New Atheism started within the United States approximately around 2004 – 2006 (but mainly 2006), gained notoriety from 2007 – 2010, and arguably leveled off after 2013 – 2014 with the passing of Christopher Hitchens in 2011. It has been a full twenty years since the New Atheist Movement’s purported beginning of public speaking events from 2006 and Pew Research has been forced repeatedly to correct the desperate narratives that Christian Conservatives of the United States keep jumping upon from organizations like the Barna Group. I’m sure that deep down, Pew Research had hoped for the same thing that the Barna Group had sought. They wanted a viable future for Christianity in the long-term. They wouldn’t have tried misrepresenting the actual atheist growth by ignoring Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus who identified with Atheistic philosophies in their own respective religious traditions otherwise. There seems to be a silent hope by the older generations that there’ll be a return and the Barna Group, a Christian research organization, had purported that there was a Quiet Revival among Gen Z males. Pew Research, which probably wants to see legitimate evidence of the same thing that the Barna Group does, went through multiple survey datasets and they were forced to conclude that it wasn’t true; religious people might be leaving more slowly, but they have not stopped leaving. The only truth was that Gen Z women are leaving at the same rates as men have traditionally left Christian Churches from what Pew Research could find when assessing the datasets of other research organizations that conducted their own surveys.
From my own anecdotal observations, the US Corporate media has gone from saying that New Atheism is “over” for around six years straight, to saying it was only rich White people who were atheists by ignoring the actual definition of atheism, and now saying that it has “slowed” but also, entire generations of younger women are now joining men in leaving religion. How can it be that religious disaffiliation is “slowing” but the younger generation of women are now leaving at the same rates that men have left religion for multiple generations?
Do these arguments make coherent sense anymore? Judging from just my own observations from reading these surveys since around 2009 to now; these ideas of religious slowdowns, religious revivals, and attempting to obnoxiously characterize younger generations as lacking some inherent core to the fabric of their existence when they leave are all attempts to rationalize religious belief itself. I actually took the time to read religious perspectives, especially US Christian perspectives, and I honestly have to ask: Do most US Christians have any morals at all? The main arguments generally went along the lines of: “Oh Young Americans have difficulty following the Christian faith because it is hard, and because Christian Priests and Pastors are raping innocent children around their age, but the Young people are the ones without morals because they refuse to return to those Churches.” — I wish I was joking, I wish I was making some sort of dumb meme, and I wish I was exaggerating. That was their primary contention. The Older generation of Americans try to portray Young Americans as lazy, arrogant, idiotic, selfish, stupid, and then concede the point about Priests raping innocent children, and then continue arguing that Young Americans are selfish, lazy, stupid, and arrogant. Your children don’t want to go to places where they could get raped, where their family and friends could get raped, and where they know of stories of people their age who were raped and you’re saying they lack morals? To all older generation Americans, are you genuinely being serious and do you understand the consequences of your own arguments? Do you want your children to get raped? Because literally, that is what you’re trying to argue in favor of when you condemn Younger generations for wanting to avoid going to Churches. Synagogues and Mosques have the same problem and even if we were to concede that the problems in those institutions are worse, which doesn’t have the datasets to support it within the US, it doesn’t make Christianity look better. If you’re angry with me for pointing this out, let me just ask you this hypothetical: Would you leave your own underage child in the care of a Christian priest or pastor completely unattended by anyone else?
Conversations like this end-up happening:
How do you think Younger generations feel when reading conversations like this when you’re calling them lazy, stupid, arrogant, and above all selfish? There’s another aspect about religion that is simply ignored by older generations: Younger Generations generally want rational, valid reasons to believe in religion and if they can’t find anything that proves the religion’s truth claims, then they stop believing it. That’s really what most of this generational decline has been. There’s this line that I and other Millennials have noticed US Boomers and Gen Xers say that doesn’t make any sense to the majority of US Millennials and the Younger generation of Americans: “You have to believe in something!” is often repeated as some sort of bizarre defense mechanism. But, this calls into question… Why? Why does anyone just have to believe in something supernatural? Why believe in something for the sake of believing it? I can’t speak for others, but I want to base my judgments on only what is true. How else can we say that we’re living honest lives? How else can we say that we’re being honest with ourselves and our moral values? If I can’t be honest with myself and live an honest life, what’s the point of believing in any value system? What difference is there in believing in faith that is a comfortable lie and a person who is being a liar as Nietzsche pointed out?
One key study of research from 2013 and made into an article in 2018 was this piece by The Independent, which I have never seen older generations of Americans willing to engage with regarding the primary reason for religious decline in younger generations of Americans:
Atheists are more intelligent than religious people, say researchers
New paper sets out to explain negative correlation between faith and intellect found in dozens of past studies
Charlotte England
Tuesday 02 January 2018 12:44 GMT
Religious people are less intelligent on average than atheists because faith is an instinct and clever people are better at rising above their instincts, researchers have claimed.
The theory — called the ‘Intelligence-Mismatch Association Model’ — was proposed by a pair of authors who set out to explain why numerous studies over past decades have found religious people to have lower average intelligence than people who do not believe in a god.
A 2013 analysis by University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 out of 63 historic studies.
A negative correlation between intelligence and religion makes sense if religion is considered an instinct, and intelligence the ability to rise above one’s instincts, say researchers Edward Dutton and Dimitri van der Linden in their new paper published today.
Writing for Springer’s journal of Evolutionary Psychological Science, the authors – who are based at the Ulster Institute for Social Research and Rotterdam University respectively – explained their model is based on the ideas of evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa.
Mr Kanazawa’s ‘Savanna-IQ Principles’ suggest human behaviour will always be guided by the environment in which their ancestors developed.
Mr Dutton and Mr van der Linden argue in keeping with this that religion should be considered an ‘evolved domain’ — or instinct.
Rising above instincts is advantageous, they said in a statement, because it helps people to solve problems.
“If religion is an evolved domain then it is an instinct, and intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities,” explained Mr Dutton.
According to the 2013 review, the more intelligent a child is — even during early years — the more likely it is to turn away from religion.
In old age, above-average-intelligence people are less likely to believe in a god.
Mr Dutton and Mr van der Linden also investigated the link between instinct and stress, and the instinctiveness with which people tend to operate during stressful periods.
They argue that being intelligent helps people during stressful times to weigh up their options and act rationally rather than give in to knee-jerk responses.
“If religion is indeed an evolved domain — an instinct — then it will become heightened at times of stress, when people are inclined to act instinctively, and there is clear evidence for this,” said Mr Dutton.
“It also means that intelligence allows us to able to pause and reason through the situation and the possible consequences of our actions.”
The researchers believe that people who are attracted to the non-instinctive are potentially better problem solvers.
“This is important, because in a changing ecology, the ability to solve problems will become associated with rising above our instincts, rendering us attracted to evolutionary mismatches,” said Mr van der Linden.
I really hate to say it, but Millennials and Gen Zers are generally just more inclined to critical thinking than US Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. We don’t fall for circular reasoning as much. Of course, the reasons for this are likely due to the cultural impact of the New Atheist movement. It seems to me that the US Corporate media was desperately and repeatedly trying to ignore evidence: when Christopher Hitchens was still alive, there were arguments that atheism needed to be “saved” from New Atheism. Pew Research attempted to redefine what the word atheism meant at one point in order to ignore Buddhist Atheists, Jewish Atheists, and Hindu Atheists as not really atheist. There were even headlines about how a small percentage of “Nones” believe in God. The US Corporate news media attempted to portray Atheism as a culturally and socially “White people” phenomena by ignoring the definition of atheism, seemingly refusing to do survey data themselves, and their portrayal honestly seemed very bizarre to both myself and a close Hispanic friend of mine as it didn’t sound credible from how either of us experienced the phenomena of rising atheism in the US among Millennials. Pew Research’s next religious landscape survey collapsed the US Mainstream media talking point about it being a White-only phenomena in the US. In short, judging purely from my observations over nearly twenty years, the US Corporate news media genuinely didn’t want to even see this rise in non-belief or recognize the new reality as it happened right in front of them. They missed the most important social, cultural, and political event of their lifetime by pretending it didn’t exist.
I want to be clear about something: as much criticism as I’m giving Pew Research in particular, they have honestly tried to be as nonpartisan and objective as possible. The Barna Group and the US Mainstream media have both failed at trying to be objective about the data. I held out writing this piece for twenty years because I was waiting for the evidence to prove me wrong; I tried not to feel too hopeful for the future, but instead what I’ve observed is that every single attempt to claim a return to the Christian tradition by the supposed objective news agencies and Christian research organizations was a desperate cry against fact-based analysis. This is the truth. I’d go as far as to say that Pew Research’s most recent datasets seem to contradict the idea that there is really a slowdown like they claim. Their summation was that for a rate of every 26% of Young People who leave Christianity, a rate of 5 percent join or return to the faith tradition. More details on those findings:
Just as important to understand, Western journalists unreservedly failed for twenty years, because they kept treating the opinions of Millennials and Gen Zers as future metrics for Christian revivals instead of ever seeing Younger generations as capable of critical thinking faculties; it was like they were incapable of understanding that children will have different experiences from their parents and should be regarded as individuals:
Shouldn’t this mean the rate rose all things considered, especially if Gen Z women are leaving Churches at the same rates now as men have throughout multiple generations? The only reason we’re left with this vagueness is specifically because the Western Mainstream News Media didn’t do their jobs for twenty years when it came to shifting faith traditions in the US. They just pretended there was a Quiet Revival because that’s the illusion they wanted to see from the Younger Generation instead of asking the Younger Generation their actual opinions.
How Did the Western Mainstream News Media Absolutely Miss All of This?
How did the Western Mainstream News Media miss all of this? Not just the US Corporate news media, but all English-speaking Western news organizations and on a global scale. What happened here? How could they have absolutely failed at their job duties for twenty years straight across the world? There’s really no understating this: all these billionaire news agencies missed the greatest cultural shift of modern times as it was actively happening around them. How can we even begin to explain this historic level of incompetence in Western journalism? This level of incompetence is truly monumental that it may deserve its own investigation and there truly is no understating it, because this is twenty years of failure. I have hesitated to argue these points for twenty years, because I felt that there needed to be undeniable datasets to prove it. I think that I overcompensated by waiting this long. I was doubtful to make this claim, because I believed that I was making a false-consensus effect of looking at a few videos of the same people, or people within my friend groups within my background of growing up in New York, and assuming too much from my own confirmation bias. Yet, whenever I discussed this topic of growing atheism with reluctant close friends, even they were confused when I mentioned the news reports of only White Americans becoming more Atheist. One of my close personal friends who is Hispanic doubted those news stories, because his repeated anecdotal experience in the opposite was too numerous among his other friends. When the Mainstream media said that atheism was mainly White Americans only; with claims of ethnic minorities being more religious in the 2016 through 2018, they eagerly ran with this headline repeatedly until the Pew Research 2019 survey. I had assumed that they knew what they were talking about and that they surely looked at the datasets as objectively as they could. After the 2019 Survey by Pew Research had to reluctantly disprove that with hard evidence that Americans of all ethnic backgrounds and throughout all economic brackets were leaving Christianity, the past couple of years the Barna group insisted there was a Quiet Revival of Gen Z males after other survey data showed that Gen Z women were leaving Churches due to rampant misogyny with leadership positions. Pew Research had to reluctantly debunk that claim too and they gave a very thorough and detailed approach, citing their examination of all these multiple survey datasets. I must emphasize, this is not an organization trying to impose any sort of bias; they’re biased in favor of religion, but they strive to be honest and to give everyone honest information. They’re not trying to hate on Christians or other religious groups; US Christians should be more upset with the Barna Group for not doing their due diligence and jumping to conclusions out of the same hope as them. Nevertheless, the main culprits to blame are the Western Corporate news media for lying so religiously for twenty years. If this is not the greatest, most severe blow to their credibility, then I have no idea what qualifies as credibility anymore; there can’t be any excuses for this level of willful self-delusion about the statistical evidence of those leaving Christianity throughout the US. This really is twenty years of utter incompetence regarding the basic facts about Christianity’s decline. We now have definitive proof that it was incompetence on both a national and global scale:
And, the US statistics, showing even people who are 70 – 80 years of age and likely lived as Christians their entire lives, are leaving Christianity:
As the Western Mainstream media has been proven unreliable on this topic for two decades, I’d like to point out an anecdote from a brief Twitter response I received from Ex-Muslim Atheist Sarah Haider regarding Christopher Hitchens. I want to be crystal clear here: this is not an attack on her character or on Ex-Muslims at all, but rather an anecdote of a shared understanding about the world that we must now re-examine because the corporate media was clearly lying to all of us to protect the feelings of the Christian-majority over giving honest feedback about the facts. I tweeted to Sarah Haider once arguing in favor of recognizing Christopher Hitchens as a philosopher, even if he would never have recognized himself as such. She tweeted a response pointing out arguments from figures like Massimo Pigliucci’s critique of New Atheism. That was the end of it and I thought I was just having some emotional attachment to New Atheism that didn’t pan out with the objective data. If you consider the datasets given now by Pew Research and even back during 2014, that interaction was because we were both being brainwashed by the corporate news media insisting our experiences weren’t real. Nobody remembers who this man, Massimo Pigliucci, is anymore because he’s led a totally unremarkable life and he never actually pointed out what arguments the New Atheists were re-packaging from old philosophers. He never explained that claim at all. Yet, the corporate news media kept using his bland claims as evidence when he didn’t cite any sources in his piece about them. In fact, nobody has ever mentioned who or what that even means. What philosophers were the New Atheists echoing from their criticisms of Christianity? The brief Twitter exchange from Haider and I was based on a shared understanding from the trusted news media that we believed were giving us an accurate view and the truth was that the corporate news media had actually been lying to all Atheists and Nones on a global scale. They were protecting US Christian feelings over the statistical evidence of the reality that all of us were experiencing in our lives as it happened. Ex-Muslims were surely experiencing this even more than I was as a Hindu, because the rates of Muslims who leave the faith in the United States are very high and remain unchanged. Yet, because all of us were trusting the US corporate news media to competently be able to do their jobs, we assumed the visceral reality that we experienced was a false-consensus effect. Unlike the journalists in the 1800s who copiously committed themselves to truth, the only group of corporate journalists doing real work were probably those who reported on all the Christian child rape scandals from the churches across the US.
What Exactly Happened? How did New Atheism Redefine the World itself in 20 Years?
A bit of historical context might be necessary to fully appreciate the achievement of the New Atheist movement. I hadn’t known this until reading Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and his brief examination of this phenomenon, but the New Atheist movement might credibly be perceived as a natural counterculture revolution to a unique event in world history. In the 1940s, religion was shockingly viewed to be on the way out. There was a belief that rationality, often conflated with Western bigotries, would carry on and vanquish all superstition. Huntington cited a famous 1991 work by a French scholar named Gilles Kepel, whose own book titled “La Revanche de Dieu” which means “The Revenge of God” and possibly a reference to Romans 12:19 in the Bible; it explained how Islam, Christianity, and Judaism had a massive resurgence in religious devotion from the 1950s onwards to approximately around 1996 when Huntington first published his book. It was unprecedented in history and it’s the historical origins for so much religious fervor throughout the world, including in the North, Central, and South Americas, the Islamic world, and beyond. The creation of televangelists, plausibly the creation of Megachurches throughout the US, the religious movements to push for prayer in schools, possibly the anti-Vaccine movement regaining support due to Radical Reliance Adherents and other Christian “Science” movements, adding “Under God” (1954) in the US pledge of allegiance and “In God We Trust” (1956) to the US national motto, and so much more of what Younger American generations believed to be normative in our lives was determined by this global religious return to faith. Likewise, the older generations of Americans born after the 1950s felt this aberration of religious fervor was a normal part of their lives. The hippie era and the 1970s weren’t actually the starting point of the decline of religion; the hippie era kept the Christian faith alive and it wasn’t until after the fall of the “Godless” Soviet Union that the United States had a massive ten percent drop in religious faith:
Religious faith, and in this context Christianity in the US for the most part, hovered at roughly 80 percent from around the years 1996 – 2007. On August 11th 2020, a Foreign Affairs article titled “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion” (paywalled link) by the then Director of the World Values Survey, Ronald F. Inglehart, who passed away in 2021, noted a very interesting fact from his multiple global surveys: religion began to have a steady drop after 2007 with the US no longer breaking the trends of secularization theory:
And further on in Inglehart’s article:
Judging from the repeated Pew Research survey datasets that also affirm this – and despite what Western corporate journalists keep insisting – the decline in Christianity has only hastened for all ethnic, socioeconomic, and educational demographics throughout the US. What happened in 2007 that could have caused this slow-moving global shift that began to snowball into larger after-effects? It’s what happened the year prior to 2007 that snowballed: Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion the year before, Sam Harris’s 2006 Aspen Festival discussion gained major notice on Youtube, and then in 2007 Christopher Hitchens began to have more numerous public debates critiquing Christianity in favor of Atheism. Correlation may not be causation, but it seems implausible to suggest that the New Atheists arguing that religion is harmful to the world would not have any contribution whatsoever to the decline of religion globally. It’s important to note that Youtube was much smaller back then as it began in 2005, so the Atheist content was emerging the same time that Youtube became popularized and there were more people interested in finding content from a limited pool of options.
I think the multiple global survey datasets and US national datasets for these past twenty years irrefutably proves a causal link and that these three men really are the primary cause in the global shift towards unbelief. The cultural osmosis of La Revanche de Dieu from the 1950s to 2007 was popped and it has gradually shifted to a new cultural osmosis that we are still living in: New Atheism. The truth is in the twenty years of data that the Western corporate media has been ignoring: New Atheism is still actively erasing Christianity forevermore on a global scale. In the US, there is no end in sight for this permanent end to Christianity: it is not limited to just White people in the US becoming atheist, there is no quiet revival of Gen Z, and there is no major difference between men and women leaving anymore because even that is shifting with younger women joining younger men in leaving Churches. The New Atheists have attacked, dethroned, and surpassed Jesus Christ. Although it may tragically be posthumous, it seems almost certain that the three New Atheists deserve to be regarded as the greatest modern philosophers of our times and the only reason they haven’t been is because the Western Mainstream news media wants to categorically deny their impact. In doing so, they have lost all credibility and it seems particularly clear that they want to reshape perceptions of reality instead of giving honest assessments of what the facts are to inform people of the truth. Unlike what they claimed, it seems only Daniel Dennett will be forgotten in history because he didn’t openly criticize Christianity in debates.
Globally, we’re seeing an approximately 30 percent drop in Christianity within Western countries and within the US, the “Nothing in Particular” category can no longer be ignored. Factoring in all these reputable survey datasets ranging from the World Values Survey, to the Barna group, to Pew Research, and more . . . What other causal factor is there from the date of 2007 where New Atheism really gained global attention? 9/11/2001 wasn’t the cause because the numbers remained steady into 2003, the child rape victims of the Catholic Churches and other Christian Churches weren’t believed for many years from the perspective of both the claims and the scale of the incidents until after the early 2000s to the best of my understanding, a slight dip seemed to start from the time of the gay panic of 2004 judging from the data that Pew Research provides, and then a gradual nonstop drop during and after the popularity of the New Atheist movement. The events at the time from Islamic terrorism, the discrimination against LGBT human rights, and Christian movements trying to impose their religion into people’s lives seemed to help jettison New Atheism to stardom even after Christopher Hitchens’s passing.
In the absence of real studies being done on these phenomena because the New Atheists were so detested by the corporate elite and the Churches; it seems we can only rely upon heuristics and anecdotes in the absence of legitimate and neutral research on the subject itself on the causal relations. The repeated debates happened and gained noteworthy public discourse until Christopher Hitchens passing in 2011; yet, there were still people watching his videos who had learned of New Atheism only after his passing. His memory lived on. In my own anecdotal experience, people of my age group usually did say they hadn’t heard of New Atheism, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens… but they usually did hear of and listen to Richard Dawkins in a debate video on Youtube at least once. The general consensus seemed to be that they thought Dawkins was arrogant, some thought he was obnoxious or an asshole, they didn’t like the prospect of arguing atheism and felt it was rude or pointless, and yet . . . they would still admit that Dawkins made them rethink religion in some personal way that they hadn’t thought about before. This was broadly the consensus I kept finding; they didn’t like him, they thought he was arrogant, and they thought what he was doing was a waste of time . . . but they admitted that he was right that religion was kind of bullshit in a way that they didn’t consider before watching him debate a Christian. It was oddly similar and to generalize a bit of what the mood was when I questioned people about it on social media in my interactions: “What’s the point of arguing against Christianity or any religion? Why bother when it changes nothing? He’s kind of an asshole. Actually, he made that one point that really stuck with me… But, religion is bullshit anyway, so who cares?” that was the general consensus from what I could find. It seemed that people didn’t realize the internal shift within themselves, conceded Dawkins was correct about a major aspect of Christianity that they hadn’t considered before, and didn’t like the aggressive nature of his atheism. . . but, not liking Dawkins was irrelevant. What mattered was Richard Dawkins made an argument against Christianity that struck them in a way they hadn’t thought about before. Likability played no factor in their curiosity over what he had to say or when they would admit that his argument was a good one to them. The quality of the rational argument mattered more to fellow Millennials; albeit, some didn’t seem to notice their own shift in opinion. There was also this odd behavior on discord servers that I use to frequent: when I talked about atheism or pointing out the child abuse cases in Churches, people said I was being a rude asshole within the discord server. Yet, once they got into some annoying feud with others; they would private message (DM) me and say that I was correct about religion (in this case, Christianity), they hoped it would die in the future too, and then they would leave the server. This happened repeatedly with variations of Millennials and Gen Zers all admitting they wanted religion (but especially Christianity) to just die off, but they didn’t want to be an aggressive atheist because they don’t want to seem disrespectful to their own parents.
If I had to guess, it is likely more that the New Atheism debates were both a catalyst and a safer alternative for people; the fact is that Christian denominations from Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, and the Catholic Church couldn’t explain why the rape of children is happening by Christian priests and pastors upon innocent Christian children. They had rationalizations about Satanism, within their peculiar subreddits they had anti-Semitism towards Jews with bigoted claims that Jews were somehow taking secret control of Churches as the reason, blaming the Hippie era which had actually been a Christian revival movement, and basically. . . doing everything in their power to refuse responsibility. The New Atheists provided an alternative answer, especially in Christopher Hitchens intelligence squared debate, where they just openly stated it was because Christian doctrines against adults having consensual sex are harmful and lead to the exploitation of children due to trying to impose 1st century norms and values into the modern world. The New Atheists shifted the perspective of the world and oddly enough, it is the modern journalists and corporations that have the hardest time understanding; banning consensual sexual content of fictional adults is seen as a form of hiding your pedophilia in modern times, because the people most notorious for it like the Catholic Church have revealed themselves to be actual pedophiles. The New Atheists provided a rational answer and alternative so that people could finally understand and know what needed to be done to keep their children safe; the Churches, Priests, Pastors, and the pro-Christian parts of the US Corporate media all preaching the gospel of a long-dead 1st century megalomaniac had no answer to the problem of pedophile priests in Churches even after twenty years. What are children and parents who sincerely love their children going to do to keep their kids safe? Listen to equivocations by people claiming to have their best interests but who can’t explain the why behind the sexual violence against children in places claiming to have absolute moral authority or are they going to listen to those aggressive atheists who show sincere concern and explain that it’s safer to stop believing in a 1st century godman who is long-dead?
For those still on the fence, please consider this: If Jesus’s message is so malformed by constant reinterpretations that are misconstruing the teachings, then what value does it have? If Jesus Christ’s teachings are so twisted and distorted, then what relevance do they have in modern times? Why have faith in a twisted and distorted version that you believe is a corruption of his teachings? The problem is the method of reasoning: Divine Command Theory doesn’t work. Divine Command Theory conjoined with the moral relativism of Open Interpretation imposes strict limits in a person’s thinking faculties by trying to align permissible thinking with the approval of a long-dead 1st century man. What exactly can the teachings of Jesus Christ offer on questions of cellphone use or technical issues regarding Wifi, heart surgery, digital banking economies, and all the breakthroughs and studies of microscopic bacteria to black holes? The teachings of the Bible are completely delusional and it has led to sexual violence against innocent children. It seems more likely the case that there never was a quiet revival, there has only been a quiet rejection and that quiet rejection is actively having a compounding effect. By pretending that New Atheism was somehow long dead for two decades, New Atheism has been clean-sweeping a complete victory. If you vehemently disagree with this assessment: explain to me what happened then? Why did this process begin right when New Atheism gained global fame in 2007 and why has it continued since then? What other social movement or social phenomena explains this? Islamic terrorism doesn’t appear to have any causal factor to this phenomenon otherwise it would have begun earlier after 2001, the anti-LGBT sentiments do appear to be a factor but only slightly in 2004, and the rapid decrease began to take effect when all three New Atheists began to really push harder for their rational critiques of Christianity. This may also be downplaying the effect of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith being published in 2004. If you want to say that I am wrong or make reddit memes about me, please explain: What am I wrong about here? Why have the national and global datasets been so one-sided for twenty years now? What else could be the primary cause besides New Atheism?
Why is only Christianity declining across the world?
Christianity is dying, but why is it just Christianity and not other religions? All others, including Islam, remain strong and stable but Christianity alone is vanishing. The rise of Nothing in Particular / Nones doesn’t mean that they gave-up on all supernatural beliefs either, so why is Christianity uniquely being hit the hardest out of all belief systems? It’s surprisingly simple: the specific theological critiques that New Atheism focused upon was mainly Christianity. They may have had a few discussions on Islam when the topic came-up, but the vast majority of their critiques were focused exclusively on Christianity because they were most familiar with it. Another factor is that when Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens critiqued Judaism, it is an open discussion on whether you can be a Jewish Atheist within the theology of Judaism. Thus, even if Jewish people lost faith in God, then they could still identify with the religion. This is also true of Dharmic faith traditions. Christianity’s very theology repels the idea of a Christian Atheist; albeit Richard Dawkins really likes Anglicanism to the point that he self-identifies as a Cultural Anglican. It’s a bit fitting that a cultural Christian is the one who is bringing the final end to Christianity. Sam Harris has recently identified as a Zionist after the October 7th, 2023 massacre in Israel by the Hamas terror group and can thus be called a Zionist Atheist as of now. Christopher Hitchens learned of his Jewish heritage late in his life around the age of thirty-eight and grew-up in a nominal Christian household. What all three intellectuals agreed upon was the anti-theist perspective that supernatural claims bring unnecessary and meaningless human suffering; they need to be erased to reduce all forms of human suffering.
In the absence of any real journalistic integrity on the part of the Western Corporate media, I can only give my best guesswork on why it is New Atheism that led to the rise of Nones / Nothing in Particular. First, because the New Atheists mostly focused upon Christianity, it was only Christians that really had to thoroughly examine the internal framework of the theology. Criticizing the Christian God and the internal failures of Christian theology wouldn’t mean that people would be convinced to abandon all supernatural claims or the belief in a God per se; yet, this might just be a slow process with people having emotional attachments to notions of God before becoming less spiritual and giving up completely. Second, apart from one or two instances, New Atheism was completely terrible at criticizing Islam. As two examples, Christopher Hitchens didn’t seem to have much knowledge of the limits of taqiyya even late in his life and Sam Harris didn’t seem to know that Jesus Christ is the Messiah of Islam. Sam Harris has to be one of the worst critics of Islam in modern US history; there’s very good fact-based reasons why it all backfired on him like when he compared Jesus Christ to the Prophet Mohammad or endorsed racial profiling of a religion that he himself acknowledged wasn’t a race. The best critique came from Richard Dawkins questioning the penalty of apostasy within Islam in a debate. Third, their critiques had almost no relevance to Dharmic faiths unless they were using Dharmic faiths as a comparison point for the logical inconsistencies within Christian theology or the Bible. Kushal Mehra in the early chapters of his book, Nastik: Why I am Not an Atheist, essentially argued that New Atheism only focused on Abrahamic theological precepts that had no relevance to Dharmic faith traditions. As such, rational critiques of other religions outside Judaism and Christianity didn’t emotionally resonate as strongly nor were they willing to put in the work to critique the internal theologies of those other religious traditions. New Atheists were mostly capable of debating different theological teachings within Christianity and Judaism due to their knowledge of the Bible, but not within other religions. All this is almost certainly the main reason that it is only Christianity that has been declining around the world. The abundance of their critiques that people read and watch were primarily of Christianity and those critiques passed on to other people discussing them among their Christian family and friends.
Diversified Atheism: The Shifting Western Narratives versus the Multicultural Reality
I would argue that there is one massive and repeatedly underestimated cultural phenomena that New Atheism caused; which the Western Corporate news media has utterly ignored. It is due to the fact that they kept chasing after illusory narratives that they missed the obvious that was right in front of all of us. This one simple shift among all Atheists who listened to New Atheism is probably the true cause of Christianity’s abrupt reduction and massive decline within two decades. Atheists changed from feeling like lesser aberrations with mental illness in democratic societies to feeling an internal confidence that no self-respecting Christian theologian could compete with. It was in making this shift that Christianity truly began to die, because this specific shift was truly multicultural and global. The nuances of this shift or its impact was never truly explored nor recognized. It went far beyond the circle jerk of r/atheism on Reddit and into a global phenomenon that we were all actively experiencing for twenty years throughout social media. It was the Western corporate media alone that pretended this massive change didn’t exist and they convinced us that none of us were having an impact by becoming more comfortable with questioning religion in society.
I can only judge from my anecdotal observations since the Western corporate media clearly refused to even acknowledge the reality that now feels like an unprecedented shock, because they refused to do any real journalism on this topic for twenty years. Despite many atheists not attaching themselves to the New Atheist label, because people did not want to be viewed as aggressive atheists due to multiple hit pieces over the years; that doesn’t change the fact that many gained confidence and took an appreciation for rationality and logic from their debates. The impact varied from different cultures from what I observed and I’ll list a few anecdotal examples:
For British Atheists, it reinvigorated an appreciation for their civilization’s scientific accomplishments, a stronger appreciation for analytical philosophy, and firmer arguments for humanist philosophies:
For the US, it awakened recognition of atheists as people and marginalization of atheists quietly vanished with less than ten percent viewing atheists as immoral according to Christian Research studies and for the West more generally, it gave rise to the Ex-Muslim Atheist movement:
For India, especially for Hindutva which was itself formulated by a Hindu Atheist, it reawakened awareness of atheistic philosophies within Hinduism, within Dharma more generally, and of ancient Indian Materialist philosophy. It was no longer vilified due to Abrahamic bigotry stemming from Islamic and Christian perspectives dominating the world:
Due to the twenty years of false narratives by the US Corporate news media: from claims of Atheism being male only in the early 2000s, then claiming it was Whites only in the late 2010s, and then the abject falsehood of a Quiet revival among Gen Z men these past two years; it is beyond dispute that they were agenda-driven without any fact-based analysis or any commitment to objectivity. We are all human and mistakes can happen, but this is twenty years of failure with one falsehood after another being debunked by the self-reported global and – for the US –the national survey datasets. How can we trust them anymore? I followed and believed the Western news media were giving the facts for twenty years. I kept giving them the benefit of the doubt and assumed they based their judgments upon credible, fact-based information when subsequent survey datasets proved them wrong. I assumed I was only seeing a false-consensus effect and illusions of what I wanted to see when observing the growing atheism within Millennials and Gen Z. It is because of their reporting that I thought that the Atheist movement overall was small, that the Ex-Muslim movement wasn’t gaining traction like Sarah Haider had anecdotally claimed about the US Ex-Muslim community, and that there was a revival in the US and the UK with Christianity. Something else I noticed: they never mention atheism in Hinduism unless it is purposefully done to vilify Hindus in political topics. The facts from 20-years of Pew Research datasets are now clear, Nones / Nothing in Particular is increasing in all communities, New Atheism was absolutely winning globally, and all of our experiences were entirely valid. Our anecdotal lived experiences that we all shared were not a false-consensus effect. They didn’t want to acknowledge reality. Western journalists, especially US journalists, of the Corporate news media seemed to deliberately attempt to silence New Atheism and its legitimate social impact, to purposefully and categorically ignore and silence the Ex-Muslim Atheist movement, and to try to view Hindus in acrimonious terms for having atheism within the internal theology. Why? Why did they express this unrelenting contempt for every aspect of atheism, atheist social movements, and atheist multiculturalism? I don’t know why Western journalists behaved this way, but it is clear that this is the truth. This really was a deliberate and covert attempt to silence all pro-atheist movements. They knew Atheists were being murdered in the Middle East, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and that they faced ridiculous forms of hatred and violence in other Islamic-majority countries . . . and they deliberately kept silent about it to prop-up Islamism as a perennially aggrieved minority even as they were chopping the heads off atheists and Hindus in Bangladesh, burning Christian homes in Bangladesh and Pakistan or gunning Christians down in Nigeria, and they have always deliberately kept silent on the fact White Christian sex offenders hunt, rape, and murder Native American women and girls throughout the US for forty years. The US Corporate journalists of our time definitely don’t display the same moral integrity as the US Christian missionaries and US socialist journalists of the late 1800s – early 1900s who did fact-based research in defense of India’s human rights under British rule. There is some decent work; yet overall, it seems as if these companies have some form of moral licensing instead of focusing on just fact-based analysis. Why all the false stories about Christian revivals in the US for two decades and even falsehoods about the UK more recently, if this was not the case? We are all more likely to see complaints about Richard Dawkins tweets on Twitter than the fact registered sex offenders have made a sport of hunting, raping, and killing Indigenous women throughout the US due to the Supreme Court decision of Oliphant vs Suquamish 1978 stemming from the legal basis of the US Doctrine of Discovery.
Atheist multiculturalism is probably understated and not overstated around the world. For example, Israel and Japan both acknowledge and accept atheism within their societies without discrimination. The Western mainstream media also categorically ignored how accepting Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are of atheism within Dharmic theology. But should the rise of Nones in the US be an example of New Atheism’s triumphs? I would say yes. It’s simple: while belief in a generic idea of God didn’t vanish, the belief in a Christian God or to see reasonableness in a Christian theological perspective vanished because of critiques by New Atheism. That was the major shift that a more confident Atheism caused. All of this probably still underestimates the numbers and doesn’t overstate them. How many self-identifying Christians throughout the world are Christian Agnostic? To what extent has survey data failed to acknowledge agnosticism growing within self-identified religious communities, especially Christian communities? This seems to be the pertinent question to ask, because the drops from Christianity don’t make sense otherwise. There was likely an unreported shift into Agnostic viewpoints before the shift to Nones or Nothing in Particular. There are so many takeaways from these global Pew Research results that the Western journalists just don’t want to acknowledge as our new reality. I had thought the various atheist Youtubers I watched over the years likely had the same viewership and that Youtube exaggerated the numbers, but it seems that was a misunderstanding of mine and I overshot the mark on any false-consensus effect or confirmation bias. In my defense, it was because I believed this agenda-driven news media were reporting the truth. As it stands, the growth of Nones / Nothing in Particular, while not a full transition to atheism, seems to have been given a compounding effect because atheists of diverse backgrounds listened to New Atheism and came-up with their own broad perspectives as a consequence. They went on to critique harmful aspects of religion in their own way, while not technically identifying as New Atheist. Yet, the vast majority credit New Atheism for enhancing the confidence for atheistic viewpoints, contributing to their own personal development, and raising important topics on the harm that religion can cause.
More Survey datasets from Pew Research Center, this one from their March 2025 findings:
I honestly think, having looked into the survey datasets for nearly twenty years now, that Christianity probably won’t last the next twenty years. The Jesus Christ of Christianity may finally, deservedly, become part of mythology like Zeus, Susano-O, Horus, Vesta, or Baal. The only version of Jesus that will remain will be the Islamic one once Christianity finally dies for good. However, this also means that real, thorough, well-researched, and well-founded honest theological critiques of religious faith really does have far more power than we thought. I would argue that the worst part about the Western Corporate news media having deliberately lied to the entire world for twenty years is that they tried to suppress the real and legitimate power of Free Speech. They demoralized Ex-Muslim Atheist activism far worse than my critiques ever could; if anything, they demoralized all Atheists as a mere speck that had no future. Yet, reality has finally broken the desperate illusion they kept peddling for two decades. Every single one of us making honest, rational, and well-researched critiques based upon factual arguments was killing religion far more than we ever thought possible. All of us, with the use of our Free Speech alone, really do have the ability and power to end all supernatural beliefs in our lifetime. That’s what this survey data means and what they’ve hidden for twenty years. We all have this power and they kept making news stories of delusion after delusion about Christian revivalism and religious resurgence to make us believe that nothing was changing. Think of how desperate these narratives were: Western mainstream news media kept reporting that it was only men, then they reported it was only White people, and then they reported a Gen Z “Quiet Revival” that literally wasn’t real. . . all of this was a complete fiction. I’m sorry if I’m belaboring a point with constant repetition, but I really cannot get over the fact that this was twenty years of complete lies. Twenty years of repeated, force-fed bullshit that had not a single iota of fact-based analysis behind it. The truth is New Atheism was killing Christianity all along.
Let me just point what this really means and why I find this to be absolutely insane. Please give some serious thought to this:
This was twenty years of organized Corporate news media campaigns to deny the power of Free Speech in Western societies, to deny the human rights of Ex-Muslims, to deny that people in Hispanic countries and India were capable of critical thinking faculties, and to deny multicultural atheist philosophies among various cultures across the world from Western, South American, East Asian, and Dharmic countries. All to pretend Christianity had a future.
What Comes After New Atheism’s Complete Victory over Christianity?
This is perhaps the most important question to ask now. While some may fear that it’ll increase faith in Islam, it seems more likely that it’ll have the opposite effect within the US in the longer-term. That is because when approximately 24% of Muslims leave Islam yearly in the US, a large minority of Christians convert to Islam as a replacement. That is why Islam has remained stable in the US. A portion of the numbers bleeding out from Christianity help give the Islamic faith continued life until they gradually leave and get replaced by others who are also mostly Christian. Thus, at least within the US, the end of Christianity will likely mean the decline of Islam. Honest, accurate, and thorough theological critiques and debates appear to be what is really declining Christianity and that means Islam can decline too. It truly amazes me how much power each of us as individuals can have once we get a full and accurate representation of reality. New Atheism is succeeding in ending a 2000-year old religious tradition and history within just twenty years with a third of its followers having left the religion in Western countries. Even if it takes longer than twenty more years, which I doubt it will, that is still an earthshattering accomplishment of a two-thousand-year-old faith dying within either fifty years or less than a hundred years; yet, people still don’t wish to recognize Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins as the greatest philosophers of our time?
Let’s all be clear on what this actually means: honest and accurate Free Speech criticisms can end all superstitious beliefs in our lifetime. We all have the power to do it. New Atheism is living and active proof that this is possible and the Western Corporate news media tried to suppress this reality for twenty years. We can end Christianity in our lifetime, we can end Islam in our lifetime, and probably so much more. As far as I can see, when we acknowledge the reality of the survey datasets, then the only real problem that is stopping the end of either Christianity or Islam are the New Atheists self-sabotaging themselves and the second-and-third generation Atheists self-sabotaging their ability to end at least Christianity and Islam within our lifetime. If I had been in Sam Harris’s shoes, I wouldn’t have appealed to White Supremacy which constitute only 14% of Americans with only 7 percent aggressively serious about it, by peddling the nonsense of Charles Murray’s race science that dehumanizes Black Americans. I’d have pointed out that Black Americans invented many of the great modern comforts that we use like innovations in refrigeration and the heating furnace. A cultural consequence of La Revanche de Dieu seems to be that Black Americans switched from creating innovations in technology in the 1800s and early 1900s by pioneering scientific breakthroughs into modern conveniences to then waste their lives on what is glorified mythology studies with pursuing theology degrees. And for what? Black Pastors and Priests equating consensual sex between adults with White children getting raped in White Churches to create a false equivalence? This is a waste of your time and of your talents. I’d argue that the scientific breakthroughs of your ancestors and predecessors proves that it is a waste of your time. Civil Rights activism is important and it has its time and place, but theology degrees are a waste of time unless you’re using it to spread atheism like British Youtuber, Alex J. O’Connor. At the very least, go into useful degrees like the Social Sciences or History which help make an accounting of human rights issues. And by the way, the sharpest critiques against Christianity that I’ve personally come to know are from Black Americans who still believe in different concepts of God, but not the Abrahamic God. They are more critical and ruthless than Sam Harris has been towards Christianity.
Ex-Muslim Atheists have the best critiques against Islam. The majority of Ex-Muslims are better at critiquing Islam’s theology than Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins ever have been and better than Christopher Hitchens ever was. Given what we now know about New Atheism’s accomplishments, it seems plausible that Ex-Muslim Atheists really could end Islam within our lifetime with vigorous critiques, but the problem is that they have three critical failings that constantly self-sabotage them. One of them is a failing I’m noticing all of America now has, another is a failing many who put themselves in public seem to have, and the final is a self-inflicted problem. The first is that we are treating Right-wing and Left-wing as eternal identities and eternal systems similar to Ultimate Good and Evil. Democrat and Republican, Liberal and Conservative, Left and Right are generational, mutable, and change with the times. Yet, after the ascendency of President Donald Trump in 2016, we began treating them as eternal and immutable systems and this has no rational basis. If the New Atheism movement was anything to go by, then consider this: It is not the case that Hindutva of India, right-wing Christians of the US, or right-wing groups elsewhere want to read and listen to rational critiques because they want to harm Muslims, but so they can formulate strategies to avoid extremism and harming Muslims. People showing openness to seeing out of their comfort zone began to be seen as evil people with ulterior motives, if they identified as right-wing. The only ones benefitting from this viewpoint are Islamists, because they’re projecting the same narcissistic claims of Islam itself onto the wider society to act as a perennially aggrieved minority. In other words, in probably nine out of ten cases, you would be changing their minds and not being exploited by them, especially if they watched an hour or two hours of the lengthy Normalizing Dissent Tour critiques. I find it highly unlikely that anyone listening to any Ex-Muslim critique for over a half-hour sought violence against Muslims; it seems more likely that Islamists successfully normalized a talking point to shut down criticisms of Islam. The second reason, which was entirely their fault, was that self-aggrandizing mockery campaigns of all groups for the sake of being consistent with the Enlightenment value of Free Speech (including some Ex-Muslims who were standing atop a Jewish Holocaust memorial) means that people begin viewing them as nuisance streamers rather than supporters of human rights. You can go ahead and offend everyone, but it means that nobody will be interested in what you have to say when you try to make serious arguments. Finally, just as noteworthy for all prominent atheist activists whether it be Sam Harris, Sarah Haider, or others; they’re more likely to insult other people’s intelligence than they are to ever admit they’re wrong about anything they say. Whereas Christopher Hitchens when he was alive and Richard Dawkins generally displayed humility, I don’t find the same is ever true for either Sam Harris or most Ex-Muslim Atheist activists.
Assuming I’m correct and Christianity dies within 20 years from now, then the most pertinent question is the one Alian de Botton posed: What comes next? I think he was right insofar as trying to develop ways to pursue meaning without religion and I think his work alongside Esthar Perel is valuable. However, I would argue that the primary focus should be a resurgence and appreciation for philosophy as the answer to a world without supernatural claims that the New Atheists and second-and-third generation Diversified Atheists have set for us. The reason Christianity and Islam fail is quite simple: they are premised exclusively upon revealed wisdom from a single ignorant, illiterate individual. The Prophet Mohammad is known and celebrated to have been illiterate and – as far as I know – Jesus Christ is said to have only written words in sand instead of writing any literature himself and that story of writing on sand for the tides to wash it away can’t be verified. Neither of these individuals, nor fantasy stories of the Prophet Moses, have anything of real value to give the world unless it is to make fictional stories. That’s exactly why Ancient Greek Philosophy is used by Christians today for their own personal views, because it is a fact that Jesus Christ’s teachings were never enough on their own merits. Whereas Christians seem to like Ancient Greek Philosophy, Western and predominately White Atheists seem to prefer a return to Roman philosophy thanks to the popularization from the works of Ryan Holiday and maybe by the works of Massimo Pigliucci. Ex-Muslim Atheist activists have outspokenly embraced enlightenment values, Kushal Mehra of the Charvaka Podcast obviously embraced the Indian Materialist philosophy of the Charvakas of ancient India which has strong similarities to British Atheist John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarian philosophy, Feminist Atheists like Laci Green are self-explanatory and Gen Z women are now following in her footsteps, and many Nones / Nothing in Particular seem interested in Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche’s varied philosophies, and Albert Camus’s Absurdism. I’m sure there’s many more too numerous for me to do a full accounting of ranging from psychology, sociology, and a general appreciation for French philosophy. On Youtube alone, various philosophers are being discussed and dissected on their pros and cons by Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. What New Atheism really accomplished was to make people slowly outgrow Christianity. We are actively seeing and living in a new post-Christian era already and the appreciation for philosophy has only grown for ten years on social media from my observations; I had wrongly thought it would be a small blip, but it wasn’t. Ancient Roman, analytical and continental European, Dharmic philosophy, and a certain other group’s general philosophy within US Black communities and among Gen Z feminists has gradually replaced Christianity. I would argue the primary culprits are clearly analytical and continental European philosophy more than any other factor. While White Christians try to blame Anime, video games, Transgenderism, feminism, and perceived foreign influences; their own White European philosophers seem to be the primary culprit that is shifting Christianity from the non-fiction to the mythology category in most Western people’s minds. A hilarious fact that should be noted is that Japanese Anime often mixes Shintoism and Japanese philosophical ideas with existential European philosophy like Friedrich Nietzsche and other concepts like the Hedonic Treadmill. White Christians treat this as foreign influence, when Japan is simply showing its own appreciation for great European thinkers. Of course, the end of Christianity won’t be the end of morality in Western societies. From my recent reading of the book, Polish Folklore and Myth by Joanne Asala, I would argue that Christianity is actually a detriment to morality because it reframes moral questions into a test of self-serving narcissism. Whereas the non-Christian Polish myths had a moral quandary that depicted a protagonist making an ethically bad choice and suffering the consequences from the moral dilemma that faeries gave humans to test their freewill, the Christian stories simply vilified anything foreign as demon worship that needed to be killed. The European Pagan myths just seemed more intelligent and morally compassionate compared to the pro-Christian stories. People in Europe and those of European descent in the US who may prefer simpler moral questions could honestly benefit more from just the moral lessons of Grimm Fairytales and other stories derived from ancient Pagan myths mixed with Enlightenment values.
The reason I’m advocating for a return to these avenues of philosophy and the moral lessons of ancient myths is because not everyone will be going into STEM fields, doing important and groundbreaking research work in a hard science field, doing important statistical research in a social science field, and generally making a large impact for the betterment of humanity. For regular 9-5 workers, people are going to need to find solace in new ways to avoid existential dread, even people who are making such grand breakthroughs may need that same solace from any existential crisis especially with important work like the study of Black Holes, and philosophy seems to be the general direction that most democratic societies are all headed. I think Japan, and now Britain, were just precursors to a global democratic movement towards appreciating and incorporating philosophy into our everyday lives as a replacement for supernatural beliefs. White European-descended Americans and European people who want only European values and prefer simpler moral arguments might find solace in their own European Pagan myths like Grimm fairytales, whereas people who prefer deeper philosophical inquiry may gravitate towards enlightenment values or existential philosophers. Among some Millennials and those who are younger, it seems that people are pushing for a mix of learning various cultures and traditions; from African proverbs, to Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy, and a certain other philosophy that is quietly dismantling Christianity’s norms and values. While this quiet dismantling was happening, Western journalists chased after holy ghost stories of a quiet revival that doesn’t exist and repeatedly lied to every single Western country for about twenty years. For those still having trouble understanding the scope and depth of why Christianity is fading, let me just ask: What value does the entirety of the Bible or the Quran have in discussions like this?
My own anecdotal experience from 12-years of age when seeing a message on a Gamefaqs “Current Events forum” of someone claiming India had atheists called Carvakas / Charvakas made me confused as I’d never heard of that when growing up in a very theistic Hindu household and I had never thought of India as having any atheistic philosophy. I felt hostile towards that comment, because I had absorbed the Western bigotries of Middle School and High School which taught me nothing of value insofar as any history beyond Europe. My response to that comment was to look up a Wikipedia page and use the Wikipedia claim of it “dying off” as some sort of absolute proof, because my 12-year-old self wrongly believed Wikipedia editors were intellectual experts in the topics they made pages for. I had never heard of atheistic intellectualism in Hindu tradition, Dharmic tradition more generally, or just Indian philosophy outside of any Dharmic context. I had stopped believing in anything supernatural completely by age 15. It wasn’t until early college, where I was surprised by the number of Hindu deities and background summaries of them in Shin Megami Tensei games, that I decided to read more into Hinduism after reading all of Nietzsche’s main works. Most of my understanding of Hinduism up to that point was just vague pabulums and moral lessons espoused by the Hindu Priest at the local – and really only – mandir around the neighborhood that my family attended every Sunday until slowly we stopped over the many years. Albeit, my Mother maintains demands for participating in religious festivals that sometimes annoy me. I read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and was struck by the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads having Agnostic and Atheistic themes and it was at that point that I began identifying as a Hindu Atheist since I realized it was plausible from just the basics of Hindu philosophical thought. The Unifying Hinduism and Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy books were terrible, so I later read the Samkhya-Karika and I’m still in the process of reading Vedanta philosophy. Any misgivings and doubts I had about Atheistic Darshanas (viewpoints) in Hinduism was essentially debunked by reading parts of Aniruddha’s Samkhya critique and Adi Shankara’s first two chapters of commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Honestly, I’ve become so interested in both darshanas that I’ll probably keep reading them for the rest of my life. I couldn’t believe how much Hindu philosophy rivals modern psychology, arguably proves superior to it since Hinduism adds the Pramana logic systems to inquiry instead of limited clinical trials that seem to have too much biased sampling to be reliable in recent times, and doesn’t appear to suffer from motivated reasoning to favor social elements of modern political discourse. The fact Hinduism is being used to create breakthroughs in neuroscience and modern psychology, but still remains uncredited due to Western notions of religious tolerance shows just how one-sided, narcissistic, and hollow the concept of Western religious tolerance can be just to protect this idea that all religions give equal amounts of insightful and useful knowledge.
A short snippet of Hinduism’s Orthodox Samkhya philosophy critiquing the plausibility and implausibility of the existence of a God:
Aniruddha. “Aniruddha’s Commentary, Translated. Book I.” Translated by Richard Garbe, Http://Indianculture.Gov.In, pp. 53–55. For Reference: Aphorisms and Commentary of 92, 93, and 94.
We can’t call out child rape in Christian Churches who rape Christian children, we can’t call out Islam’s propensity for violence including child rape of non-Muslim children and Muslim children, and Hinduism and Buddhism suffer from repeated and exploitative practices that honestly hearken back to cultural genocide by opportunistic Western marketers and some Western scholars taught “religious tolerance” while Swamis and Buddhist monks try to appease and assimilate superior cultural practices in Dharmic tradition with a narcissistic lunatic from the first century and a pedophile warlord from the seventh century who never said anything of value that doesn’t already exist in other cultures. I want to be clear for those in the Western world who are engaging in Dharmic practices: I have no problems with that and I’m not calling you a racist. My specific problem is that Dharmic faith traditions, and I notice this more with crediting Hinduism than Buddhism, never get real credit for what modern people find helpful and useful. There’ll be a reference to Buddhism sometimes, but almost none for Hinduism. You’re taking concepts from my religion of Hinduism / Sanatana Dharma, erasing all Hindu / Vedic references, and then calling it Mindfulness while actively practicing my faith tradition; all in the name of “religious tolerance” to pretend Christianity (a 2000-year-old faith) and Islam (a 1400-year-old faith) ever had useful insights equal to 8000 years of Dharmic intellectual history. At the same time, you’re pretending Christian child rape scandals and Islamic child rape scandals have nothing to do with all the support for sexual slavery, violence against children, and forgiveness of all forms of violence (including violence against children) that both the Bible and the Quran teach. How am I wrong in accusing this to be a modern form of cultural genocide, if Hinduism gets no credit at all? Dharma was not the first to suffer this exploitative, one-sided, and narcissistic Western cultural practice of imperialistic assimilation; to be clear, in my opinion, it is either imperialistic or supremacist if the culture that is doing the contribution gets no credit for their contributions. At the very least, Dharmic civilization isn’t suffering from state-sponsored rape campaigns by the US Federal government unlike the first culture that was given this narcissistic, exploitative, and one-sided treatment. They still don’t get any fair credit for their contributions to human rights even now.
Are We Seeing a Quiet Revival of Native American faith traditions supplanting Christianity?
In the US, we often conflate the end of religion and the end of Christianity. They are misapprehended as synonymous by the majority of the US public. However, judging from the extensive Pew Research results for around twenty years, what the New Atheists have accomplished was not the end of faith in God, but the end of faith in the Christian God. They have not ended religion, but have ended 1/3rd of Christianity within Western countries and had a blunting effect of decline in Christianity in the rest of the world. This twenty years of decline was the accomplishment of their Free Speech criticisms against Christianity and it appears to be continuing onwards. There is another effect that I’m seeing that has me really wondering about the future. Among US Black Americans and within several countries in Latin America, there are religious beliefs about nature that appear strikingly similar what I’ve read about Pre-Columbian Native American faith traditions. The word “spirit” is still used whereas it is more theologically accurate to recognize nature as sacred energies in Pre-Columbian Indigenous faiths, and it is plausible that younger Black Americans have infused their Christian faith with African animism and not Indigenous faith traditions, but I can’t help but notice this shift:
Yet, another cultural embrace of Pre-Columbian Native American faith traditions, specifically the Northern Native American faith traditions in this case, is the fact that Gen Z women who leave Churches often embrace feminism. Feminism was appropriated by White settler women from North-Eastern Indigenous women’s socioreligious traditions, specifically the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, but Matrilineal and Matriarchal social customs exist among many Northern Native American cultures. In other words, when White Christian men attack feminism, they’re attacking repackaged forms of Native American faith traditions that erased their cultural origins. Similarly, Conservative White women like the Australian founder of Collective Shout, Melinda Tankard Reist, try to add Christianity to Feminism to impose her version of Christianity upon US male gamers, they’re trying to force their Abrahamic worldview upon repackaged forms of Indigenous people’s faith tradition and force the rest of America to comply to their dogmatic Christian bigotry through Visa, Paypal, and Mastercard.
Latin American countries are also displaying a similar shift as US Black Americans in their Christian faith in most cases:
However, there is one case where it is firmly more Christian oriented based upon Platonic philosophy:
We still have limited data on this; I do think this question is worth exploring and I would welcome randomly sampled data on it, especially since five percent of the US Black population has Indigenous heritage and Gen Z women are now leaving Churches due to feminist beliefs. Incidentally, I find it hilarious that Sam Harris now has to contend with supporting a racist stance against Black Americans in the podcast where he hosted Charles Murray versus the information from his wife’s own book on consciousness, which suggests plausible scientific hypotheses about consciousness in nature itself. If these hypotheses turn out to be true, then it would validate the beliefs of Black American youths and we’d have to re-examine the utility and limitations of IQ tests and the G-Factor. If not for his racism against Black Americans and his general narcissism, he’d probably have far more power and ability to end religion within the US and the broader West. For those who don’t see it, Sam Harris never admits that he’s wrong, only that he “changes his mind” when people call him out on his nonsensical positions. If he could own-up to his mistakes and show some humility, he would probably end Christianity faster than we all realize. The datasets for twenty years show that he does have that power; unfortunately, he’ll have to go it alone as Richard Dawkins is in his 80s and Christopher Hitchens passed away in 2011.
Nevertheless, regardless of their human flaws, it seems that Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens will probably be remembered for all of history or at least within this particular early 21st century time period as the ones who reshaped human history itself. While Western journalists kept making fatuous claims with headlines like “What Happened to the New Atheists?” every year; they somehow didn’t understand that direct criticisms that gained global prominence in 2007 would have this impact upon Christianity. I don’t want to vilify too much, I do think all of the news articles published on credible accusations of child abuse from Churches was important human rights work and that the Western journalists who did the investigations, chronicling, and publishing of these abuses are all caring individuals who are concerned about the rights of children. Anyone who made honest articles about such disturbing topics were clearly compassionate and serious about the human rights of children and tried to hold our society up to higher standards. This is not about those Western journalists who did the hard work about such painful topics to tell the US public the truth. This is strictly about the other Western journalists who chased after lies upon lies about Christian revivals. Let me be as blunt as I can: We really are in the Era of New Atheism, because all objective datasets have pointed it out for twenty years. This is not the case of me drawing a hasty conclusion as some type of fanboy; I waited twenty years to avoid doing that and I gave Western journalists the benefit of the doubt for three times in which their reporting was repeatedly proven to just be lies in defense of Christianity. This is a case of reality slapping Western journalists in the face for two decades and the journalists refusing to accept it, understand it, or analyze it so that the US public would remain ignorant to protect the dominant faith tradition of Christianity. If you disagree, you have to deal with these questions: What else is the primary cause, if it is not New Atheism? Why does the decline of Christianity begin with the prominence of New Atheism in 2007? You have to answer these questions, you cannot run away anymore if you want to be honest about what we’re seeing, and Western journalists need to take responsibility for having willfully lied to the entire US public for twenty years. This generation of journalism that chased after lies about Christian revivals will go down in history as among the worst, because they keep trying to separate reality into disparate and isolated parts that don’t make coherent sense and deliberately confuse people who trust them to know their jobs. They did this by ignoring the objective data on both Christianity and the rampant child abuse of non-Muslim children by the Islamic faith.
If nothing else, this means the Western Corporate news media, who have repeatedly argued complete falsehoods in favor of a Christian viewpoint, absolutely wanted to suppress the success of New Atheism and likely harbor the same hatred for Ex-Muslim Atheists. They appear to want everything else to be failing or worse than their faith in “true religions” of the Abrahamic faiths. They lied for twenty years about the effects of New Atheism, they downplayed and vilified them as individuals, and did everything in their power to suppress it and pursue complete lies as narratives. After the Iraq War 2003, ignoring Islam’s real harm upon children and others, politicizing Jeffrey Epstein’s child rape rings to vilify criticism as far-right conspiracy, and now this . . . how are they anything other than collective, glorified tabloid news networks? I have to cross-reference their news with the news from other countries, because they want to pursue a vested agenda instead of truth claims. If collective, 20-years of lies to deny the cultural impact of New Atheism doesn’t prove it after all their previous failures, then what does? It wasn’t AI, eroticism or weirdness in Anime, anti-woke themes in Video Games, smutty romance books, Woke books, or feminism. It is the intellectual critiques of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens that is wiping out Christianity forevermore. At this point, people may as well add another book onto the Bible called “The Book of Metaphors” and add a scene like this as the ending with the fictional character of Lucifer being one of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins: