Atheist clones and 'stock responses' in the evolution of the atheist community

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Mon Jun-13-11 05:49 PM
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Atheist clones and 'stock responses' in the evolution of the atheist community

In a conversation at a friend's blog, especially the comments, a criticism I have seen before arose; we atheists are all repeating the same arguments that we hear from the arch-bishops of atheism make, and we are all Dawkins clones (or PZ clones, or whatever). This got me thinking about how the atheist community has, over the last several years, started to coalesce. I have seen the community start to come together in social, political, and memetic ways that may look like clones to the outside, but from the inside speaks of our growing unity, even among the various in-fighting about tone, strategy, etc. Ultimately, I believe that our clone-like behavior is indicative of a strength, not in itself, but in that it is a symptom of that growing unity.

I remember back in the days of yahoo chat (does that still exist? I'm too lazy to find out right now...), while in the religion debate chat rooms, discovering the atheist community online (this was before the days of 9/11 or around the time of the start of the Infidel Guy show). I remember how after a few weeks of listening to and talking with people who came in, I saw the same arguments occur again and again. Christians (and sometimes Jews, Muslims, or even some pagans) would come in, make their arguments, and the atheists in the room would seemingly repeat what they said 5 minutes ago to another theist chatter. What I began to realize was that these atheists who came in night after night were responding to a small set of claims, or set of related claims, made by theists of many different conclusions. In other words, it didn't matter what they believed, they had similar arguments, emotional appeals, and experiential anecdotes to present as proof. There was very little actual difference between theistic claims in general. It was around this time I discovered that I had always been an atheist, and that I just didn't know it because I had misunderstood the term and its relation to religion and belief.

Once I started to become active in the IRL community (around early 2002), I saw a lot of the same thing happening. And so finally, in around 2005-2006, the various atheist books started to be published by Sam Harris and so forth, I started to see, in print all over book stores, all the arguments I had been seeing for years. Yes, the arguments were often a little different, sexed up, and given flare that they may not have had in yahoo chat and in my experience with the community at the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia (now just the Freethought Society). But they were really essentially the same.

Since then, atheists will freely refer to a concept of Harris, a quip of Hitchens, or a witticism of Dawkins when at meetings or in conversation with theists. They do so for a number of reasons, whether because they like the way that person said it, that was the first way they heard it put, or because they are trying to identify themselves as being familiar with the work of said person. But in the end, these memes that have become part of the atheist community are evidence that we are really a community with our own language, developing history, and shared experiences. In many ways we atheists are often fiercely independent and strong minded (hopefully not stubborn, because many people think they are strong minded when they are actually stubborn), but we have developed a community that has shared ideas. We share them because they work. We are not repeating them merely to copy other people, but because we find them useful in conversation or debate. It is a kind of evolution of atheist arguments, where memes which have a better zing or are more affective remain as part of our shared language.

http://www.examiner.com/reason-religion-in-philadelphia/atheist-clones-and-stock-responses-the-evolution-of-the-atheist-community