I think it was Jordan Peterson who mentioned that 10% of the US population is so dumb that even the Army has no use for them. We've made sure that they all got access to the Internet in their pockets. A drawback of cheap access to technology, if ever there was one. Just be glad you ONLY have to deal with that. The hottest topic in the greek atheist community is whether there should be an international court for the crimes of the soviet regimes against the peoples under their control and whether it was Communism or Stalinism that is to blame (aka Stalin wasn't a true Communist)... Count your blessings.

Well, that's certainly debatable. What I see on Social Media is just a regurgitation of the same old material (and material aiming to the lowest common denominator in most cases), but with a generally much more degraded comment quality. At least that's my experience from the "Greek Atheists and Agnostics" group (we've got around 30,000 members). Not to mention that Social Media are ridiculously ephemeral. And that makes sense; they were never meant to be debating fora nor platforms for posting extensive articles.

Honestly, the switch from blogging to social media may have been the worst thing that has happened to public debate since the invention of the Internet. If there ONE thing I'm grateful, is that Twitter has not really caught on in Greece. At least I don't have to defend my ideas with 140 characters or less :P

Thinking back, it's surprising it didn't happen sooner.
Here are a couple of observations:

• Unlike countries like Greece, Italy, Ireland etc. where religion is still entrenched in the system and has to be forcefully extracted (we've got a radical left-wing government and they STILL suck religion's dick), the USA always had the Wall of Separation and you guys over there basically had to fight a war of conservation and attrition with religion. Your fetishization of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers helps a lot in this respect as well.

• To continue the metaphor, here it's "fire and movement uphill", over your side it looks like 'trench fighting" with a couple of artillery exchanges every now and then. In both cases, the process is long and losing people on the way is to be expected.

• Furthermore, the New Atheist Movement was in large part of the aftermath of 9/11 and faded as the years went by. Other countries got in the game as the US made Atheism a non-taboo topic, the focus was the same, but the seed was not. Sure, we used the memes ("religion flies you into buildings"), but it's shocking what 20 years can do to collective memory, especially when you were never really affected in the first place.

• And to get to the grand guignol part, to put it bluntly, terrorism helps. In Europe, it keeps the issue of religion relevant on a level that resonates emotionally. Sure, we've got our Islam apologists, but each attack makes them less and less convincing. The unfortunate side-effect is a rise in the far-right.

• Finally, Atheism has no moral core in itself, so it's no surprise that people bring their own to the party, especially when one has already done the groundwork of destabilizing the moral edifice by removing the traditional core. I'll be the first to admit: when we started bringing down God, we were ill-prepared to fill the gaps it left; not just on a practical level, but emotionally as well. It was a daunting task to begin with: moral nihilism on a philosophical level and moral pragmatism on an everyday level? Yeesh... I've been studying this stuff for 10 years and still struggle with the implications at times.

In any case, unfortunately, splintering is usually a one-way street. It's pretty difficult to come back and cooperate with someone when you've already declared "Begone knave! I'm a so much better person than you!". Perhaps a large event could restore unity (like a major attack on the Wall of Separation or a terrorist attack like 9/11). But I don't think that splintering can be avoided (in any movement, not just Atheism).

That's my (definitely more than) 2 cents.

Natural Rights is a huuuuge can of worms. It's difficult for most people to understand that the humean gap is just not bridgeable and all rights are necessarily legal rights; some are more basic, granted, but still. Really, this is the only practical application for the existence of God; as a source for natural rights (I won't say that it solves all problems, obviously, cos Euthyphro is waiting at the corner, but it can be psychologically satisfying). Without God, all rights are necessarily legal and I would argue that for most people this is unsatisfactory and feels precarious as it depends on human whim. Nietzsche (OMG, wrote that correctly on the first try) Nietzsche understood that perfectly.

As an outside observer to the Anglosaxon atheist movement (AAM) since 2004, I have to wonder if it is salvageable at this point. I'll be honest with you guys. In Greece, the AAM was a constant source of material for the local atheist group. People posted horseman stuff all the time. Since 2012-13 it has all but dried up. You still see a couple of old clip from the Horsemen and that's about it.

If's not just that there's infighting, but I feel like the AAM has become irrelevant and fatigued. The "good old days" are gone. I hate talking like an old man, but it looks like it's true.

You can also see it in the state of blogging. Anyone remember Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll? I did a checka couple of years ago to see how many of those blogs were still active: 30% completely gone (dead URL) and 47% inactive since 2014. Just some 300 bloggers active from a pool of 1400.

And don't forget:
-Optical media (CDs, DVDs) are the most resilient, as long as they are not exposed to heat (ideal for permanent storage, like movies, songs and stuff you won't modify ever)
-HDDs are far more resilient and reliable than SSDs (albeit slower, but we're talking about backups)

What I find amazing is how all this information got dug up in the first place and so fast. Who released all this? An ex husband? A colleague? Does anybody know?
My recent post Religion in the Greek School Life

I think it's become fashionable to quote Tyrion Lannister on this issue: "When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say".

Why the concept of free expression is so difficult for some people to get is beyond me. What's even more disturbing is that they often fall back to the "it's only a constitutional right against the State" as if the State is some nebulous thing and does not comprise the Citizens as well. If the Citizens don't respect free expression in their daily lives, would it be surprising if the State started moving against it as well? After all, who would object to such a thing if it is viewed as a matter of course?
My recent post Religion in the Greek School Life

Hey Mojoey, thanks for the plug.

As I mention in the article (which Google Translate undoubtably mangles if one attempts to use it) the rise of Social Media has definitely contributed to the trend (and the unfortunate rise of the ephemeral soundbite). I don't know how atheist facebook communities are in the US, but the greek meeting site is an endless parade of cartoons rehashed for the umpteenth time and picture memes interspersed with the occasional news article (which gets quickly buried in the clutter). Kill me now. After I got ratted out by an atheist crybaby for not using my real name and got suspended for 4th time, I said enough is enough. Google+ will have to suffice.

Other usual suspects must include disappointment due to small readership and burnout (maintaining a healthy blog is no easy task; how Cephus manages to write fast enough to accumulate scheduled articles for several months is beyond me :P) I think repetitiveness was also a factor; regurgitating stuff that has been done ad nauseum loses its appeal after a while. I fell for this when I started blogging myself, but thankfully got bored with it before it had a chance to burn me out. The same seems to be true in YouTube atheist channels as well, but in more acute form, since video is a much more demanding medium.

On another tangent, it is sad that much content from the abandoned blogs is often ungooglable due to bad post titles and tagging.

Cephus, I honestly don't know where this thing will lead us.

On the one hand you have the far left giving in to Muslim demands for exceptionalism, on the other hand this creates a backlash and a rise of the far right and all voices in the middle get drowned in a sea of shouts and insults. And it really pains me to say it, being an atheist, that this environement not only isn't a fertile ground for logic and reason (far from it), but that at some point we may have to be thankful for a backlash from the christian majorities in european countries. You can only push against a group of people so far till they reach a breaking point (and I'm focusing on Europe, because US Christian fundamentalists are, as we say in Greece, crying without having been beat up). It would be ideal if the opposition to muslim fundamentalism came from within Islam itself, but so far I'm not seeing it.

It's simple logic really. If the far left won't react to muslim fundamentalism (and it appears unwilling to do so, despite being traditionally anti-religion) and if the skeptic communities are too small or too left-leaning to offer any appreciable resistance, then it's a no brainer who will have to step up to the challenge. I am dismayed by the rise of the far right in Europe and the regalvanization of nationalists, but at this point it seems like a historical inevitability.

As for your concerns about Turkey, I wouldn't worry too much. Erdogan is not dedicated to the kemalic ideal of a secular state, that's for sure, but even he is not a moron. At the very worst, he might let ISIS invade eastern Turkey so they solve Turkey's kurdish problem for him, before pushing them back; but I'm guessing that that would be about it. If you have a reader from Turkey, I'd love to hear his perspective on this.
My recent post 8 χρόνια αθεϊστικής σκανδαλολογίας