Let’s get into this:
Now I’m not going to start off by saying anything positive about the speaker here. I’m just going to dive right in and say that Gothix is wrong here.
She pulls the same fallacy I see time and time again from the right by conflating a lot of negatives with atheism. Here she starts off by saying that a sense of urgency among leftists, such as the climate alarmism, is due to leftists being atheist and trying to make their own heaven on Earth since they don’t believe in a Heaven after death. Which has a bunch of implications, but I’m not taking that tangent.
So let’s keep this just on Gothix and her statement that most on the left are atheist:
First of all if we look at the breakdown of people who tend to be involved in psychology, these people tend to lean more one way on the political spectrum. Okay they… they usually tend to be left liberals, progressives. Most people on the left tend to be secular, tend to be atheist.
Secular, yes, but not atheist. No, they are not the same.
Nearly 3 in 4 people in the US is Christian according to the World Religion Database as of 2020. Meaning a very substantial portion of those she’s attempting to describe are actually people who DO believe in an afterlife, don’t believe that this life and world is all there is. And the US has gotten more religiously diverse over the years as well courtesy of immigration.
Then there’s the flip side of her statement: that atheists are leftist. And, no, that isn’t the case. There is a very sizeable portion of atheists and agnostics who are conservative and libertarian – something that continues to surprise a lot of atheist talking heads. Sure the majority of atheists are left-leaning, but left-leaning doesn’t mean leftist, and progressive doesn’t mean leftist either.
The number of people who are leftist is actually relatively small. They’re very vocal, yes, but they aren’t even a plurality of everyone who falls left of center.
But there’s also a lot of political diversity among the religious, too. Liberal and leftist Christians, for example – yes, they exist. “Blue Dog Democrats” are another. The guy who penned the original Pledge of Allegiance was a Christian socialist.
So can we please stop acting like everyone who’s left of center is an atheist and everyone who’s right of center is religious? That fallacy has been floating around for so long that I see atheists repeating it. And the number of times I’ve been called a Christian merely for disagreeing with atheists is staggering…
So Gothix is just engaging in more of the same misrepresentation of atheists I’ve seen time and again.
And to summarize, most atheists are left of center, but most of those who are left of center are religious to some degree. Simply because most people are religious to some degree. And a sizable portion of atheists are conservative or libertarian.
