Atheists turning to cult behaviour?

[Mister Agenda]

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.

Do you have a proposal for how to correct these misperceptions? Maybe some atheists could have a conference about it.

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.

Rational skepticism is a good thing. So is broadening public acceptance of atheists and addressing misconceptions of atheists and atheism.

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.

On the internet, almost completely free of context regarding who they are or their involvement in the 'movement'. Is this something that doesn't happen in non-atheist contexts? Is it atheist behavior or stupid young over-privileged human male behavior? If it is particularly atheists, what are we supposed to do about it? We already condemn it, what next?

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.

The members of the RCC hierarchy didn't protect their offenders because it's what religion teaches, it's how hierarchies behave (to protect the organization) unless specific and powerful controls are instituted. It's reprehensible, but last I heard, these organizers don't claim to have Jesus in their hearts to help them make correct and courageous moral decisions. That some atheists are bad actors, insensitive, defensive, or mean is not in dispute.

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.

That's quite a sentence. The dictionary does not define atheism as 'nothing'. It's the state of not having a belief in a supernatural deity. But it's not the salient characteristic of either their involvement in these activities or their good or bad behavior. Their interest in skepticism and equal treatment of atheists is.

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.

Unless the person you're talking to actually belongs to the particular group of atheists you're complaining about, it's like griping to a Quaker about the behavior of the WBC. Once they agree with you that it's bad behavior, where do you go from there, since you're not addressing anyone in a position to change the behavior of this organization to which they do not belong?

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.

That makes sense.

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).

And the first step would be to recognize that whatever is wrong with it, it isn't atheism or atheists per se. More likely it's demographics: too many curmudgeonly old white privileged male atheists coupled with too many peeved young white privileged male atheists. That's fixable. And plenty of people are making an effort to do that fixing.