Personally I must have missed this. How did the downfall of the Atheist community in the US happen and who was hunting witches?
It's fairly political, so even though a lot of it happened online you'll still have a hard time of getting a clear picture. "Elevator Gate" is the obvious starting search, http://www.conservapedia.com/Elevatorgate seems to be the most complete single page I can find as an introduction.
For instance: http://www.conservapedia.com/God
> "Other than creation itself, God is revealed in several ways, including conscience and special revelation (the Bible, and prophets). Most importantly though, God is revealed in Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God."
I don't expect them to paint a friendly portrait of Richard Dawkins.
Yes, I was the person who wrote that, and this is what I meant.
> as opposed to an outspoken atheist who said something stupid online and got publicly ridiculed for it.
... which then resulted in infighting over if it should be ridiculed, a mass exodus of the thought leaders, and general dwindling of the community. Seriously, Dawkins was shunned by major atheist conferences over his comments in my earlier link. Many atheists then shunned those conferences for shunning Dawkins. When's the last time you saw new material on athiesm in the news? Your answer is almost surely "before elevatorgate"
The majority of atheists never had the goal of maintaining one large political power base, and the authors you mentioned mostly wanted adults to stop believing in fairy tales and wanted little to do with political power.
I don't see any failure in atheism other than the amount of time it is taking to gain societal acceptance in the south, which seems to have nothing to do with this discussion.
Re: group size being the primary cause... maybe?
There are plenty of non-split groups that are larger than the size the atheism community was before elevator gate, and most split groups (say, programmers divided by programming language) seem to coexist relatively peacefully.
To me, that suggests the size hypothesis is wrong. It'll need more variables if you'd like to explain the atheism community situation this without using elevatorgate (ie "a huge divisive political battle") as the primary cause.
Re: atheist headcount, this is why I referred to the "atheism community" rather than atheism generally. While I'm glad that atheism has grown, I find myself missing the conferences :/
Reading that list you will note that there are Christian Atheists. People who claim to be Christian but reject the idea of god. They are... atypical people.
Pretty much people from any and every walk of life just say "Oh, that god thing was silly, well time to move on", and then they continue with their life.
Why would anyone expect this group to be cohesive on anything except that one thing that literally define the group "the lack in belief of god". We can't even agree if we reject god or just don't see any evidence for god.
Now that we are big enough that me, living in Nebraska, can just run into atheist on the street, there seems no pressing need for an active community. I suspect many other feel the same way and smaller activist groups are picking specific battles.
> coexist relatively peacefully
Is there some violence I missed?