5 Things I Hate About Atheists (As an Atheist) – Britt Hartley

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What annoys me about atheists as an atheist. So, here’s my list for what annoys me about my own camp and my own community. And I’m doing this one because I recently got annoyed with atheists personally and too I wish every camp was better at calling itself out on its own BS rather than just calling out everyone else on their own BS. So, I want Christians, for example, to be more honest about the problems in their own camp or their own doubts. And if I want that from other people, it’s something that I also have to participate in, which is easy for me this week because some atheists annoyed me this week. So, let’s talk about it.

First on my list is a lack of empathy for those who deconstruct to atheism. And this came up for me last week when I was on the Myth Vision YouTube channel. Go check it out. It was one of my favorite conversations that I’ve had all year. We went to a lot of nuance spaces. I was able to talk a lot about my story and some things, just some nuanced stuff. But this comment section really came after me. And this isn’t about me being defensive. Like I get negative comments all day every day. But what bothered me about these specific negative comments is because they lacked so much empathy for what it’s like to go through a religious deconstruction. And I am so happy for secular people who grew up secular. And they just accepted early on that God isn’t coming. And they just kind of live and die like everything else in nature and they accept that and they develop skills to help process anything that’s problematic and so they’re fine and nihilism isn’t a problem because they’re optimistic nihilists or they’re absurdists or they’re stoics or they’re secular humanists and they just accept that there’s no objective grounding for these things and they’re off living their best life with the one life that they have. I know a lot of secular people and atheists who are like that and I am so happy for people who have that. I didn’t.

So when I talk about my experience with religious deconstruction and how atheism was hard for me, how the death of God was extraordinarily painful for me, how nihilism was existentially devastating for me, even suicidal for me, how it led me towards an existential crisis, it should be okay that I have that experience and you have a different experience in being an atheist. There should be room in secularism for people who like just from the get-go did great in it and were raised in it and want everybody else to have that opportunity too. And I get that that group of people don’t even really understand why people are religious because from the outside it looks silly. Like it looks ridiculous. I get that. But there should be room for people like me who had a rough ride getting there. And I get super annoyed that sometimes secularism, especially like the very atheist male-dominated side of these atheist spaces, just leave no room for you to have a different experience. Like just because my path to atheism or nihilism was a painful one doesn’t mean it takes away from your experience that it has been a freeing and positive thing for you. Like both should be okay. And I get a little tired like when I get push back from religious people, I expect it. That’s fine. But when I get push back from atheists who laugh at me that it took me so long to deconstruct psychological and social anchors and how painful that journey was for me, it just comes off as a very gross lack of empathy. It’s like a Christian would have so much empathy for me if I was a sinner my whole life and found God and came to church, but there’s no empathy from the other side if I was religious for my early life and it took me time to deconstruct that because it’s embedded into my brain. That just seems very unnecessary and very tiring for me personally because I’m not going to shame the part of myself that did the best with what she could with what she knew. You know what I mean? So that just that just annoyed me this week. And I think we all know like an atheist who’s like that who just really feels like people who go through religion and have a hard time leaving it are it like that’s just such a foreign experience that you just laugh at it. And I just don’t think that’s fair. And I think it’s very bad taste and icky and I don’t like it.

All right, my second one. This is a similar one. I dislike how atheists often think that being religious is just stupidity and just indoctrination. Like yes, indoctrination is real. Yes, bad ideas exist. Yes, harmful systems exist. I have critiqued them. I have critiqued them publicly for years. But when religion gets flattened into religious people are just dumb, I think it reveals in atheism a kind of intellectual laziness that ironically mirrors the dogmatism that atheists claim to oppose. So religion is not just a set of propositions about the universe. Something like Mormonism, which is where I grew up, it is not just a set of propositions and historical truth claims that are like crazy when you look at it from the outside. It is not just that. And when we treat religion as if it’s just that, I think we’re the ones that end up looking dumb. Because religion is also attachment theory. It’s community bonding. It’s mortality management. It’s identity formation. It’s ritualized nervous system regulation. It’s intergenerational meaning transfer from grandparent to parent to child. It’s grief containment. It’s social belonging. It’s moral scaffolding. It’s narrative coherence. And if you think people cling to religion just because they are stupid, then I think that we reveal that we just like don’t understand human psychology and you do not understand the reasons why we co-evolved with religion. It is not just because of brainwashing. And I would rather talk to a Christian about that sometimes than talk about that with an atheist because sometimes the atheists like just dismiss all of that. Even though there’s solid science showing that religion is much more than just a set of truth claims. The cognitive science of religion shows us that belief in gods is not an IQ problem. It is a byproduct of agency detection, pattern recognition, attachment wiring, our deep needs subconsciously to buffer our death anxiety. And religion persists because it’s doing so much psychological and social work. And sometimes it does that work incredibly well. And so when atheists dismiss religious people as idiots, they miss the opportunity to understand why religion is so powerful. And if you don’t understand the function of something, then you can’t responsibly critique it and you can’t responsibly replace it. If you really think that all religion would just go away if the next generation just wasn’t brainwashed, then I feel like that’s such a shallow critique that that’s more of a critique on secularism than it is on religion because that’s it’s just so shallow. And there’s this subtle arrogance in pretending that we the enlightened secular ones are immune to the same mechanisms. Like humans do not stop meaning making when they drop God. They tend to redirect it into politics and identity and ideology, moral grandstanding, online tribes. So if you think that you are above like all indoctrination or above like all of the psychological needs that humans have, you’re probably just swimming in a different fishbowl and just don’t recognize it.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I am defending bad theology. I’m interested in psychological honesty. And psychological honesty requires admitting that religion is not primarily about intelligence. It’s about safety and belonging and existential orientation for all these anchors that help to give you some stability for your psyche. And so if we want to build something healthier on the other side of belief, we have to understand and respect what belief was doing in the first place. And there are still some things that to this day religion still does better. It does community better. It passes down rituals and stories better. It has better resources for processing death as a community. Lots of things. So I dislike that atheists think that they are smart and religious people are dumb because my IQ did not change. I was smart when I was a Christian and developed incredibly complex theories of theology and apologetics. I was smart when I let go of these theories when I got better explanations for why we are religious. I wasn’t an idiot either time and my IQ did not change in the process. Also, with this one, I think there’s a lack of intellectual humility when you think you’re smarter than everyone else because your rationality as an atheist is not grounded. If your ability to reason came about because of evolutionary processes and evolution does not evolve us to see according to truth but instead to see according to evolutionary fitness then you actually have no objective ground to stand on that you are more rational anyways. Now just because like I give that point to the Christian apologists when they say your rationality isn’t grounded doesn’t mean that we go back to God. It’s just admitting that yes, there’s a lack of ultimate groundedness when it comes to rationality. Even so, I think atheism is a better position than pretending that you have objective rationality or objective morality. But it’s still a problem that should take this sense of high horse that we feel as atheists. So, take Joe, I don’t know if it’s folly or foley. I think it’s foley. But I’ve heard it said both ways. He’s the philosophical guy who’s always on Alex O’Connor’s YouTube channel and they’re talking about philosophy and he said the thing that keeps him up at night is this problem because both sides use circular reasoning like when you ground rationality in God or the Bible like that’s circular reasoning but it’s circular reasoning that’s self-sustaining but on the atheist side it’s like circular reasoning that’s self-destructing your rationality continues to chip at your ability to trust your rationality at all and I wish there is more intellectual humility from atheists rather than the annoying peacocking that you get in these atheist, particularly philosophical male spaces. Not to mention, when you take free will out of the conversation, there’s no high horse to stand on. I didn’t choose that my core values are things like authenticity or honesty or truth seeking. And my brother didn’t choose that his core values are loyalty. And that caused us to experience religion differently. I didn’t choose that I’m neurodivergent. I didn’t choose the books that I read versus other books that I read, right? And so when you break down that like if none of us have free will then how do you have any ground to stand on when you say that you are smarter or better than anyone else? Because if you were in their situation with all of those inputs you would be them. You know what I mean? And so I just like it just gets so annoying. And there are some times where there are some spaces I go to where the religious people are much more humble and much more kind and much more available to listen to different perspectives and points of view than some atheist hangouts that I’ve been in which are sometimes very one-dimensional and making fun about how everybody else is stupid. Not all atheist spaces, not all religious spaces, but I have had that experience.

Number three on my list, I’m just going at my hit list right now because I was annoyed at this comment section. And I, you know, I usually don’t get annoyed at comment sections because whatever anyone says is like their business and I don’t spend a lot of time in comment sections. It was just more so that I was disappointed. I was disappointed that I went to this platform that has so many atheists and secular people and they couldn’t make any space for my experience. And so I think I was just kind of hurt by that. You know what I mean? Because it feels like these are my people in the sense that like I’m an atheist too. Why isn’t my experience acceptable in these spaces? So that you know it just kind of that stung a little bit. I’m not going to lie.

Okay. Number three, I dislike the intuition that all spirituality is by definition woo. I’ve literally walked atheists through all the science behind rituals, for example. There’s so much science on the effectiveness of rituals and they will still not participate because it’s too damaging to their ego that they are above all of these things. I have literally walked atheists through the—tend to be men. Women in my experience tend to be much more open to the space. But I’ve literally walked atheists through the neuroscience of ritual. How repetitive embodied action regulates the nervous system. How synchronized movement and shared attention can increase oxytocin and social bonding. It can help you process emotions. How symbolic acts help the brain consolidate emotional memory and process it and let it go so that it’s not bothering you so it’s not showing up in your body. How marking transitions through ritual reduces anxiety increases meaning coherence. And when you do this in community is just really beautiful because you have more than just your body holding these things that are really maybe hard for you to hold. And none of that requires belief in invisible forces. I’m literally just showing them the science that all you need here is a body and a brain. We’re not I’m not doing anything metaphysical. Rituals scientifically help process emotions, increase pleasure, decrease pain, and mark values. So I’ll show them the science behind doing something like a sin ritual around Halloween time where you wear different clothing to mark the occasion. You write down something that you want to let go of during this time of Halloween and death and winter coming and you use that as a way to reflect and dig into what’s bubbling under the surface of your attention. You want to let go of something. So you write all about it. You throw it in a bonfire. Like the fire is not magic, but the sensory intensity of the heat and the light and the smell creates this emotional environment and it helps the brain encode closure. And then when you do this in community like we are in well-established scientific territory, co-regulation, narrative processing, social buffering against stress. Being witnessed changes how memory is stored. Being held by others changes how we metabolize shame. And then when you set an intention and there’s this cauldron of intention with all these other people and you want of what you want to lean into you like what’s bringing you life in the next chapter and it works not because like the universe is tracking your vibration but because the brain is predictive when you consciously orient towards something your attention system starts to scan for it. You’re literally shaping your perception and queuing your brain towards what you want your brain to notice. And when you put that all together, you have this embodied multi-sensory processing layered with communal regulation. And there is substantial peer-reviewed research showing that these embodied practices can sometimes be more effective in moving emotion through your body and letting something go and moving forward than purely something like cognitive reframing or cognitive behavioral therapy. Trauma researchers have been saying this for years. And so I’ll walk an atheist through this and show them this is not capital M magic. It’s not spells. It’s not some energy frequency in the universe. But at the level of the brain, there’s so much going on with these women who are gathering in their kind of medieval dresses and their cloaks for a sin ritual. And I’m showing them all of the solid peer-reviewed science and what’s going on there. And they just won’t even go there even when the science is there because it feels like participation is like contamination. It feels like they’re slipping back into something that they worked hard to escape or it feels like they’re losing their identity as this like rational robot. And I understand that instinct like either you’ve been burned by magical thinking and so you overcorrect or you have this identity being a person who just doesn’t do woo woo stuff, right? And so you want nothing that even resembles it. But rejecting something like ritual, that’s only one part of what religions do. But by rejecting in this case ritual entirely because it sometimes comes in supernatural packaging is like rejecting all of music because hymns exist and you can drop the metaphysics and keep the mechanism. Not everything that looks spiritual is irrational and woo woo. Like some of it is just deeply human technology and I get frustrated when secular pride prevents people from accessing tools that could actually help them in life. Like these tools are just helpful. They just make life better. And I again like I get that more in male-dominated spaces which is why I do these kinds of activities almost exclusively with women because so many atheist men I know wouldn’t be caught dead throwing something in a fire and doing a little dance and singing a little song or whatever we do because it doesn’t look rational because Christopher Hitchens wouldn’t do it. And so they don’t participate in all the ways that life are lowercase m magic. And that is frustrating for me because the science is there. And not pseudoscience. Like I’m not saying the science is there and like I’m just hiding stuff in quantum spookery and all of that. I’m saying like real studies with peer-reviewed results on how the brain and body work. But because it doesn’t have the look or the identity signaling of these hyperrational atheistic spaces, it’s just all seen as woo. And no, not all atheists. And if you’re on my channel, like maybe this just isn’t you at all, but we all like I at least I do know a lot of people who are like that.

Number four for me on my hit list this week is lack of community building. Trevor Noah recently pointed something out that I think secular spaces need to take more seriously in his discussion with Mom Donnie. He was talking about why the secular left struggles to organize and inspire the way that the right sometimes can and the way that religious movements historically have been able to. And he floated this idea that part of it might be the decline of religion itself. That not because religion is politically correct, but religion trains people to believe in a future that doesn’t yet exist and work towards it. And so religion says this is reality and also we are collectively working towards something bigger and better than this reality. And it trains the imagination. It trains collective hope. It gives people a shared story, a shared ritual calendar, a shared moral horizon. And when that infrastructure disappears, especially on the political left, his idea was that something very real disappeared with it. The problem isn’t that atheists don’t believe in God. The problem is that we often don’t replace what God was scaffolding. We deconstruct the metaphysics and then somehow assume that the social architecture will just hold itself up. But it doesn’t. Churches, they gather weekly. They sing together. They eat together. They mourn together. They welcome children into the tribe. They bury parents. They show up when your marriage falls apart. They mark seasons. They create intergenerational continuity. They give people a role in a story. Do they give a lot of bad stuff, too? Yes, I will always talk on this channel about all the bad. But what does secularism offer at scale in community? A subreddit like a debate channel, a conference once a year where we gather together and then we wonder why religious communities still kind of outperform us in so many markers of human well-being. And so what annoys me about atheists is not that we reject supernatural claims like we should. Atheism should be the default response of just like, hey, I’m not convinced of a theistic god. That seems like a rational starting place to me. That’s not my beef. It’s that we seem to sometimes be allergic to building anything warm and structured in its place. Like we critique churches constantly, brilliantly, but have we ever really outcompeted them in community, in care, and so we’re very good at saying what isn’t true? But what can be just kind of like I don’t know, just sometimes not degrading, but like sometimes it just gets tiring is what I’ll say. Just being in this online space where it’s all critique and no solution. And if atheists couldn’t speak except for if they have actual alternative ways of thinking for community and they are a part of the solution, I think there’d be very few atheists talking. And so this loops back to everything else on my list. If you dismiss ritual as woo you won’t build embodied practices. If you dismiss spirituality as stupid, you won’t create story and symbolic depth that’s going to bring people together. If you dismiss religion as indoctrination, you won’t study about how it was so psychologically resilient. If you pride yourself on being purely rational, you won’t invest in emotional infrastructure. And then these secular spaces start feeling thin. And that’s what frustrates me. It’s not that atheists are wrong about God. Like I’m an atheist. I don’t believe God is coming. I don’t believe in any ultimate grounding. I accept the basic evolutionary story. But if you remove all of that and don’t replace belonging, if you remove story and don’t provide new narratives and you have no tools to offer children, then we shouldn’t be shocked when Ayaan Hirsi Ali becomes an atheist after Islam and then goes back to Christianity like she spends a few years in secularism and found it to be lacking. And so we shouldn’t be surprised also that people are returning to political religions. We shouldn’t be surprised when the children of atheists now in the data they are kinder than the children of Christians. But compared to their religious peers, they often have more anxiety and a lot of issues with identity and belonging and security, which is why atheist children sometimes will have higher anxiety and depression because they’re operating with less tools than their religious peers. And so humans need orientation and shared narrative and ritual and meaning scaffolds. And if secularism wants to be more than just an argument online, it has to become a better ecosystem for that. And what annoys me about atheists is too many of us just like to stand on the high horse of being better than religious people and critiquing religion, which is really fun. Like it’s really fun to be that guy. But then I think I just think too often we stop there. And I can tell on social media because I’ll do so many posts on ways to rebuild, on ways to raise secular children, on ways that I’ve rebuilt my own life, on spirituality. I do lots of videos on that content. The reason that nobody sees them is because nobody watches them because they don’t tap into that like righteous indignation feeling, right? My videos that talk about why some religion doing something is problematic, those do really well. You get to feel like they are the problem and it taps into something really tribal. But when I talk about rebuilding and all the complicated hard ways of for example rebuilding a family, even a family system where the kids get all the benefits of the religious kids but without the religion, those are hard, difficult conversations. They’re complex. They’re nuanced. And when I do those videos, like nobody listens. Nobody listens. They just want that quick dopamine of religious people are stupid. And those videos do really well. And I think there’s something like addictive about that that’s revealing to what’s going on sometimes in these atheist spaces.

And my next beef, I don’t know if it’s going to be my last one. I’m kind of on a roll here. I’m just kind of annoyed with atheist men last week. I’m human. I get irked. It happens. And my next one is that I just hate the assumption, and I see this in so many arguments, that the whole world could just become secular tomorrow and we could all just magically turn into Denmark if we drop religion. And I see this constantly in comment sections that like Nordic countries get held up like this. Like it’s this mic drop. Like just look at Finland, look at Norway. They’re barely religious. They rank high in happiness. Therefore, religion is the problem. And if you just drop God, then you’ll be Norway. Like, you’ll be Finland. And I’m not against becoming more like Norway. Like, I like social safety nets. I love high social trust. I like functioning health care and low corruption, strong education systems. But what annoys me about this argument is how simple the argument is made when it gets presented. Like Finland did not just wake up one morning, lose belief in God and then become a stable, wealthy, educated, high trust society overnight. These societies have extremely high levels of social trust, low corruption, strong institutions, robust welfare states, high literacy, high education attainment, and like relative cultural like they’re culturally homogeneous. They’re kind of more similar than they are different as far as diversity levels. There’s low levels of violent crime. There’s strong civic participation. There’s wealth. There’s infrastructure. And so when you have that level of economic security and predictable institutions and health care and public education and low corruption, your nervous system just doesn’t need supernatural stories and scaffolding in the same way. And existential security theory talks about this directly that when survival feels stable, religion declines not because people suddenly reasoned better or they just got educated out of religion. It’s because they feel safer. So they don’t need religion in the first place. And so religion is really functioning as this compensating mechanism in these environments of instability. And so when institutions are weak, when corruption is high, when health care is unreliable, when violence is common, when economic mobility is low, people tend to lean harder into transcendent frameworks. And it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because uncertainty increases threat detection. And you’re searching for some way to make it okay. You’re searching for some existential anchors. So when atheists say, “Just become secular and you’ll be like Denmark,” they’re ignoring kind of how this happens, right? It’s not that Denmark became secular and then became stable. It’s that Denmark became stable, therefore religion became less necessary. Therefore, they seem to be doing okay without God. You cannot export the low religiosity without also exporting the high institutional trust. Like you cannot replicate Nordic secularism in a country with a lot of diversity, in a large country, in a country with high inequality, fragile institutions, ethnic fragmentation, low social cohesion, and expect identical outcomes. There was also a cultural factor that rarely gets mentioned in these comment sections that Nordic countries developed relatively cohesive identities over long periods of time. High homogeneity, shared language, shared norms that increases trust and trust lowers anxiety. And lowering your anxiety reduces the need for God at all. And you can’t just take that like the end of that road and just like transplant it into America. America does not have high homogeneity. It does not have a culture outside of Christianity unless you’re Native American. Like America may not be a Christian nation in the sense that like God established this country, but it’s a young country that was formed by Christians. We don’t really even know what our culture is outside of it. And so if secularism wants to scale, it has to first deal with sociology and economics and psychology and political stability. It has to ask what are the conditions that allow people to have our country be so good that it loosens our grip on God without causing us to go into collapse or extremism. Because if you want a world that doesn’t cling to God, you have to build a world that doesn’t feel existentially unsafe. And the atheists that are talking about building that in the world’s most violent countries, which are also the world’s most religious countries, are not talking about that. Like they’re talking about it as if the world’s most violent countries are religious and the religion is causing the violence. But in those countries, there is no institutional justice. So it’s not crazy that religion is high because you have to believe in justice in the next life or the grief of the lack of justice in this life is too heavy for a human to bear and continue on. But atheists will just look at that and say just lose religion because if you did then you know you’ll be Denmark. Not realizing that if that country actually did lose religion you wouldn’t just automatically go into a secular country that’s doing fine. It would actually open up a vacuum that would lead the country into authoritarianism. And so sometimes religion is a part of the process by which a country builds social truths and culture and stability and then it can outgrow God later on. But rarely I hear atheists argue that point because when religion collapses suddenly something fills the vacuum. And so humans just do not tolerate meaning vacuums. They don’t tolerate authority vacuums. And so if you remove the religion in a fragile society without strong institutions, you will not get Scandinavian social democracy. You will get authoritarianism. You will get political cults. History has shown this repeatedly.

So overall, I could go on here. I think that was cathartic enough for me. I am sometimes annoyed by the lack of empathy in our own camp, the lack of humility intellectually and otherwise, the lack of constructing things in its place. And if you say, “Yeah, I’m an atheist because I don’t believe, but I’m a secular humanist.” Okay, but secular humanism is doing absolutely nothing for our children. Nothing. And so, despite the science that we know about what kids need, it is doing nothing. So, there’s so much work that needs to be done on our side. And we are coming across as annoying. People are literally calling themselves agnostic today even though they are atheists because they don’t want to be seen as that annoying atheist guy because we are sometimes that annoying. So for all these reasons I just hope that atheism can do better. Like because if we are just as annoying as Christian fundamentalists to the point that people don’t want to be known as atheists, that’s a problem. If we’ve lost our intellectual humility, then this is just another way to make you feel better than everyone else. And if you’re not a part of the solution, don’t pretend you have the high ground because at least Christians have a plan. It’s a bad plan and it’s a limited plan, but they have a plan and a vision that they’re working towards. And the project of secularizing this country or a world is a hard problem with a lot of moving pieces that we need to talk about rather than just assuming everyone else is stupid and without God we would create this secular utopia. Like we have to be better. And that means me too because 100% I have done everything on this list. But I’m trying to do better when I know better. And if I want Christians and other religions to have these kinds of discussions within their own camp about the ways they need to call out their own behavior, then I feel like I have to too. So yeah, that was my beef this week. But it’s a beef that like includes me. It’s like a caricature of my own community that I feel like we need to be aware of so we’re not as annoying. And so we are focused on building something better in its place. Otherwise, we’re just tearing everything down and not replacing it. And then that’s just not helping the children. You know what I mean? So yeah, that felt good though. That felt good.

Next week, I don’t really have a plan for what I want to do next week. I really loved that you guys liked my last video on the existential elk because it’s such like a niche kind of nihilistic worldview. And so I’m happy that I’ve found other people on YouTube who want to think about things like that like me. But I don’t have anything on my agenda for next week. So I’m going to turn it over to you guys. Maybe I’ll do a video on whatever comment gets the most likes. So what do you want me to talk about next week? And thank you for listening to my rant. It’s not like a us versus them thing. It’s not that I’m just like ripping on atheists because I think they’re the worst or anything like that. It’s that we should be able to call out the ways that we could be better as atheists. So, do with that what you will and I will join you next week for whatever you guys want to hear me yap about if you find it helpful for you. Okay. Bye from Britt.

Professor Ehrman is not a believer. Even so, his blog welcomes both as does the forum. In all the years I’ve been here, never has any disrespect for my comments been shown. Even so, I’m aware it is not the place to tout my Christian beliefs though at times I’ve certainly transgressed. Whoever wants to expound on Christianity should find another forum more suitable, I think.

Funny, I don’t see it like that at all. Maybe because I’m not a Christian?

I rather like to think of the forum as a place where it doesn’t matter what you believe (or don’t) as long as you are open to good faith discussions.

As expected, no answer.

“Unbelievers here bend over backwards to be respectful of people’s beliefs”

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You can search for the exact phrase “Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle ” or “partially masticated crayon” if you’d like to relive one of my more acerbic moments. “God, you are stupid” should also pull it up.

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David seems to think he is a sort of modern Socrates, asking hard questions while professing his own ignorance.
But Socrates actually engaged meaningfully with his interlocutors.
David is closer to the kid down the street who just repeatedly demands, “says who?” while bits of partially masticated crayon fall out of his mouth.

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Porphyry said:
‘David is closer to the kid down the street who just repeatedly demands, “says who?” while bits of partially masticated crayon fall out of his mouth.’
What an apt description!