@chairman_meh I think you can criticize religion staunchly without turning into a fascist or an authoritarian, but it has to be from a standpoint of not being overly occupied with whether the people around you believe "True Things" if it doesn't affect you, but rather being just caring about actual harm, and so thinking about the actual problems of those philosophies and whether they actually cause harm to their practitioners and the people around them. That way it's more like criticizing something like Marxism or Hegelianism or Kantianism or whatever. A lot of militant atheists will say all they care about it is harm but then take this really weird absolutist reified view that any belief they consider untrue (or even just poorly evidenced) is inherently harmful, when that's not really true and you'd have to prove the harm of a belief on a case by case basis, which proves that what they care about isn't actually harm but just making sure everyone around them "True" beliefs. They also seem constitutionally incapable of telling the difference between people who have a personal spirituality or religious outlook on life for themselves because it helps them understand and structure their own experiences and organized religions which is really frustrating and makes me sad.
I think the other big thing is that basically all of those militant atheists didn't actually do anything to understand and deconstruct the assumptions that had been built into the very core of how they think by their white supremacist Christian upbringing and culture. Instead, they thought that their entire job was done once they stopped believing in the "supernatural" stuff, and went on being a basically white supremacist Christians without (at least, explicitly) the "god" part, ironically becoming all the more impervious to actual change and self-improvement because they thought they'd already done all the work and become the most rational free thinking person imaginable, when they actually were still subjugated to pretty much all the same ideas. That's why I'd much rather make common cause with liberation theology Christians and Quakers and Jewish people then I would with militant atheists — despite being very atheist myself — because a lot of those people have actually done the legwork of undermining and deconstructing all of the other horrible assumptions, they just still happen to be religious. I hope that makes sense.
Chairman Meh
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