering spirituality and faith, with a resurgence of belief in God. Justin Brierley and I discuss the compelling details surrounding this revival of faith. 

[quasitsqueeries]

Kill your Primarchs

When I first heard about this I thought it was a terrible idea. I still do, but I’ve decided to have more complicated feelings about it.

Let’s talk about the idea of heroes, and Rationalism, and maybe New Atheism a bit.

So my gripe with this is to do with what the primarchs represent in Warhammer 40,000. Specifically in the 41st Milennium that is, I’m not talking about the Horus Heresy. I think this image here is an important casting off point to discussing it:

It’s got two heads but only one eye. The head facing to the right, the future, is blinded. The Aquila, and by extension the Imperium, can only look to the past. The Imperium’s whole schtick is that it’s a crumbling beaureaucratic organisation, mired in the past. Everything about the Imperium, from the beatification of genetically enhanced super-soldiers, to the religious observance of what are basically procedural documents in order to keep technology running, is geared towards the glorification of a near-forgotten and mythical past.

Before GW started resurrecting Primarchs, they and the Emperor held the status of ancient Heroes in that mythical past. The early descriptions of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy in the original Rogue Trader rulebook are really vague, as befits something that’s supposed to have happened ten thousand years before the current setting. It’s an age of myth, its heroes are long gone. This is what the great hero of the Imperium looks like in the 41st Milennium, according to the 1st edition rulebook:

I’m sorry but that’s a corpse.

Maybe you think the Traitor Legions are lying when they call him the Corpse Emperor but I really think the subtext in early Warhammer 40,000 is that the Imperium has managed to hold on to the corpses of some of their ancient heroes and interred them in machines that require an enormous investment of resources (a thousand psykers’ souls a day in the Emperor’s case) to run, in a futile exercise to cling on to the glories of the past. It’s true of the Emperor’s Golden Throne, it’s true of Roboute Guilliman’s stasis machine, and it’s true of the rumours that Lion El’ Jonson was lying somewhere under Caliban convalescing for all that time.

It’s felt like there’s been a drive among 40K fans and Games Workshop themselves to move Space Marines away from the hidebound traditionalism of the Imperium and make them more ‘genuinely’ heroic.The problem is that it’s exactly this heroism that ties them into the Imperium’s traditions. Space Marines are important to the Imperium in the same way Siegfired and other figures from Germanic myths (and Wagner’s operas) were important to the Nazis. Fascist ideology venerates heroic warrior figures to engender a culture that is comfortable with war.

When the Warhammer 40,000 lore didn’t make it clear whether these heroes of the Imperium’s past were dead or alive, but carried the subtext that they were dead, and the Imperium was wasting an enormous amount of resources on keeping them in a sort of un-life, it expressed the futility of this kind of hero-worship. If you start bringing them back, you communicate the idea that it wasn’t futile, and maybe that it was worth slaughtering all those psykers, and maybe that we should revere these bio-engineered sort-of-people as heroes.

And like, no. This is the image that’s always expressed the essence of *Space Marines* to me.

But then I started reading about Roboute Guilliman and apparently he’s the most logical, the most rational of the Primarchs, and I get the sense that in a lot of people’s minds this means he’s the most equipped to save the Imperium, whether from itself or everything outside it is unclear. But I think it’s interesting that according to this new lore he’s supposed to have woken up, seen what the Imperium’s become, and been totally apalled by it. Not by the genocide, of course, but by the fact that they’ve turned the Emperor into a god and the Primarchs into his angels. So he went and had a *conversation* with the Emperor, then turned around and started the genocide all over again, with a whole new crusade.

I’m going to talk about the 11th of September 2001 now, because it’s had consequences we’re only now starting to realise, and I think it definitely had consequences for Warhammer 40,000.

So, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and other reprobates had been doing the rounds before 2001, but their movement really found its feet in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Much of the Anglosphere and the West in general constructed an ideological divide between us and the Islamic world, where the West was civilised, rational and free, while the East was mired in superstition, religiosity and authoritarianism. In this context, a movement that characterised all religion as barbaric and anti-intellectual found itself in very fertile ground. For many people in the West, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could be dismissed not as retalliation for Western Imperialism, but as the deluded actions of religious fanatics. Rationalism and superstition were set up as ideological opponents, and rationalism was assumed to stand up for other values like liberty, intellectual freedom and human rights.

Horus Rising, the first of the Horus Heresy series, was released in 2006, the same year as Dawkins’ The God Delusion and the year before Hitchens’ God is not Great. Not much had been written about the Great Crusade or the Horus Heresy before this, and the idea that the Crusade had been an attempt by the Emperor to spread the light of reason into the galaxy first appeared in the lore at this point. In hindsight it’s pretty hard not to see this as a response to the post September 11 environment.

So, where the Space Marines of 1st editionhad been a bunch of psychopaths given genetic engineering and combat drugs, by 2006 you had the idea that their original function had been a sort of idealistic rationalism that was to make the galaxy a better place without religion, but that maybe some of them had fallen into superstition since then. Since then there’s maybe been a growing sense that Space Marines don’t really believe that the Emperor is a god and consider all of this a bit embarrassing.

So then you get a guy who’s been brought back to life, who was there with the Emperor during the crusade, he’s the one son who most embodies the Rationalist ideology that Games Workshop decided would drive the Great Crusade when the zeitgeist of the early 2000s taught that that ideology would lead to all good things.

And the reason he’s shocked by what the Imperium’s become isn’t because they sacrifice a thousand psykers a day to feed the Golden Throne, or because of the constant expansionist wars, or the genocide, it’s because they’re a bit religious about it.

And this is why my feelings about it are complicated. We’ve all been a bit concerned about whether Warhammer 40,000 is satire since Games Workshop released that statement, but I think this is good satire, and I don’t think they meant to do it. Christopher Hitchens, the poster boy of rationalism, supported the invasion of Iraq, he supported torturing prisoners until he tried water boarding for himself. In many ways the rationalism of the New Atheist movement was nothing more than a justification for Western Imperialism, and I think it’s interesting what Robout Guilliman’s rationalist genocide in the 41st Milennium has to say about that.

[woollybearsaint]

Religion- Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Krishna, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Psychics, Tarot Cards, Spiritualism, The Law of Attraction, Magic, Ancestral Worship- all lack sufficient evidence enough to be taken seriously, or for us to waste our time on. Our time is limited, and you can choose what ever the fuck you want to do with the time you have, but you can at least do a little something that makes the world a little better than the way you found it.

[raglanphd]

[jcalexandrewrites]

Richard Dawkins: I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. Me: Cool! I am against anti-theism because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding religion.

Seriously, anyone who understands Christianity or religion or theology or, heck, philosophy in general would understand why that quote is pure Grade-A bologna.

Then again, as the old saying goes, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And, boy, did Dawkins make real bank convincing people not to understand things.

Also, anyone who unironically quotes Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens in the year of our Lord 2024 is cringe. These folks were terrible people with terrible ideas. Especially now that Dawkins as outed himself as a "TERF" and "cultural Christian."

[vidreview]

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #4 (or: The Grind)

[originally posted january 3rd 2024]

it's 2024! i know nobody's happy about that, but here we are. bit of a weird roundup this time because i'm going to spend most of my time talking about one specific channel, as i think it's a useful example of what "success" looks like on youtube and the internet more broadly. so let's get right to it!

"no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)" by Jeffiot.

i have a feeling that by the time this roundup goes live, Jeffiot's investigation of who, exactly, made the famous skull trumpet gif will have made the rounds in a big way. the algorithm recommended it to me and, as i often do, i opened it in a new tab to watch later. over the course of that same day, i saw three separate people on three separate websites independently say "hey, you should watch this." like any god-fearing youtuber i will gripe about the algorithm until the cows come home, but even i have to admit that a broken clock is right at least twice a day. this is just a solid, entertaining, unique, and earnestly impassioned video essay dedicated to the simple act of giving credit to someone for creating one of the most timeless and universally beloved images on the internet (a subject that has been very hot lately, thanks in no small part to Hbomb's recent video about plagiarism). all else aside, i have to applaud Jeffiot's visual style and production quality. now i'm gonna go watch some of his other videos :)

[20 minutes later] you need to watch It's: Doors™ right fucking now. finally, a video essayist who understands that horror and comedy are the same genre! the rare, fantastical species of creepypasta-knower who seems to understand that the backrooms aren't creepy just because there's a monster! and it's pretty good filmmaking to boot! this is exactly the kind of thing i'm always imagining when i talk about the artistic potential of video essays-- how the medium allows you to blend fiction and nonfiction, personal subjectivity with factual objectivity. i love finding a channel like this, it's like uncovering a goldmine in my backyard. how did nobody notice before??? i'm off to go watch more, will report back if i have further thoughts.

[11 days later] i must report now, having watched a multitude of videos on Jeffiot's channel, that this guy has the stuff. i didn't need to watch as many vids as i did to confirm that he has the stuff, but then again, when someone does have the stuff, it's not like you can stop at just one or two. as a general rule, when i watch a video from someone i've never seen before, i always click through to their channel and see what else they've got on offer. one of the unstated calculations i make in what i choose to cover in this blog is that i am more likely to recommend a channel that has multiple essays of similar quality. you'll understand why in a moment.

i can see why Jeffiot's channel didn't take off until now, as many of his videos are esoteric in subject and presentation. not in a bad way by any means, but in that way where if i saw one of his thumbnails in a lineup i would probably conclude it wasn't for me. this is the chief hazard of producing videos that are complex and intricate: they're fucking difficult to advertise. good art in any medium often requires a lot more prompting and persuasion before an audience can buy in, especially in an environment so drowned in easy, safe alternatives. this is why i try to watch through videos even if they make a bad first impression, why i try to watch multiple videos on a channel, so that i can get a sense of the voice behind the work. there are amateur creators out there with an identifiable spark that Will burst into something special eventually, if you just give em a little leeway and try to see what they're doing for what it is. luckily this is not a problem with Jeffiot at all. everything i've watched of his is fantastic and appallingly high effort. it's a channel that might be a hard sell at a distance, especially if you're not into horror-focused channels, but if you just give it time you'll see that he's got a lot more on his mind than appearances might suggest. this is someone putting in the work, clearly not satisfied with doing the same thing more than once, with videos ranging in subject from a frenetic examination of the logic of Death in the Final Destination movies, to an astonishingly journalistic investigation of the history of the Gävle Goat, to an odd and heartfelt exploration of the intoxicating and terrifying call of the void. it's rare to find someone who scores so high on style, substance, and verifiable source usage all at once.

and yup, i was right, he went from having just over 5k subs when i first started writing this draft on December 22nd, to exceeding 50k less than two weeks later, with the skull trumpet vid itself sitting pretty at over a quarter of a million views, the most of anything on his channel by several orders of magnitude. i mention all this because i think it typifies The Grind, on youtube but also as one working in any creative economy online (if you utter the phrase "content creator" at me i'm going to erase you from history). getting started as a video essayist, you will pour your heart and soul into videos that almost no one will watch. you will try to chase the algorithm, and it won't work. you will try to make something just for you, and it also won't work. some vids will break through more than others, but the progress will be achingly slow to the point of feeling nonexistent. you will do this for months and months, in some cases years, and you will ask yourself always… is it worth it? am i just dumping my art into an uncaring void for no reason?

i speak here from personal experience. i posted my first proper video essay in December 2013. i didn't have a real Hit until five years later, with a defense of a ContraPoints video in September 2018, which was successful in part because it was amplified by Natalie Wynn herself. but even then, it took until March 2019 before my video about The Politics of the McElroy Brothers took off (this time thanks in part to a lot of visibility gained from guesting on Hbomb's DK64 nightmare stream) and really pushed my subscriber and patreon numbers into "can actually pay some bills with this" territory. prior to both of those moments, i was convinced that i was at an insurmountable dead end. so you see, sometimes "luck" is getting a boost from popular strangers at the right time. while i did not expect the ContraPoints defense to gain any traction at all, the McElroy vid was weird in that everyone i talked to about it in the months before its release was immediately excited by the pitch. a rare case where i had reasonable suspicion that This One Might Be A Hit. but even then, i figured it would fail. when it didn't fail, in both cases, there was a terrible temptation to pivot my entire creative focus to just doing More Of What Worked. unfortunately for my wallet, i'm constitutionally incapable of making good business decisions, and so generally failed to fully take advantage of those opportunities in the ways a Mr. Beast might advise. but i also happen to think that it was the right call to not make those pivots. i would hate to be stuck just making response videos, or pigeonholed as the "politics of [podcaster]" gal. i stand by those videos (i think the McElroy vid still has some of my funniest jokes), but neither of them is particularly the kind of thing i would like to continue making in perpetuity. and anyway, you can't chase what works, because "what works" is always changing. unless you want to make half of your job studying the ebbs and flows of the Greater Video Essay Marketplace, only suffering and ruin lies down the path of trying to reproduce viral success.

the thing about making a living online is that what the job fundamentally is, is laying the groundwork for a future bit of good luck. if your very first video takes off, that's good for your views and sub counts, but it's an open question how much of that audience will come back for seconds. youtube is littered with channels whose first video went big and then nothing made a splash after that. unless you're a Big Established Channel, most of your traffic is going to come from a very small percentage of your videos. the people you want to court are not the mass audience, the hundreds of thousands who turn out when the algorithm and zeitgeist grants you time in the spotlight. the people you want to court are the folks who click through and watch your other stuff, who like what you do, and who will show up for you even if a project isn't something they expect or know they'll like. you want those people because instead of commenting "just play the hits" they'll tell you how surprised they were at how much they liked the wild swerve you took. so you put your heart and soul into releasing stuff even though it feels like screaming into the abyss, because it means that someday, when (if) you get lucky, you've got a broad foundation of existing works that new viewers can then jump to, giving them a sense of your proclivities as a critic and artist, how you've grown and developed over time, and what kind of commitment you rhave to the work you're trying to get paid for. this is important because anyone can make one good video essay. i repeat: anyone can make one good video essay. it really isn't that hard! it's the people who do it multiple times, on multiple subjects, in multiple different forms of expression, over a long stretch of time, that i think are most often worth paying attention to, and most reward material support.

the algorithm really isn't straightforward at all though. my experience for a long time was that when i released a new video, the new thing would drop like a lead balloon, but some random older vid of mine would get a huge bump in viewership. my essay about netflix's tendency to abandon its originals from all the way back in April 2018 still gets randomly promoted every once in a while! which is nice because i'm actually rather proud of that one. it's partially for this reason that i try to futureproof my videos, in the sense that i try to write for someone watching five or so years in the future (applying materialism to my analysis is a big part of this). youtube as a platform is incredibly wasteful in how it encourages disposable information, with no mechanism for mass rebroadcast or whatever, but if i still read media criticism written in the 1970s today, i have to imagine that people in the future will want to watch the media criticism of the 2020s for many of the same reasons. this isn't about legacy or an overblown sense of self-importance or anything, i just think it's good practice from a writerly point of view. you just never know what thing of yours is going to take off or when!

this is by no means a fair, just, or even particularly excusable system --it's defined exclusively by private enterprise with no input from the creators who generate the value that youtube's parent company thrives on-- but that's how it's been for a long time (and not just on youtube, even before the internet). i wanted to draw your attention to the graph at the top of this post precisely because it illustrates the long game of this gig. if you're not a creator, perhaps it can give you a sense of what it feels like waiting around to get lucky. an endless and desperate stream of little to no movement. no hope of change, no indication that anything ever could. nothing makes a dent, and no amount of work relieves you from the obligation to turn around and do it again, in the hopes that maybe this time something will be different. when you're really in the doldrums, it's never different. it can feel like being trapped in a wasteland surrounded by oases. all the youtubers you like are making money doing this, why can't you? you ask yourself if there's something wrong with you as a creator, or as a person, if there's something fundamentally unlikeable or whatever about you that makes succeeding at this gig impossible. you'll give up hope so often, only to get dragged back in for some reason or other.

and then, suddenly, for seemingly no reason, with the application of exactly the right video at exactly the right time (never a predictable combination), everything changes all at once. you watch in dumbfounded, horrified amazement as those numbers, long immovably static, multiply at an incomprehensible pace. the shock of it is so distinct it's like god tapped your shoulder and gave you protagonist privileges for a day. when this happens, you instantly and viscerally understand why so many people go absolutely out of their minds when this happens to them. such a sudden wave of attention is eldritch and, if you're queer or POC or cover any topics more controversial than watching paint dry, it's deeply threatening. but then you see comment after comment of people saying "wow this is so good, why doesn't this have more views?" and you're like, okay, so actually i've never done anything wrong in my life! it's awesome and vindicating and scary and such a relief and SO STRESSFUL all at once. you can just FEEL the 90 degree curve on that graph when it hits.

in many of his videos, Jeffiot talks about difficulties paying rent and making ends meet, begging as all essayists must for some portion of the audience to please give him a few bucks a month. since releasing the skull trumpet vid, his patron count has gone up from 92 in november to 160 at time of writing, and like, as someone who went from "i might have to get a full-time job" to "i can quit my shitty part-time job for at least a year" money over the course of a couple days, i feel such a vicarious thrill of relief on his behalf. what's better than getting a raise??

so we have two numerical changes to look at here with Jeffiot's success. 5,000 subscribers to 50,000, vs 92 patreon backers to 160. the disparity in magnitude there is huge, and crucial to understand if you're an essayist in your early days and you want to stay remotely sane. for all the thousands who subscribed to the channel from one video, only 68 decided to pay him for his labor. of those 68, how many do you think watched only this one video and then immediately went to give him money? or did they see the quality of the work on the rest of his channel from the launchpad that was the skull trumpet vid, and only then decide this is someone worth supporting? in my experience, it's the latter who form the longterm base of support that you come to rely on. they're the ones who stick with you through the slump eras when your pen dries up and you just can't pump em out like you used to. and trust me, you will experience slump eras, no matter how sigma your grindset.

the hits come and go. it's very likely that Jeffiot's next video will hit with a thud and stall out at, like, 20,000 views on the high end. but that's the grind, man. you aren't courting the thousands, you're courting the handful of weirdos who share your particular brand of derangement. infinite growth is impossible and unsustainable. i share all this with you because i think it's helpful to dig into an example of "success" within this system as it happens in the wild. so that maybe you can get a sense of what the business of this gig is for people with more ambition than content farming and response videos, and adjust your behavior towards such creators accordingly.

in any event, i wish Jeffiot all the luck in the world, and i'm very much looking forward to whatever he produces next.

hey, remember how this is supposed to be a roundup post? let's get back to that.

"The rise and fall of New Atheism" by Costanza Polastri.

i previously highlighted another Polastri video in VIDROUND #2 (is that what i'm calling these? that can't be what i'm calling these), and i'm gonna keep on recommending her stuff as long as it's this good. does a great job explaining the appeal of new atheism among millennials while also criticizing its worst elements. this topic so often gets discussed with a lot of exaggerated rhetoric and loud hyperbole, so to have Costanza talk about new atheism with such easygoing humanism and frankness hits different. i also share her feeling that new atheism did a poor job of replacing the social roles religion plays, and her desire to find something religious that isn't the institutional religions we're stuck with, or cults, or the church of the flying spaghetti monster.

"Alan Wake 1 & 2 | A Self-Indulgent Retrospective" by Pim's Crypt.

two entire Swedes in this roundup? and they're both channels focused primarily on horror genre analysis? i don't have a punchline to these questions. this is an enjoyable and digestible retrospective on the Alan Wake games from someone who really cares about them, which is the best kind of retrospective. these days i vastly prefer listening to someone talk about media they love than media they hate, and as someone who has a lot of gripes about Remedy's games it's always useful to get the perspective of someone who likes their stuff. full disclosure, i haven't finished watching this video yet because i haven't finished playing Alan Wake 2, but 58 minutes out of a 73 minute runtime feels like enough to give an honest recommendation.

"The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of X" by What's So Great About That?

Grace Lee is quietly one of the best video essayists out there. her stuff is always, without exception, insightful, well-researched, and polished to a mirror shine. this video is largely about the semiotics of the letter X (and, eventually, what it means to Elon Musk), and digs into a surprising amount of literature on the subject along the way.

THE "DOESN'T NEED THE HELP" ZONE

"It's time to talk about Plagiarism… again" by Jack Saint.

the post-Hbomb-plagiarism-on-youtube conversation continues. bless Jack Saint here for his insistence that lazily-researched bordering-on-plagiarized videos are popular because they're systemically incentivized. i also can't believe that the new Wonka apparently isn't complete garbage? anyway i think the evolving plagiarism discourse is fascinating to watch, and i like the insight that Jack brings to the table.

"The Obsession with Bad Games" by NeverKnowsBest.

echoes many of my thoughts on the toxicity of so much games discourse, particularly the vitriol directed at "bad" games. traces the influence of AVGN to now & and dares to ask "is the hate really worth it?" so often gamers treat bad games like an assault, and you know, movie reviewers do this too, but in this post-gamergate world such naysayers just so happen to be a significantly influential audience segment capable of amplifying their vitriol all the way up the chain to the likes of Elon Musk. it really doesn't help that tech types have well and truly devolved into spoiled children appealing to the butthurt gamerbros, that corporations like Disney hear their protestations louder than any other voice regardless of how numerable such voices actually are.

and that's it for this roundup! fewer recommendations than normal because of the lengthy Jeffiot analysis, but i think it was worth it. there will probably be another roundup this month as a result!

thank you to everyone who's sent me video recommendations to my askbox! to repeat from the previous roundup, please feel free to send me under-appreciated videos, new or old, made by you or anyone else! no promises that i'll cover anything you send of course, but i WILL see it.

take care of yourselves in this brave new year, folks. it's gonna be a weird one!

<- ROUNDUP #3 | ROUNDUP #5 ->

[readingsquotes]

"The irony, of course, is that the New Atheists invoke myside bias to draw their own battle lines: between the team that uses “evidence” to transcend ideology, and everyone else, who are instead irrational, “political,” trapped inside their imaginations. ...At the heart of New Atheism is a fanatical enthusiasm for reality. And like other fandoms, it guards its interpretations of the object of its obsession jealously.

It is this legacy we are still contending with today. Since roughly 2014, takeslingers across the prestige media landscape—and at the New York Times and The Atlantic in particular—have declared their allegiance to Team Rationality in droves, dutifully going to the mat against the forces of Team Tribalism wherever they can be found. (This, it turns out, is mostly on college campuses.) .....

Recently this premise has loomed especially large in the conversation surrounding two apparently unrelated issues. The first is Palestine, and the student protests against their universities’ investments in companies complicit in the slaughter. This position, it turns out, is just another manifestation of myside bias. Former Iraq War cheerleader Jonathan Chait bemoans the way that “Trumpian conservatives” as well as “radicals on the left” both argue that the Israel-Palestine conflict “pits good against evil and that compromise is unthinkable.” These apparent enemies are really both on Team Tribalism––equally simple-minded in their respective positions that Palestinians should be exterminated, on the one hand, and that genocide is bad, on the other––while members of Team Rationality, like Chait, recognize that the conflict “is complex and has faults on many sides.” ...

The second issue is trans rights. Just as New Atheism helped to legitimize the War on Terror among self-identified science believers who’d ordinarily never think to ally with evangelical Christians, the charge of progressive irrationality has helped to legitimize transphobia among precisely the same demographic.....

It's not just Chait: The correlation between just-asking-questions transphobia and hostility towards pro-Palestine activists is astonishingly high. Among the community of aging New Atheists, both positions are practically obligatory. Jerry Coyne, the UChicago protest spitter (allegedly!), has also taken an obsessive interest in the issue of trans people’s participation in women’s sports. To determine if “someone is an extreme gender activist,” Coyne writes on his Why Evolution Is True blog, you should “ask them if trans women, born as biological males, should be allowed to compete against biological females in women’s sports.” If they answer in the affirmative, he writes, it means they are “ignoring the palpable data on the physical advantages of transwomen.” Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, when he is not urging Christendom to go to war against Islam, spends his time slandering trans identity as “a distortion of reality.” Your brain on New Atheism, apparently, looks an awful lot like your brain on Fox News propaganda.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with trying to figure out what reality is like. Some of my best friends are real. The problem is that reality isn’t fixed. It is not merely complex, as liberal handwringers point out incessantly. It is contradictory, riven by forces pulling it in different directions. It changes, and it changes not least because we change it. In trying to freeze reality into a cudgel that can be used to assault political opponents, the New Atheists and the liberal pundits who consciously and unconsciously imitate them end up committing the sin they claim to hate the most: They deny the observable evidence in front of them. It is entirely backwards to try to determine whether sex is immutable “in reality” in order to assess whether it’s “really possible” to change sex. In reality, people change their sex, so it cannot possibly be the case that sex is immutable.

For the same reason, it is a mistake to fault advocates of justice in Palestine for failing to understand the “reality” of the conflict, because it is this reality that they are participating in and reshaping. There is no essential thing called “the Israel-Palestine conflict.” There is just a place between the river and the sea, and the reality there is dependent, for better or for worse, upon the outcome of political struggle. Reality is a historical process, as Lewontin and Gould argued against the sociobiologists long ago. New Atheism will continue to haunt us for as long as we refuse to acknowledge that the way things are always includes the possibility that things could be different."

[liskantope]

So, another of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism down, and somehow even though he died almost half a month ago, I didn't hear anything about it until beginning to listen Sam Harris's new podcast episode which just dropped tonight.