No image. Not worth it.
Before the Four Horseman became a thing (turn of the Millenium), or what some call the “New Atheism”, we were a self-contained community of indignant fuckheads grinding our own axes sequestered in all forms of life, professional pursuits and political opinions – back then none of that mattered to anyone and no one cared. That “herd of cats”. All that mattered was a shared intolerance for bullshit – especially the supernatural kind. Nothing else was really relevant. Freethinkers – that’s all we really were. Just minds challenging minds. A demographic Jackson Pollock image of society that would get into screaming arguments with each other over minutae as an intellectual exercise just for its own sake – then get up dust off, shake hands and tomorrow forget anything ever happened. Contrast that with today.
But then Dawkins, Saint Hitch, Dennett and Harris found a stage in pop media and made the world aware. That was the death knell. It empowered the stupid to crawl out of their closets, still clutching their (in)security blankets and handfulls of burnt bible pages (see RationalResponse), and proclaim themselves to the world as pseudo-godless as well (see atheistnexus and related sites). People with no concept of the prohibition on bullshit we had always maintained. Just damaged souls with a bottomless pit of grievances religion had caused and no idea what Freethought actually was nor any kind of rudimentary self-discovered moral compass. Shit happened, culture wars ensued, new fundamentalist idiocies were rammed down our throats (see atheism+). The original cabal of actual atheism was shouted down and exiled as pariahs.
So we are back to square one – we lurk in the shadows and laugh amongst ourselves at the new stupid, the new church => the New New Atheists.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
grey lining 