Astral Codex Ten

New Atheists

8 min read

New Atheists

Article

New Atheists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 10, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""New Atheists""; “its most confrontational detractors - the New Atheists - ended up being judged harshly by history”; “a dig at New Atheists”. It most often appears alongside Scott Aaronson, Trump, America.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
A warning: I was mostly sympathetic to Internet atheism, but mostly unsympathetic to Internet feminism. I think these histories are easier to write from a sympathetic position - any study of Internet culture is basically a study of crazy people, and the failure mode is to point and laugh at them without looking for real understanding. Sometimes pointing and laughing is unavoidable (the New Atheists probably could have done without the Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise) but I think it should be tempered by an attempt at charity. All I can do is try my hardest, and trust readers to keep me honest if I screw up.
Inline links: Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise
Nobody uses the term "New Feminism", but maybe they should. Feminist ideas are age old, but their Internet version was something new and more aggressive, in exactly the same way the New Atheists had been. Going through the history bit by bit, with an unavoidable focus on the parts that most caught my interest:
"Woke" is suspiciously similar to another word that marked the end of its respective culture - "euphoric" as applied to New Atheists. Both words describe basically good things to be - woke people are aware, euphoric people are happy. Both were originally (supposedly) used in a non-ironic way, by true believers, to praise their respective movements. Both sounded so over the top that people started using them to make fun of believers. Both became so iconic that even now, five years later, if someone gets too annoying about atheism, you can just roll your eyes and say "Euphoric!" and it will be universally understood as a devastating retort that means you win the argument.
Advice For Unwoke Academic?
March 10, 2022 · Original source
How Should We Assess New Atheism? Our last monoculture was the conservative/Christian hegemony of the mid-to-late 20th century. It gradually crumbled, but its most confrontational detractors - the New Atheists - ended up being judged harshly by history. Should we care about this? Maybe the New Atheists were an epiphenomenon who didn’t contribute at all to the decline of Christianity in America. Or maybe they contributed some appropriate amount they can be proud of, and we shouldn’t care whether or not people disliked them afterwards. If you were giving strategic advice to Richard Dawkins in 2005, would you have told him to tone it down? How analogous is the current situation?
Inline links: being judged harshly by history
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
There are just some similar sounding words in these two debates, one of which is normative (how should the economy be run) and one of which is descriptive (how did species evolve), but Haidt latches on to it seemingly because he cannot reliably distinguish the normative and the prescriptive (and because he can’t resist a dig at New Atheists, many of whom favoured somewhat left-leaning economic policy).
This is really damning for a book that’s meant to be about understanding each other better and reaching across partisan divides. Haidt is witheringly harsh about simple-minded liberal partisans, exemplified in his telling by the New Atheists (the fact that the New Atheists are the ultra-partisan liberals is a whole other kettle of fish I’ll explore later) and simple-minded utilitarians, but his actual understanding of conservatives is basically the same as that of those he’s criticising, just with individual level selection replaced with group level selection.
He’s mad at New Atheists for being simple-minded enough to think that religion is nothing more than the product of natural selection predisposing the individual brain to think in magical ways and that therefore we can discard it as no longer useful. No, Haidt claims, in fact religion is the product of group selection predisposing whole cultures to build communal rituals around magical claims. I’m pretty sure the average religious conservative feels like these two positions are both pretty offensive ways of just not engaging with their actual beliefs but talking around them like they’re non-agents. The difference between them is pretty technical, and crucially Haidt’s position leads just as surely to the possibility of “and therefore we can discard them as they’re no longer adaptive to the current environment” as does that of his New Atheist foils.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
The author of the link goes on to say that for a while Christians claimed that there was no other reference to this goddess and that it was just dumb New Atheists seizing on fake history - but then archaeologists found lots of other references, plus she is an obvious cognate with other goddess like Greek Eos, so probably she did exist and did give her name to Easter.
The New AI Consciousness Paper
November 20, 2025 · Original source
For millennia, people have been attributing consciousness to trees and wind and mountains. The New Atheists argued that all religion derives from the natural urge to personify storms as the Storm God, raging seas as the wrathful Ocean God, and so on, until finally all the gods merged together into one World God who personified all impersonal things. Do you expect the species that did this to interact daily with AIs that are basically indistinguishable from people, and not personify them? People are already personifying AI! Half of the youth have a GPT-4o boyfriend. Once the AIs have bodies and faces and voices and can count the number of r’s in “strawberry” reliably, it’s over!
Inline links: GPT-4o boyfriend.
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
But I don’t think he did it cynically. At the turn of the millennium, the obsessed-with-their-own-cleverness demographic leaned firmly liberal: smug New Atheists, hardline skeptics, members of the “reality-based community”. But in the 2010s, liberalism became the default, the public switched to expertolatry, dumb people’s orthodoxies about race and gender became easier and more fun to puncture than dumb people’s orthodoxies about religion - and the O.W.T.O.C.s lurched right. Adams was borne along by the tide. With enough time, dedication, and archive access, you can hop from Dilbert comic to Dilbert comic, tracing the exact contours of his political journey.
And the Nineties (God’s Debris was published in 2001) were a special time. The decade began with the peak of Wicca and neopaganism. Contra current ideological fault lines, where these tendencies bring up images of Etsy witches, they previously dominated nerd circles, including male nerds, techie nerds, and right-wing nerds (did you know Eric S. Raymond is neopagan?) By decade’s end, the cleverest (ie most annoying) nerds were switching to New Atheism; throughout, smaller groups were exploring Discordianism, chaos magick, and the Subgenius. The common thread was that Christianity had lost its hegemonic status, part of being a clever nerd was patting yourself on the back for having seen through it, but exactly what would replace it was still uncertain, and there was still enough piety in the water supply that people were uncomfortable forgetting about religion entirely. You either had to make a very conscious, marked choice to stop believing (New Atheism), or try your hand at the task of inventing some kind of softer middle ground (neopaganism, Eastern religion, various cults, whatever this book was supposed to be).
Inline links: Eric S. Raymond is neopagan