As regular readers know, I snark semi-regularly on Reddit's AcademicBiblical subthread. I've done that here on occasion in the past for OnlySky, but not for their particular atheist takes on biblical criticism, or biblical issues in general, nearly as much as ...
Their conflation of Gnu Atheism with secular humanism and
Their proxy war warmongering on Ukraine. Multiple links on that below.
I had gone to the website, since I hadn't been in several months, to see the take on Israel-Gaza post Oct. 7, 2023, and instead, they're dead?
(A part two, focused on environmental issues and more specifically on climate change, is now up.)
The first "this" is by cofounder Adam Lee. Confirming what I suspected, and refudiating Gnu Atheist claims that the rise (kind of stalled) of the "Nones" means a rise in atheism, with more refudiation here, the bucks weren't there to support it. (It's not just that full atheists aren't Nones, or that atheists make up only a small percentage of Nones. In one OnlySky piece from 2022, James Croft notes the withering and imploding of the Ethical Culture world, saying the St. Louis Ethical Society's 350 or so members are one-tenth of the whole of EC in the US.)
None of this stopped Lee again, earlier this year, from, at least by implication, conflating Nones and atheists. Nor, globally, did it stop Dale McGowan, in looking at China, from conflating secularism and atheism. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, surely, of atheistic and quite religious Theravada Buddhists. Yes, Buddhism is a religion, and a pre-emptive shut-up to claims otherwise. Ditto for Daoists and a fair chunk of neo-Confucianists. The reality, contra McGowan, is that terms like the Dao or Way, or T'ien or Heaven, is that they are metaphysical concepts in traditional Chinese thought, even if not deities.
The second, meh-ish, is by Captain Cassidy. She is religiously illiterate, IMO, having conflated Calvinism and Lutheranism.
The third? Jonathan MS Pearce. "The Self-Besotted Philosopher," I called him, to pun on his own moniker. A deep-fried proxy war warmonger over Russia-Ukraine. (Indeed, per a piece there, deep-fried enough to actually go to Kherson.) And, per this piece, also an Islamophobe and a Jesus mythicist, or at least a "fellow traveler." (I don't know if any other people at OnlySky were Islamophobes, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were.)
The fourth? M.L. Clark, which finally gets me to the intended snarking.
As far as Israel-Gaza, M.L. Clark seems to have written about it far more than anybody else, and in pieces that probably needed editing for size or broken into multiple parts. This one, her best overall since Oct. 7, nonetheless never comments on the issue of many Jews conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And, while the Nakba is mentioned, details of it are not discussed, nor is pre-World War II British Palestine and other things.
Item No. 1, per Wiki's surprisingly generally very good page about the Nakba, MUST be established, and that is that it was started BEFORE any Arab League armies attacked Israel. Zionists, even if they don't directly say so, will hint, to the degree they admit that anything like a Nakba happened, that it was a response to being attacked.
Of course, about the same time late last fall, Clark used the issue of Israel-Gaza war crimes to attack Russia for war crimes while ignoring Ukrainian ones. She does mention Russian claims that Ukraine has committed war crimes but never steps beyond "Russian claims." That said, she appears to be at least a low-level proxy war warmonger, or did. And, as with the Nakba, there's no backstory. Of course not; that would undermine being a proxy war warmonger.
Elsewhere, she shows she's a one-trick pony. Talking about German state elections in Thuringia, she notes that the Alliance for Democracy failed to come out on top. Two-thirds of the way down, she finally mentions Russia-Ukraine war issues and their effect on domestic politics, but doesn't get into detail.
Clark may not be as much a warmonger as Pearce, but she is just as much a neoliberal. I suspect that goes for others.
As for comments on the group announcement page? Yeah, other people besides the above that I snarked on early on? Kind of not writing any more.
And, commenters call out Adam Lee (and by extension, other cofounders). MANY of them talk about the commenting system being crap and say they told Lee et al that from the start. Sounds like an arrogance problem on the part of the founders. Shock me.
Also? One person calls them out for neoliberalism. Another snarks on the Democratic identification in another way.
As I mentioned in the "conflation" link? Robert Price is an atheist, unless he believes in Cthulhu's existence. He also walks, talks and quacks like a racist. (H.P. Lovecraft himself was definitely one.) But, the point? While I say that you can't be a humanist, secular or otherwise, and be a racist, you certainly can be an atheist and racist. Or an atheist and other things. I've said it repeatedly and repeat it again, atheism is no guarantor of moral or intellectual superiority.
But, by conflating atheism and secular humanism, and even among non-racists, excluding conservatives or true leftists alike, they had a narrow focus.
Back to the Nones not being atheists. You also had a narrow target audience. Your expectations were probably too high in the start. As for a place like Skeptical Inquirer? It doesn't pitch secularism as its focus.
Related? It reaches out more beyond the USofA. OnlySky was pretty much a Merikkka-only project. Again, more non-Americans should have been recruited from the start.
So, you blew it!
Bye!
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