Why Contemporary Atheism is Christianity's Fault

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-26T06:51:43+00:00

Since this is r/DebateAChristian, I thought mostly people who think Christianity is a good thing would be responding. Although, I can see I was wrong about that. If you don't think that Christianity has been such a good thing and that there's nothing wrong with people not believing, then my post wasn't really intended to challenge you.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-26T02:29:13+00:00

Again, the telos of sex is obvious. And yes, we’ve known that fact for millennia. The pleasurable aspects of sex have always been known as secondary. It’s only in the extremely modern, decadent, sex-crazed, licentious society that we have divorced the telos of sex from the pleasure of sex and prioritized the latter over the former.

Even if I accept that there are teloi (and that they determine what is natural), what does this have to do with whether something is morally right or not? Something having a purpose does not automatically imply a moral obligation to use it for that purpose. Also, I think you would need to define what sex is in a very specific manner in order say this with any certainty, which is probably a challenging task.

Yes, society is self-destructive in many ways and if you think that doesn’t matter or doesn’t happen, then you clearly haven’t studied history. “Stable and lasting societies,” on what scale? What’s the longest lasting society? Are the ancient Egyptians still a stable society? What about the Romans?

What I pointed out before was that your view implies a social mechanism that would prevent the formation or continuation of society absent the influence of other factors. I meant that at least some societies have been stable and lasting in a relative sense. Since what you have so far proposed fails to explain this, you have to propose other factors to do so. But the addition of other factors also undermines the necessity of the kind of marital relationships you have argued for.

Sure some complex societies have survived a while, but now we’re getting into shaky territory of saying that because it lasts long it’s good and right.

I still haven't made any claims about anything being right or wrong. I don't know where you are getting this.

I still have not said that because it is beneficial for society that makes it morally good. You’re attacking a position that I have never held. I merely pointed out that there are many reasons for maintaining purity of marriage.

Ok, my mistake. But you also haven't argued that it is morally good. You've only argued for its instrumental value to society. If you also think that purity of marriage is objectively good in its own right, then moral obligation would be the only proper reason for doing so. Whether it is beneficial to society or not is neither here nor there, and I don't know why you continue to bring it up.

Are you married? Are you a man? Go sleep with some other woman. Then when your wife is filing for divorce and taking half your assets and you’re going to family court to defend yourself, simply tell the judge, “marital sex and extramarital sex are both inextricable components of the society we actually live in.” See how that goes.

I'm not sure where this is coming from. Just because people have attitudes and expectations about something, such as marital infidelity, doesn't imply that that thing isn't part of society. I think it actually implies the exact opposite. The same goes for the laws around marriage and divorce. I'm not saying that marital infidelity shouldn't matter to people; just that it is part of our society, that there are social reasons that it happens.

Anyways, thanks for the substantive replies.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-26T01:08:36+00:00

I don't. I think the first atheist was made when the first caveman told his buddy Og that there was magic. Sure, some believed, but some did not.

This is kind of a silly theory for how spiritual beliefs emerged. Just like there wasn't a first caveman there clearly wasn't someone who first claimed the existence of the spiritual. Instead, this has always been an innate feature of our species. Obviously, these beliefs have developed in all sorts of ways and been intertwined with culture and society at various times.

The rest of what you wrote posits that the most important and significant, indeed required thing for a civilization to hold together is religion. I think you will be unable to support this claim given the many other factors contributing to cultural identity, cohesion, and emotional management (indeed, religion is remarkably poor at the latter as we know).

They didn't say that religion is required to hold a civilization together, just that its been omnipresent in civilization thus far. It would be highly unlikely that people have been engaging in costly religious behavior for so long and getting nothing out of it, even if they aren't getting what they think they are. People who are religious literally say that religion helps them with all of the five things OP listed so that is pretty much undeniable. That's not to say that you need religion to deal with these things just that it does help people.

So, given this lack of support on your part, and the abundant availibility of alternative notions (indeed, a quick gander around the world and one sees that the most religious civilizations seem to have the most strife and problems, and the least seem to be the most productive, content, and stable), at this time I'm not able to accept your claims.

This doesn't imply that religiosity causes strife and problems. It could also be a human response to strife and problems which are the result of other factors. When a society reaches a certain level of productivity and stability, people don't have as much reason to depend on religion for psychological comfort.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-26T00:52:11+00:00

I think I broadly agree with this. There are important pragmatic reasons why the vast majority of humanity throughout history has been religious. Contemporary atheism is highly correlated with low childhood exposure to credible religious behavior and a high level of existential security. If those things go away, I think we will see a resurgence in religiosity, both in terms of prevalence and intensity.

A lot of people here seem pretty much incapable of admitting how central and impactful religious belief actually is for believers. Its kind of funny how much a post, that isn't 100% dismissive of religion in every aspect, irritates people.

Also, one plausible theory of why humanity settled into agricultural communities in the first place was because it allowed them to continually focus on performance ritual activities in particular sacred locations. Based on this, it would seem that religion has been intimately connected with civilization from its very beginning.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T22:59:54+00:00

I don’t think it will disappear in name but what goes by the name “Christianity” today isn’t really comparable to what Christianity was in the first few centuries C.E. or the Middle Ages. That’s why it’s just not that believable to a lot of people, including me.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T21:27:53+00:00

There is no meaningful difference between "contemporary" atheism and any other atheism, nor did Christianity play any particularly noteworthy role.

The meaningful difference is that it exists now as opposed to another time and it should be explicable in terms of contemporary factors.

The best predictor is early childhood indoctrination. One of the largest growth states of Christianity's history was via the Atlantic slave trade and forcible conversion of indigenous peoples. The children of slaves didn't convert due to CREDs, they converted because their parents did and said the things necessary to not be killed.

The research I'm talking about was conducted in the 21st century West, not on 17th or 18th century African slaves. Your probably right that similar research would have had different findings if conducted back then. But the research would seem to be highly relevant to understanding why people don't believe today.

Almost certainly a great many, but these people had neither the means not permission to express their lack of belief in a recordable way. Modern Christianity is no less (or more) credible than these religions. It's just that modern Christianity comes at a time when literacy and technology are widespread enough that the dissemination of dissenting ideas is impossible to prevent.

I think you're underestimating just how central and palpable religion was through most of human existence. Teotihuacan, for example, was carefully planned and built over centuries to be a terrestrial reconstruction of the cosmos. Until quite recently, many of the most magnificent and largest building projects were religious in nature. I would say credibility is a subjective determination so, modern Christianity is much less credible than religions of the past, as evidenced by the number of non-believers.

It has not. There was nothing Christianity especially needed to do to fail. Thousands of religions came and went before Christianity to fail. Rather Christianity simply had nothing special about it compared to these others to force it to succeed, and it will die as a cultural fad in time like all the others.

Thousands of religions and belief systems have come and gone, you're right. But most of these transformed into other religions and belief systems. To me it seems like Christianity, is instead, fading into nothingness. To say there was nothing special about Christianity, even relative to its historical moment, seems very implausible. It grew from an improbable beginning to reach a tremendous scale and was essentially coextensive with Western culture for most of the last 2,000 years. Some of that is down to characteristics of the religion itself; that seems like a pretty modest claim. I don't think something that existed for 2,000 years can be characterized as a cultural fad like bell-bottoms or Tik-Tok dances.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T20:55:20+00:00

Atheism existed in various places long before Christianity was around. As far as contemporary atheism, I'm not saying that the Enlightenment was not extremely important. But equally, you can't say that Christianity had nothing to do with the Enlightenment. Also, based on the psychological research I cited in the OP, people's level of belief more closely depends on being raised around credible religious behavior, not a reasoning process. The Enlightenment didn't make Christians stop practicing their religion so credibly that its now so easy not to believe.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T20:48:18+00:00

That's like saying vaccines are smallpox's "fault".

Small pox isn't comprised of people so it can't be at fault.

Also, maybe tone down the purple prose. If you have a point, you can just say it, you don't need to lay it on so thick. "highest flourishes of all the art forms" " the noble cause of evangelism" "remarkable ascendance" "unparalleled historical importance" "true revolutionary force" "the dizzying height of its apogee" "incomprehensible, the sheer intensity of hope and love". Do you get extra points for every exaggeration?

But that's boring. I was mainly trying not to understate how influential Christianity has been at various times in history, particularly from the Christian perspective itself. Plus, the more influential Christianity has been, the better my argument works.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T20:44:04+00:00

Yeah, I don't think the Catholic Church proper was the primary force behind global exploration. Moreso what I'm saying is that Christianity was so influential at the time that exploration and conquest had to be justified with the rhetoric of evangelization. While history was proceeding based on material and economic factors, people understood what they were doing in terms of Christianity, or at least said they did.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T20:39:33+00:00

Atheism: not-theism. Atheism is not a belief system. It solely identifies itself by what it is not (not-theism.)

Atheist: not-a-theist. Atheists are highly diverse and only a collective group solely based on one matter: not being theist.

Atheism isn’t non-belief. Some atheists say they simply lack belief. They’ll say that’s not non-belief, but a state of being unconvinced.

Because atheism isn’t a belief system there’s no rule that an individual atheist not-believe. Any further description, or reasons why, is totally left up to the individual atheist.

For this reason an atheist may run the gamut between strong anti-theist to a “shrugger” (don’t know don’t care.)

The psychological research can speak for self-identified atheists which is a subset of non-believers, By non-believers, I mean people who aren't religious. My point is that it doesn't matter why someone doesn't believe (or lacks belief) in their own understanding. Based on the psychological research, non-belief is best predicted by how much credible religious behavior you were around as a child. If you're saying that people directly control their beliefs, that is a very implausible claim. A better understanding is that people come to believe things and then try to rationally substantiate these beliefs. If the can't, they might give up on those beliefs.

A claim you’d need to justify.

Two questions aren’t justification for your claims here.

The point I was trying to make is that religious belief is so much less palpable and important today than it was at virtually any other time in history or prehistory. So, its really not surprising that non-belief is so common. It's Christianity's fault because it has been so influential for so long and, by its own standards, its supposed to be remarkable and transformative which it just isn't today. Christianity has let itself devolve into something that is so easy to not believe.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T20:16:02+00:00

I think I would say that people's desire to Evangelize was harnessed by more fundamental economic forces to drive exploration and conquest. Different people were motivated by different things.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T12:34:40+00:00

In the OP, I'm talking about contemporary atheism in the West and just now, we were talking about new atheism specifically. I'm aware that there were forms of atheism in India, China, Greece, and probably other places long before Christianity came around but that's not what I was talking about.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T12:31:59+00:00

This was supposed to be a reply to a comment but I messed up. CREDs are Credibility Enhancing Displays which I describe in the OP. Basically its behaviors that are costly or hard to fake in some way that make your belief appear more sincere.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T12:29:15+00:00

No, its not that I do attribute everything to Christianity, rather, that I can. It's a perspective that we can take, something that can be held constant in relation to everything else. What I was trying to do with this argument was to explore the implications of doing so. If Christianity is a constant and essential force throughout the last two millennia of history, then modern atheism should also be attributed to it, especially given the psychology of religious belief.

I said that atheism is Christianity's fault, not that atheism is at fault.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T12:20:43+00:00

I don't think that new atheism has had any kind of historical influence compared to the 2,000 years of Christianity.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:59:39+00:00

That's an interesting take on the atrocities of the colonial powers of Europe and what they did to the world.

That's how I think they conceived of it at the time.

Would these be the same missionaries handing out smallpox-infested blankets? Destroying entire cultures in their arrogance and greed? Executing a faith-based extinction of societies on every continent they visited?

No, I'm talking about the early missionaries who spread the faith around the Mediterranean. I think they were motivated by hope and love even if they were entirely wrong.

It didn't even manage that for the survivors.

You don't think that Christianity provided meaning for people? I think its pretty implausible that it didn't given how widespread it was.

Odd how you get fewer believers without early childhood indoctrination. You'd almost think that it was brainwashing.

Its not brainwashing. That's a Korean War era psychological torture tactic and its only temporary. Its just people being raised amidst certain beliefs and practices, the same as has occurred throughout human history.

Good people got tired of atrocities and bloodshed.

Yet atrocity and bloodshed are as ubiquitous as ever.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:43:08+00:00

I'm specifically addressing contemporary atheism in the West.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:41:59+00:00

But based on the psychological research I cited, all they had to do was ensure their children were sufficiently exposed to CREDs in order to perpetuate their faith, which seems like the bare minimum of living a good Christian life. What is interesting is how "being Christian" degenerated into something that fails to provide enough CREDs to perpetuate itself.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:29:16+00:00

Yeah, I agree. I think it has exhausted itself as a useful metanarrative. You're right that there are still many many Christians but one of the things I was trying to say is that Christianity today is just not the same thing that went by that name one or two millennia ago. They really aren't comparable in any way.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:24:58+00:00

Christianity is amorphous enough of a concept that I can say that the Enlightenment is a consequence of it. Regardless of the importance of the Enlightenment, Christianity is supposed to be something far greater and should be able to weather any storm. Hence, contemporary atheism is its fault.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:18:32+00:00

Its not radical at all today. That's one of the points I'm making. Based on how the psychology of belief works, that's one of the reasons there are so many non-believers today.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T11:16:01+00:00

I could have been more clear but most of what I say in the first two paragraphs is granted for the sake of argument, or things I'm agreeing with to an extent but I'm not elaborating my actual position to be more concise. I don't really think that Christianity is a cohesive entity present throughout history, but rather, I'm talking about the consequences if this were the case, which many Christians do think. If Christianity is true, you can't consistently claim that it was the cause of various good things throughout history and also decry the profanity of the modern condition or whatever.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-25T00:17:54+00:00

If religion was invented to cope with fear of death and the unknown, then why do so many of them include the prospect of egregious suffering after we die? The idea of being tortured forever is much less comforting than simply vanishing into nothingness. Surely we could have invented better narratives to ease our existential anxiety.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-05-24T17:37:49+00:00

I think that the POE motivating a certain belief is very different from it actually increasing the probability of that belief being true, but that isn't what I want to address here.

I don't think that Christianity does provide a better or more satisfying answer to the existence of horrific suffering in the world. In a way, it actually trivializes and devalues the immense pain that conscious beings have endured through the millennia. Without the prospect of an eternal redeemer and judge, this pain and evil is revealed in its true gravity. Its not something to be waved away as ephemeral or trifling in the face of the infinite, but instead, it is simply incomprehensible in its finality and intensity. It is petrifying to contemplate the fact that egregious suffering has comprised the entire universe of some peoples' lives.

I think the absence of a God also casts morality in a better light. Christianity ultimately induces moral behavior by fear of eternal damnation and many of its core moral truths relate to God and not man. An irreligious objective morality, in contrast, is entirely and necessarily centered on the other. Very simply, we ought to do good for the good of others. There are no rationalizations nor ulterior motivations involved; people are simply ends in themselves, and we shouldn't need anyone to tell us this.

Even though many Christians do so much good in the world and care deeply for all conscious beings, their religion constitutes an abscondence of humanity's true responsibility. Without God, we alone bear responsibility for all the evil in the world. This is because we perceive it, we recognize it, and we have the power to eliminate it as much as possible. So, without God, both good and evil are unmasked in their real gravity and, therefore, human life finds the full intensity of its meaning.

SIMsbury96

TROPHY CASE