Atheists turning to cult behaviour?

[Alex K]

Kinda of what I'm trying to get at. Should pure atheism be necessarily followed up by a few humanistic principles? Pure atheism itself doesn't actually ensure any less madness.

As has been said a million times. Atheism is nothing more than the disbelief in a higher being. It's not an organisation and it's certainly not a religion. People defining themselves as atheists have greatly differing opinions on most other aspects of life.

So in short, I don't know what you're getting at.

I'll give you an example: whatever brainfarts Richard Dawkins decides to put on twitter will be perceived by the public as something that comes from "the atheist movement", whether you like it or not. In particular in the anglophone world there are skeptical/atheist themed conferences and there's a range of speakers which are typically invited to these. There have been numerous examples of e.g. women advocating social justice issues and getting a huge backlash of rape and death threats from self-identified atheists. There are examples of influential people in this circle sexually harassing women and being covered by organizers in the best traditions of the catholic church. Of course you can then say - since atheism according to the dictionary is nothing, these are just random individuals who happen to pay attention to atheist themed activities and conferences, but really there's nothing there to identify them with, so there's nothing to talk about. You can wash your hands of all that and say that it has nothing whatsoever to do with you - identifying as an atheist does not force you to somehow claim allegiance with any of these people or any particular group of activists.

In that sense, the OPs claim is problematic, or, let's say, prone to misunderstandings. There's a huge difference between pointing out tribal behavior in, say, atheist themed facebook groups or conferences, and attributing such behaviors in any way to atheism as a philosophical point of view.

So I think after we clear up these things, there's still an important discussion to be had about what's up with the atheist movement(s).