So, Angry Atheists Who Were Not Raised As Believers ?

Angry Atheists ... · So, Angry Atheists Who Were Not Raised As Believers ?

Just to start off a comparison, all five raised as some kind of believers, I would say Genetically Modified Sceptic and Paulogia and Kristi Burke, all of whom are Exvangelicals, are far less angry or toxic than Dan Browne or Richard Dawkins, who are both ex-Anglicans.

But surely, no one would consider weak Anglicanism to have more indoctrinated Dan Brown and Richard Dawkins in Bible Truth and Hell Fire than strong Evangelicalism was doing with GMS, KB and Paul?

So, some are even in Sweden, third or fourth generation total unbelievers, far angrier than the Exvangelicals cited.

So, no, it cannot be from the perspective "I'm angry because I was personally traumatised by Christianity" ...

In some cases, there is a kind of family tradition. Magic Sceptic is angry because his own father in his youth was traumatised by Christian Brethren. In some cases in Sweden (or comparable societies, England, Netherlands, North Germany, the rest of the Nordic countries) one grandparent can have been among the ones remaining raised as Christians and that one grandparent can have been traumatised.

But I think, in a lot of cases, sth worse is going on.

A Frenchman was profiting from a girl who went to some kind of therapy, and he could not marry her, because he was already married. So, when she becomes a Christian and is set free and no longer goes to therapy and no longer bonds with him, he is angry. He seems to have been one of the guys behind the misfortunes of Torben Søndergaard in Denmark and who also contacted the ICE authorities in the US, even before he got there. Apart from no longer getting his pleasures from her, he pretends concerned, perhaps honestly (though irrationally) is concerned that her leaving the therapy would have seriously hurt her.

How many other people are angry because Christianity lost themselves power and influence over someone they liked and also liked to manipulate, is a matter on which one can only speculate.

There are other case types.

Someone has had an abortion or a sex change. They will know how Christianity condemns this, so, even some openness to the idea of the supernatural could never reconcile them to the terms of Christianity. They can take Tarot cards or Atheism, or both, but not Christianity. They can take reincarnation or Atheism (hardly both), not Christianity. They can take reiki or homeopathy or standard medicine, but would be the first to denounce faith healers or ridiculise Lourdes.

The last line in my description of them is a cue for medical professionals. Some of them may have seen real cases, many more of them have heard of real and imagined cases in which reliance on a faith healer not just left someone as ill as before, but left him disappointed when there was no improvement, or allowed the disease to fester worse because of delays in seeking out real professionals. Some of these men have an equal dislike for homeopathy and for Christianity.

Some in the case of med professionals, pharmaceutical professionals, computer professionals, whether IT or IA, hold a solid contempt for the past. Mark Robidou was sure Medieval Europe had to have cholera, because the streets were dirty. His area of expertise is, surprise, surprise, not history, least of all Medieval history. He's into IT. Each of these is aware he's on some or even all levels using techniques that were not around in the Middle Ages or the Late Antiquity or the Bronze Age. If this inspires a contempt for these periods, and it often does, this can reflect on things inherited from such periods, like the Christian religion, very notably. As a matter of fact, cholera didn't get close to Europe before the colonial times, an epidemic starting in Bombay in 1817.

In a similar but not quite identic position, there are people who got rich by putting people on assembly lines, paying them perhaps more than they were payed before, if they were ruined farmers or if they were farm hands, but a smaller part of the total gain than previously craftsmen would be paying their journeymen, or they became rich by new banking schemes, including obviously taking of interest, or by outcompeting small competitors thanks to making temporary losses offset by bankloans, and then making the profits by raising their prizes, when the competitor is down. Such people, about 100 - 150 years ago were conscious of building a new world, were conscious that it was unlike the world dominated by Christianity, and got the idea (perhaps very shrewd) that it could be even more their own world if they got rid of Christian influence. Who recalls what role Andrew Carnegie and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching played in pushing Evolution into US schools?

Now, some of these were raised as believers, but this does not necessarily mean they came to show themselves as "traumatised exbelievers" - some might have been, but that class I am talking of in that time was not one for doing psychoanalysis before all of the world or even at all. In many cases, they did not opt for eradicating Christian belief, and in many cases that was because they were dealing with Protestants in a mainly Protestant culture — Protestantism being all about the pliability of Christianity. And Protestantism being since the beginning, historically, very much less supranaturalist in outlook than Catholicism.

Let's recall, in some of these cases, the people who would now hate the guts of Fundie Evangelicals were back then hating Catholicism. This was part of why the Spanish-American War started, the one in which Spain lost Cuba, Guam and the Philippines. Puerto Rico as well, if I recall correctly. This is also one reason to be less pessimistic about the salvation of Fundie Evangelicals than a Feeneyist reading of Gregory XVI would warrant — that Pope was considering the case of not very supranaturalist and sometimes unduly pro-slavery and racist Protestants. Also, in the 1830's, the community most prominent in clerical pederasty were the Anglicans. But anyone who in the 19th C. was pushing "Genesis is part of our holy Scriptures, but it is unreliable" would have been a non-Catholic back then, and the ones who weren't pushing that, were pushing other liberties of the type that Fundamentalists tend to deplore. A journalist recently made a case for modern Fundies being very alien to historic Protestantism. I agree. They would have often enough a lot of cultural issues with Catholicism, even in some cases to the point of very hateful animosity, but they are even so closer to Catholicism. That's the reason why, having gone from Evangelical to Lutheran for historic reasons, and because I began to feel uncomfy with some Pentecostal worship music in my early teens, I then went on from Lutheran to Catholic, when I saw how much Lutherans were open to liberal theology, and how much the Deformation* itself was actually a secularising influence, chasing God out of society.

These guys have the opposite priority. They hate Christianity the more it brings God back into society or threatens to do so. Being a teacher of Earth Sciences often involves you being an Evolutionist, and no, this does not mean a specialist in Evolutionary Biology, it means a believer in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of Evolution theory with associated theories in other fields than biological evolution (abiogenesis, gradual humanisation, man being no composite of spiritual and material, but simply material and everything "spiritual" either an illusion or an epiphenomenon of matter. So, it does come with a certain doctrinal opposition to Christianity. But some are also tempted by its position of power — which would be threatened if Christianity was more accepted than Evolutionism, on the societal level.

Similar observations can be made for those who do not exactly themselves suffer from unwanted pregnancies or gender dysphoria or same sex attraction, but who are instead catering to those categories, like service providers or mental health specialists or members of advocacy groups. They have a power position they would not like to lose.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Jerome
30.IX.2023

In Bethlehem Judeae depositio sancti Hieronymi Presbyteri, Confessoris et Ecclesiae Doctoris, qui, omnium studia litterarum adeptus ac probatorum Monachorum imitator factus, multa haeresum monstra gladio suae doctrinae confodit; demum, cum ad decrepitam usque vixisset aetatem, in pace quievit, sepultusque est ad Praesepe Domini. Ejus corpus, postea Romam delatum, in Basilica sanctae Mariae Majoris conditum fuit.

* This word is usually misspelled with an R at the beginning.