But then I think, maybe they're fighting a cultural battle. After all religion is as old as humanity & maybe releasing its hold on our collective consciousness is something that will take generations of work. & maybe religious ideas are deep in the structure of our institutions & social organization which prevent us from solving problems.
But THEN I think... in all probability the real villains of today have nothing to do with religion, the things to worry about are resource overconsumption, resource misallocation, technological authoritarianism, economic exploitation, etc... & the atheist intellectuals are just a sign that the rich people of the world have too much time on their hands & nothing better to do.
What do you think? Is atheism today an important cultural battle?
I'm an atheist and not particularly militant, but do realize that if you weren't raised in the middle of a particularly dysfunctional religion, then your perspective will be different from someone who was.
I was raised in a dysfunctional religion that was used to make some people vulnerable and others exploitative. Some of what I've seen is almost as extreme as the most militant religions overseas. There is an element of power dysfunction that uses the ultimate power of God to justify itself. That part is a disease, horrific, and needs to end. To give an abysmal example, there is a man right now who is the elder of a rural church who is adored by its members, but who is also outrageously, physically abusive towards certain people. It's incomprehensible, but it is literally happening. He tells people that "God understands him, and so its okay", and because of the dysfunction, the congregation as a whole accepts this. There is something about claiming the power of god that overrides any other claims to power in a completely irrational manner. When I was a child there was another elder of the same denomination who was molesting all of his children and eventually was run out of town for breaking the leg of a child. He got away with his bad behavior possibly longer because of his position. Alot of people don't realize there are these weird, horrific little cult dynamics peppered across the landscape of the U.S.
I make a rational attempt to not impose my anger about these incidents onto the whole of religion because there are polite congregations who are healthy and normal, and who like to get together to think about inspiring things and to become better people. I generally like to view religion with curiosity to first understand why humans create these social structures and to understand what they get out of it. I don't like to control people - especially their most personal inner space of identity and belief. I am not interested in fighting a cultural battle to make people stop believing something. I won't even do that with close friends and family because I also sense enough of people's internal emotional and psychological frameworks to know that you could really destabilize and hurt someone profoundly if you rip away their inner construct of reality.
What I do care about is healthy education for the young. I care about teaching children critical thinking based on reasoning and logic. I care a lot about teaching people to be skeptical and ask 'why' continually. People need to question every authority and never fall into a childlike trust and admiration of them. I think we need to be rigorous and questioning in our thinking, and then however that affects religion, so be it. If it eliminates it, if it reconstructs it, whatever the result will likely be the best for humanity if you just provide the healthiest, best tools and then let the process unfold naturally.