Friday, December 21, 2018

American atheism suffers major beatings for 7 years

In June 2016, American Interest reported:
First of all, religious belief is still very powerful and widespread, and there is nothing inevitable about its decline. In fact, the proportion of people who say they believe in God actually ticked modestly upward, from 86 percent to 89 percent, since Gallup last asked the question in 2014.
Post Elevatorgate (a July 2011 controversy in which atheist Richard Dawkins was accused of misogny), there has been a lot of friction with the atheist movement (see: Atheist factions).
At the American Atheists 2018 convention, David Silverman, ex-president of the American Atheists organization, gave a speech entitled, "How the mighty get back up". The speech alluded to the pro-religious rights agenda of the Trump administration (See: Donald Trump and American atheists). During the speech Silverman said regarding American atheists, "We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before". (See: Decline of the atheist movement). Later in 2018, Silverman was fired due to allegations of financial conflicts and sexual assault (see also: Atheism and sexism)
At the 2018 American Atheists convention, the ex-president of the American Atheist organization David Silverman declared:
It is a hard time to be an atheist activist. This has affected us. And it has affected our community... 
...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before... 
We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost. 
The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us. 
And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have. 
In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse.
Rationalwiki is a wiki run by atheists/agnostics who are politically left leaning. It is predominantly run by "social justice warriors" (SJWs). A Rationalwiki editor who goes by the username ikanreed wrote on October 31, 2018 in relation to the declining editing of their wiki and the decline of the atheist/skeptic movement:
I think it's the massive reputation blow skepticism and rationalism itself has taken over the coarse of the last... I don't know, let's say 4 years...  The intellectual clout of rationalism has suffered dramatically, look at the way people talk about skeptics today versus 5 years ago.
Numerous atheists have declared that the "atheist movement is dead" or that it is dying (see: Decline of the atheist movement)

Facebook post at the Freedom For Atheism Foundation page about this article: 

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