Skepchick Rebecca Watson has raged up at atheists in a post she’s titled “Reddit makes me hate atheists” after a disgusting show of sexism and chauvinism on www.reddit.com‘s r/atheism forum.
She starts the post with:
Before I joined Reddit, I never thought of myself as a masochist. The great thing about Reddit is that you can subscribe to particular subreddits that represent your interests – in my case, that might be skepticism, atheism, feminism, science, and pictures of baby animals – and ignore the subreddits that make you angry, like Men’s Rights, Beating Women, Space Dicks, and [Choose Prefix] Jailbait. The problem is that Reddit is infested with shitty, racist, sexist, bigoted people, to the point where it’s nearly guaranteed that some of those people will post in your special interest subreddit. The larger the subreddit, the better the chance that this will happen.*
And so it is with r/atheism. R/atheism is very large, and so it is jam packed with assholes. And yet! I continue to read it every day. I read it even though I usually learn nothing new from it and it only serves to create and foster inside me an intense hatred of my fellow atheists.
Two days ago, 15-year old Redditor Lunam posted a thread called “What My Super Religious Mother Got Me For Christmas“, in which she linked to a photo of herself holding Carl Sagan’s Demon-haunted World.
She goes on and on to post a lot of the disturbing, sexual, derogatory comments that members from r/atheism posted up in reply (quite a few… in the many hundreds). I agree with her in that they are absolutely uncalled for and revolting. However, I don’t hate atheists for it. She should be hating on these atheists because of their remarks, but not hating on them as ‘atheists’.
This sort of rubbish happens in all cultures, in all societies and in all groups and races of people from men. Atheism doesn’t have a monopoly on sexism and chauvinism. Christians use this line of logic for hating atheists all the time when they use Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, etc. “They did terrible things, and they were atheists, therefore I hate atheists.” Atheism, the absence of a belief in a god/s, didn’t make either of these groups of people do what they did, so hating them because they’re atheists is irrelevant and pointless as it had no baring on their actions.
