deviantart.com

My first alarm bells about what I term new, new atheism began going off several years ago when the phenomenon of atheist social sites began surging in popularity.

Belief may be the death of intellect for the armchair philosopher, but for the realist, it is popularity, and populism, that does the real damage. And having experienced the heartbreak of watching some of these sites from point of inception, where they were amazing hotbeds of dissident discourse amongst some of the brightest on the ‘net, slowly degrade, as the masses arrived, into a toxic miasma of faux moralism, ideological axe grinding, Gollum inspired “don’t be a dick” censorship and witch hunting, it is difficult to not succumb to despair.

Figureheads which should have acted with integrity and shown clear leadership to maintain intellectual and ethical standards instead succumbed to the lure of chasing ratings and audience numbers at any cost. So hope got drowned in a bucket and what we ended up with instead was a bunch of godless Oprah Winfrey shows. (more…)