“New atheism” is bigotry, not enlightenment

Not too long ago, I went through a phase where I was watching YouTube videos of debates, interviews, and round tables of the new atheists. I was drawn to what seemed to be their rationality. This led me to the broader skeptic community on YouTube.

While I found their so-called rationality intriguing, it wasn’t long before I realized their politics didn’t align with mine. Stefan Molyneux was probably the first whose politics I realized diverged from mine.

As time went on, I started seeing Islamophobic themes emerging from people like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, and Maher. They argue that religiosity has no place in Western societies, but their discussions on religiosity centre around Islam; rarely do they talk about Buddhism, Sikhism, or Judaism, for example.

Then the transphobia started emerging, which I first noticed with people like Woodford. How they fall back on tired tropes of binary—such as anatomy and chromosomes—to justify their so-called “rational” approach to topics like trans athletes.

And that’s to say nothing of the homophobia, racism, and sexism prevalent in the discourse that comes out of the skeptic community.

The skeptic community likes to present themselves as rational and enlightened, but it’s just thinly veiled bigotry.