Now? Ok whatever, maybe it's changed.

12 years ago when I was on there? The racism was recurrent. It wasn't everywhere, but it was frequent enough and offputting enough to poison the space, and like I said, it's not a surprise how many prominent New Atheists ended up being reactionary shits. Christopher Hitchens supported the destruction of Iraq, Sam Harris is vile, Richard Dawkins is an asshole, and the people who venerate them without acknowledging (or perhaps because of) their reactionary bents are sus as hell.

Or maybe you're not as good at noticing it because you haven't been forced to become hypervigilant about it. Are you Muslim or from a Muslim family?

What made me leave was a purely emotional shattering of my ability to have faith. It wasn't intellectual. It was the agony of having my family broken by the white supremacist racism of AmeriKKKa post-9/11. I'm sure we'd have been hit hard living in my parents' home country, but living instead in the imperial core was rough. I don't want to go into details too much because it's really upsetting, but my siblings' lives are ruined, my parents' lives are ruined, I got out but with major scars and PTSD. We keep living and suffering and I think we woupd be better off dead -- better to have died on 9/12/2001 than to endure what came next, and then live with the permanent damage that came from it. And where was Allah for any of that? He didn't protect us. We were just little kids being tortured by an evil, racist system, and he didn't help us. I hoped for years that our lives would improve but they just got worse and worse, because trauma compounds and compounds. My ability to believe in a benevolent omnipotent god broke by seeing how he abandoned my family, then by noticing how much other and frankly far worse horrors were occurring globally. What my family went through is nothing compared to the torments that are visited upon the innocent people of Iraq and Palestine. And Allah did nothing to protect anyone. If I had the power of God I would fix things immediately, here on Earth in the present, defend the vulnerable and execute their oppressors. God does not do that. The promise of an accounting in the afterlife is empty -- too little too late, we'll be racked by PTSD which can make a Hell of any Heaven.

It's the old Problem of Evil -- cliche, but true. He cannot exist, belief in him is just cope.

I grew to hate him and turned to Satan, then realized the entire framework of Gods and Devils is just a fantasy to help people cope with how horrible the world is, and that is when I went hard into New Atheism before getting turned away by how racist it was too. Now I just don't believe in any religion. I want to, but my capacity for faith has been brutally broken. I wish I could believe, because my faith brought me comfort and the hope that Allah would see fit to make things right kept me from killing myself. But it was all a lie and now I'm so allergic to false hope that I'm peobably overly pessimistic and apocalyptic. Both my parents and one of my siblings remained religious and their faith hasnt helped anything. So I see I was right.

I didn't make my way back to the theological part of it, but as I've developed as a leftist I've noticed how much my old religion set me up to become a Communist. From Islam I learned to fight oppressors, to stay true to what is right no matter how outnumbered, to care for the vulnerable, to pursue liberation for everyone regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, to never bow down to oppressors even under threat of death. Maybe I'm ethnically Muslim? A secular atheist Commhnist Muslim? I don't know what label fits. I just call myself an atheist and a Communist. But I've used religious language to pull a Catholic friend further left