Update, 26/3/23: Talk now available online here, courtesy of Central London Humanists.

Is Pastafarianism a parody or a religion? What is a ‘religion’ anyway? Can an internet movement originally intended as a joke be used to challenge the status quo of religious privilege in law and society around the world? And what happens when followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster start taking their ‘faith’ seriously?

We have returned to these questions several times in the pages of the Freethinker. Editor Emma Park has also written on similar themes for the New Humanist and podcasted about them for the National Secular society.

On 16 March, Emma will be giving a talk organised by the Central London Humanists to explore these issues further.

Meeting details

Registration: Register on Meetup here.

Date: Thursday 16 March 2023

Time: 6.30pm – 8.30pm, followed by drinks at a nearby bar

Venue: Old Diorama Arts Centre, Regent’s Place, 201 Drummond St, London, NW1 3FE

Cost: £3.00

All profits to the National Literacy Trust.

More about the talk

Emma will look at the origins of the Pastafarian movement, the evolution and distinguishing characteristics of its ‘churches’ around the world, and some of the legal cases to reach the European Court of Human Rights and courts in the US, Australia and Canada.

She will also consider the ways in which the symbols of the movement – colander, pasta crown, pirate hat – have been used in protest in a variety of contexts and in countries from Russia to Austria, from Canada to Australia.

Bibliography of Pastafarianism

What is ‘religion’? Strasbourg and the Pastafarians again, by Frank Cranmer

Religious Privilege 2 : 0 Pastafarians, by Niko Alm

Flying spaghetti monsters, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

The secular religion of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Mienke de Wilde and Paul Cliteur

Judging the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Derk Venema and Niko Alm

Pastafarianism and the meaning of religion, National Secular Society podcast with Derk Venema, Tony Meacham, and Tanya Watkins, Captain of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Australia

Pastafarian Month at the Freethinker

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What is it called when you really, really, really believe in secularism?

Can you hold these views and morals so dearly that they become sacred to you? Can you believe that humour, irony, and play are the most appropriate, ‘God-given’ tools to teach your views? Can you believe in coincidental design, which is the most intelligent design, if you also believe in science and the importance of play, experiments, and a trial-and-error approach to learning and becoming?

And if you firmly believe in such a system, might you also devoutly believe in the use of metaphorical thinking to guide the manner in which you practise this belief and give concrete meaning to your thoughts? What if you believed this moral system of secularism so firmly that you would make serious sacrifices for it, engage in legal warfare, and consider it to have all the features of religion, even though it had all the features of secularism too? What if one branch of this hybrid belief system was called ‘The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’? Can you have a serious secular religion, and would it deserve the same protection as every other religion, by calling it a religion? In other words: can we call a hybrid religion, ‘religion’?

Pastafarianism belongs to ‘New, Unknown, Weird and/or Small (‘NUWS’) religions, a term proposed by the Dutch scholar Derk Venema. Its founder is Bobby Henderson, a science student from Portland, Oregon. Pastafarians revere an all-powerful, invisible, flying monster made of spaghetti and meatballs. Their holy book is the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Is this a religion? According to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the answer to this question is ‘no’. That appears from their recent verdict in De Wilde vs. The Netherlands (2021).

According to the European Court, Pastafarianism is a secular creed – not serious, not religious. But what if someone’s secular worldview is so firmly held that he believes he needs to adopt a fitting religion to practise, preach and teach that secular worldview in the best possible way? Should he not have the right to practise his worldview freely if – with this religion of practising secularity – he does no harm to others? Does everybody have the same right to have a recognised faith in order to practise what they preach, or is that a privilege reserved for people who believe in something in the most literal or classical sense?

What about ‘cultural Christians’, who only use their religion as a cultural tradition to bond with family and friends on holidays, weddings, and funerals? Or what about Muslims, who often state they do not literally believe everything their holy texts are saying? Should we deny them their rights as well, or should we be glad when people do not take fundamental religious texts literally and read them in a more metaphorical way?

These are a lot of questions, but there is also is a lot to think about.

Back to the European Court of Human Rights, but now to a different case. In 1993, in the Kokkinakis case, the Court made an important ruling. The case dealt with whether a Jehovah’s Witness would not be unduly frustrated in his right to practise his religion by a Greek ban on proselytising. The Court ruled that this would be the case. But more interesting for the topic of this essay is something that the Court said about the reach of Article 9 in the European Convention of Human Rights – the article which protects the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Here is what the Court said in Kokkinakis:

‘As enshrined in Article 9 (art. 9), freedom of thought, conscience and religion is one of the foundations of a “democratic society” within the meaning of the Convention. It is, in its religious dimension, one of the most vital elements that go to make up the identity of believers and their conception of life, but it is also a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, sceptics, and the unconcerned. The pluralism indissociable from a democratic society, which has been dearly won over the centuries, depends on it.’

In turn, Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights states as follows:

‘1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’

This combination of jurisprudence and law terminated any speculation about the extent of religious freedom under the ECHR. The statement in Art. 9 that one can change one’s religion or belief – the so-called apostasy clause (Cliteur 2021), is, as part of the freedom of religion, ‘also a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, sceptics and the unconcerned.’ Since Kokkinakis, we know that the apostasy clause is applicable to those who want to change from one religion to another religion, but also to those who want to change from a religion to non-religion, that is, to atheism, agnosticism, scepticism or simply ‘indifference’. The freedom of religion, or the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, also protects the rejection of all faiths and thus the right to freely practise that rejection, or lack of belief, in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.

The Kokkinakis case was an enormously important step in what might be called  ‘the emancipation of fundamental unbelief’. For European citizens whose governments had joined the ECHR, it was clear from 1993 onwards that their philosophical position had found explicit protection under Article 9. In other words, their view was protected not only as an ‘opinion’ under the right to freedom of expression (art. 10 ECHR), but also under the apparently more dignified right of ‘freedom of conscience, thought, and religion’.

From 1993 onwards, the right to be an atheist in practice and preaching was clearly affirmed. Article 9 protects the interests and rights of believers who want to stay within the traditional religious mould, but also the interests and rights of those who want to break free from it.

The consequences are significant and relevant to a broad spectrum of social institutions. Take the case of education. ‘Atheists, agnostics, sceptics, and the unconcerned’ also have a conscience. They have their ‘thought’. And their conscience and their thought have the same protection under the Convention as the classical religious conscience, or classical religious thought.

What does this mean? If atheists have the same rights, they too should be able to manifest their belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance, in any way they think is necessary. If an atheist or agnostic believes he needs to adopt a religion to be able to practise, teach and manifest his beliefs, he should not be restrained from exercising his rights. After all, ‘the freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs can only be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’ Or can it?

As we have argued, the right to freely change religion counts for believers who might want to change to a different religion (for example, from Christianity to Islam), and for those who want to make changes within the central elements of their belief system, for instance by questioning the trinity within Catholicism. The consequence of this freedom is often ignored. One of the consequences, in our view, is that Article 9, especially in combination with the apostasy clause and its interpretation in Kokkinakis, can help us to develop more liberal interpretations of religious positions. In a time of increasing fundamentalism, this is no mean feat. And not only that: it can help us to ‘liberalise’ the notion of religion itself.

Unfortunately, in De Wilde vs the Netherlands, the ECtHR failed to consider the liberating effect of the apostasy clause and Kokkinakis, as far as the idea of ‘religion’ itself is concerned. Let us explain what we mean.

The Court has repeatedly emphasised that ‘religion’ must meet specific requirements to find protection under Article 9. And it has also indicated what these requirements are. However, no exhaustive definition of religion has been given by the Court. The conditions set by the Court for something to count as a ‘religion’ are therefore necessary conditions, but not sufficient conditions. What are these conditions? Let the Court speak for itself. In Eweida v. UK (2013, para 81) it states:

‘The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion denotes views that attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.’

Thus Article 9 does not protect just any arbitrary position that the complainants see as religious, but only views characterised by:

1.        Cogency

2.        Seriousness

3.        Cohesion, and

4.        Importance.

We might call these the ‘coherence requirements’. ‘Seriousness’ proved to be a fatal stumbling block for recognising the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a ‘religion’. The CFSM uses irony and humour – and according to the legal institutions in the Low Countries and the European Court in Strasbourg, this was incompatible with ‘seriousness’. We deplore this. We also think it is a missed chance to have the combination of the apostasy clause and the Kokkinakis case further developed. The Court could have said: why should religion always be gloomy? Why exclude humour and joy from the concept of religion? Why is parody incompatible with religion? But perhaps this is something for further consideration.

What we consider a promising perspective for the future is the development of the concept of ‘secular religion’, and ultimately its legal recognition. Religions go through changes. But the idea of religion is also undergoing change. In more or less closed cultures (cultures not open to pluralism, diversity, open-mindedness), people use a concept of religion that is wholly grafted onto their own religion, the religion of their own country, or their own culture. For the ancient Greeks, for example, it must not have been easy to imagine a concept of religion that was not polytheistic. For the Jews, on the other hand, it was difficult to conceive of a religion that was not monotheistic.

Today, a judge who must interpret the concept of religion will not hesitate to include both the monotheistic and polytheistic conceptions of religion. Even atheistic religions, such as certain forms of Buddhism, find recognition in law. Is it not evident that the resistance that now manifests itself against ‘humorous religion’ will be broken one day? We think so.

The time will come when a religion that values parody, humour, light-heartedness, and merriment will also find recognition as a genuine religious option. Perhaps this could be called a ‘secular religion’. A religion that takes ‘seriously’ values which are traditionally associated with secularism and modernity. That will also be the moment when all discrimination against alternative religions, such as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is finally abandoned.

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The post The secular religion of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster appeared first on The Freethinker.

July is Pastafarian Month at the Freethinker. This picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by radical cartoonist Polyp (Paul Fitzgerald), was inspired by the depictions of Jesus on this website: www.jesus-withyoualways.com

Now who would you rather have looking over your shoulder?

The post Pastafarian Month at the Freethinker appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘Would you be an atheist without the Internet?’

This was a question asked by Hemant Mehta in a 2009 post on his Friendly Atheist blog. His own answer was, ‘I don’t think I would be… when the doubt about my religion started to creep into my mind, I found my answers late at night online. It was those crude websites and email newsletters which helped me answer my questions and formed new ones.’

Others shared their reflections in the comments. One wrote, ‘I think I would have become an atheist eventually with or without the Internet, but it certainly hastened the process. I’d certainly be a less happy atheist, at any rate.’

In general, some agreed they would never have become atheists without the internet, and others said that while they would probably still be atheists, it would have been slower and more difficult without the internet, and they would have been far less engaged in the atheist community.

We live now in probably the least religious time in human history. And the internet no doubt has played an important role in this transformation, by providing a means for non-religious people to discover new arguments and to connect with others with a similar viewpoint.

With this in mind, in this article I want to think about the history of atheism with reference to three media revolutions: the invention of the printing press in the mid 1400s, the development of steam printing in the nineteenth century, and the arrival of the internet at the end of the twentieth century.

Each of these revolutions gradually allowed for the ever greater exchange of ideas and new possibilities for community. And each was accompanied by a rise in unbelief.

The Printing Press

Before the introduction of the printing press, there were doubters and sceptics among the masses, but their ideas almost always remained confined to them. There existed little way beyond word-of-mouth to spread one’s ideas – not to mention the danger of doing so.

In the medieval period, books were produced in scriptoria, where monks laboriously copied out texts by hand. China had already invented woodblock printing centuries before Europe, and Korea even had moveable-type printing at this time, yet Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of a movable-type printing press in Germany around 1440 sparked the printing revolution in Europe. By the 1500s, print shops had opened in every major European city and would replace time-consuming methods of copying texts by hand.

Books could now be produced far more efficiently, while avoiding problems of inaccuracies that cropped up in the course of the scribing process. Trade networks soon developed across Europe to allow books to be relatively easily bought and sold. This allowed knowledge to spread as it never had before.

The printing press was a boon to those who challenged the established religion. Martin Luther, whose gripes with the Catholic Church kicked off the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century, relied on the printing press to spread his message. Luther’s famous 95 Theses, detailing the Catholic Church’s failings, were originally written in Latin, but they were quickly translated into German and other vernacular languages, and then printed for mass distribution. What was more, Luther and other Protestant propagandists printed cartoons to present simple arguments to those who could not read.

The Reformers wanted people to read the Bible for themselves. New editions were now commissioned and printed in the vernacular languages. Printed versions were not completely free from mistakes: the so-called Wicked Bible of 1631 accidentally omitted a crucial ‘not,’ leaving a verse to command, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ More importantly, the printing revolution meant people could now read the Bible for themselves, in their own language, and draw their own conclusions. Furthermore, competing translations allowed linguistically sophisticated scholars to compare and contrast Bible texts and their shifting meanings.

The Reformation created a centuries-long conflict between Protestants and Catholics. With each side hammering away at the other’s arguments, this created a fertile soil for people to wonder if both sides were wrong.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, since book printers cared most of all about earning money, this encouraged them to print controversial books. In Protestant areas, works that appeared on the Catholic List of Prohibited Books were of special interest to readers, in a kind of early modern ‘Streisand effect.’ The printers knew that printing these heterodox books would result in an audience eager to purchase – and they were the ones responsible for printing works that have become significant in the history of freethought, by authors such as Giordano Bruno, Machiavelli, and Rabelais.

Ancient and medieval sources were now more accessible, as were newer works. Students no longer were beholden to their professors for learning, but could access books directly. Dictionaries, atlases, and medical and scientific texts likewise made knowledge more accessible than ever, as did the development of weekly and monthly newspapers.

The impact of printing on the spread of actual atheism was not immediately apparent: it took time, even centuries, for the first atheists to emerge from the shadows. But it is nonetheless telling that the modern term ‘atheist’, which derives from ancient Greek, appeared first in Latin and other vernacular languages, including English, in the 1500s. Refutations and condemnations of atheism appeared in theological works, even if atheists themselves could not yet give voice to their views.

At a time when openly stated unbelief was punished with death, it made sense that few dared to express their views in print, even in letters. Those who did tended to meet a sticky end, and their published works usually went with them.

One who did publish was Geoffroy Vallée, a French nobleman who authored a pamphlet in 1573 called La Béatitude des Chrétiens, ou le Fléau de la Foy (The Beatitude of the Christians, or the Scourge of Faith). The short work rejected revelation and miracles, although it did allow for the possibility of a divine creator. Vallée had the work printed and tried his best to spread it, even sending copies out of France.

Under interrogation by civil authorities, Vallée tried everything he could, from denying to justifying to begging forgiveness, but was still hanged and his body burnt, along with almost all copies of his work – save one. When questioned, Vallée did not reveal where he got his ideas, but he claimed to have read somewhere – he would not say where – that Moses was but a magician. This seems to indicate that other heretical works might also have been circulating, even if no trace of them remains.

Similar stories to Vallée’s can also be told. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, sceptical arguments were beginning to be found in works by those like Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, and in the anonymously-written Theophrastus Redivivus. This book collected arguments from ancient Greece and Rome, as well as from contemporaries reputed to be sceptics and atheists, like Machiavelli, Vanini, Pomponazzi, and Montaigne. Even if some authors did not explicitly make atheist arguments, if they were taken together, their ideas could be reassembled to make strong statements of unbelief that questioned the truth of the Bible, the nature of the soul, the creation of the universe, and even God himself.

Aside from these explicitly anti-religious works, Christians themselves might, paradoxically,  have helped to sow the seeds of atheist arguments. One theologian would devise a compelling ways to prove God’s existence, and then another would then come up with the strongest arguments against his opponent’s proofs – ‘steelmanning’ them – in order to construct better arguments for God’s existence. But this paradoxically gave ammunition to those, like the secretly atheist Catholic priest Jean Meslier, who drew upon these very same arguments to make the case against God in the early eighteenth century.

Steam Printing

In the Enlightenment, the criticism of religion flourished among the wealthy and educated. The undercurrent of doubt that ran through the previous centuries found fuller expression in salons like that of Baron d’Holbach in Paris, where, for the first time, atheists could discuss their ideas aloud, even if they still had to be cautious.

But these ideas remained confined mostly to the educated few, and there was little effort to spread these ideas to the masses.

Moreover, books were still prohibitively expensive. Even wealthy people needed to be discerning about which books to buy, given the cost of purchasing one. For working people in the early nineteenth century, the cost of a book might equate to several days’, or even weeks’, wages.

The invention of steam printing, however, is the second milestone in the story. Steam printing allowed books and newspapers to be printed much more cheaply and quickly than with manually operated presses. Whereas the hand-operated printing press could produce about 200 sheets per hour, the mechanised, steam-powered versions could produce 1,000 per hour early in the century – and by the 1870s, over 20,000 per hour.

The first steam-printing machine was used early in the nineteenth century, but the process was slow to be adopted by publishers, who clung to the old-fashioned methods. By the middle of the century, however, steam printing had become dominant. Between 1800 and 1850, the production of books per year had doubled, while the price halved.

Other new technologies further hastened the spread of knowledge. Railway lines criss-crossed Europe; circulating libraries and public reading rooms sprouted up; and electric telegraphy meant news could be transmitted across long distances almost instantly.

The nineteenth century also saw a new focus on education for the masses, and literacy rates rose accordingly. 69.3% of men and 54.8% of women in Britain were literate in 1851; by 1900, these numbers had jumped to 97.2% and 96.8% respectively.

The political context was changing too. The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century ended in bloodshed and the rise of a new autocrat, but it also demonstrated the power that the people could have to overthrow old political and religious hierarchies.

Even before the advent of steam printing, societies at the end of the eighteenth century sought to spread news to the masses about the French Revolution. In this milieu, political and religious radicalism went hand-in-hand. The London Corresponding Society began reprinting cheap editions of various freethought works, including by Thomas Paine, in the 1790s, before the British government, fearing the spread of revolutionary fervour from France, halted their activities.

Enterprising radical printers, like Richard Carlile, continued this mission in the early nineteenth century. In addition to his own radical newspaper, Carlile reprinted cheap editions of Paine’s works like The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man, as well as other freethought classics such as Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature. When Carlile and his wife and sister were imprisoned for blasphemy, his work was carried on by Susannah Wright, who kept his bookshop open, although she too would land in prison for selling radical books.

The impact of each book sold was multiplied as the book inevitably changed hands. As Carlile himself explained: ‘Just calculate how many persons may read one copy of Age of Reason, if it be taken care of. I know several persons, who have kept copies, which they purchased of me in 1819, in constant use, in the way of lending them up to this time, and instances where a single copy has gone through fifty families, all approving as they read. This is the way to calculate the power of the Printing Press. … From December 1818, to December 1822 nearly twenty thousand copies will have gone into circulation.’

Soon afterwards, societies dedicated to Carlile and Paine’s radical religious and politics ideas sprang up across Britain. These radical groups often worked hand-in-hand with mechanics’ institutes, which had been founded in the late eighteenth century to encourage the education of working-class people.

Yet censorship and prosecution reigned, and those atheists who dared speak up faced time in prison for blasphemy or ‘obscenity’ – or at least the threat of such a punishment. (Though at least they survived with their lives; the last person executed in Britain for blasphemy was Thomas Aikenhead in 1697.)

Practical barriers existed as well that prevented the flow of free arguments. The British government applied various taxes ­– the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ – which aimed to stamp out smaller, radical newspapers by making them impossibly expensive. By the mid-century, however, these taxes were repealed after decades of campaigning, opening the way for the further spread of radical ideas.

The middle of the century saw a corresponding overflow of freethought literature with dozens of weekly freethought newspapers and periodicals published in a given year. The biggest were newspapers like George Holyoake’s The Reasoner, Charles Bradlaugh’s The National Reformer, and, indeed, G.W. Foote’s The Freethinker, which, aside from its writing, gained popularity in some quarters and dislike in others for its risqué cartoons.

In the United States, meanwhile, freethought newspapers, such as The Truth Seeker, appeared across the country, in big cities and small towns. These allowed atheists and freethinkers to know they were not alone, even if within their own town they were ‘village atheists’.

As the working classes mingled political radicalism and religious criticism, new organisations were formed. The National Secular Society, for example, was founded in 1866. Local secular societies across Britain likewise flourished.

While the new possibilities of printing were important, meetings in person and open-air lectures and debates were still big draws. However, the ability to print the details of these debates enabled their organisers to reach an even bigger audience.

While the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century did not give obvious evidence for God’s non-existence, the development of science in the nineteenth century more directly undermined the case for believing in God and the authority of the Bible. This can be seen, for example, in new geological findings in the first half of the century which caused geologists to re-estimate the Earth to be first hundreds of thousands and then millions of years old. Even if they did not fully comprehend the vast antiquity of the Earth, the new findings seriously challenged the traditional, Biblically derived idea that it was but a few thousand years old.

Traditional ideas about humanity’s place in the universe were thrown into even greater confusion with the emergence of evolutionary theory. The great nineteenth-century best-seller in evolution was actually Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, anonymously written by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. This work set forth a naturalistic account of the evolution of the universe and all species, including humanity. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) was the stronger book scientifically, with a clearer mechanism for how evolution took place, yet its implications for humanity were confined to a single sentence: ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ Vestiges continued to outsell Origin for the remainder of the century, but both books forced many people to fundamentally rethink humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The new Biblical criticism, emerging primarily from Germany, also undermined religious faith. These new ideas challenged the authorship of the Bible and its accuracy, even though its main proponents were trying to salvage Christianity, not destroy it. Key works in this movement, like David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, translated into English by George Eliot, argued that the miracles recounted in the New Testament were mythical and had no basis in reality.

While Christians undertook such work to strengthen and refine their faith, freethinkers used similar techniques to capitalise on the new challenges to the Bible. One such popular work, called A Few Hundred Biblical Contradictions, pseudonymously written by Peter Lecount, ran to 1,180 pages. Other hostile dissections of the Bible included Robert Cooper’s Infidel’s Text-Book and Charles Bradlaugh’s The Bible: What It Is!

Cheap printing meant that all of these new ideas could find a much wider readership than ever before. Atheists and freethinkers would now know they were not alone. Even if the ultimate numbers of atheists remained small – Edward Royle, for example, estimated that at most 100,000 Britons would have supported the aims of the freethought movement – nevertheless, it seems to have been the first time in history that atheists began to publicly identify as such, at least in significant numbers, and to join with others with similar views.

The Internet

The twentieth century saw the arrival of new media like radio and television, which allowed for the proliferation of atheist and secular viewpoints to a wider audience. In 1955, Margaret Knight presented a radio broadcast on the BBC Home Service called ‘Morals Without Religion,’ while in 1970, the president of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, debated a Christian preacher on the Phil Donahue Show.

But the arrival of the internet afforded far more opportunities for atheists than ever before. As Teemu Taira writes, ‘it is perhaps not a serious exaggeration’ to use the word ‘revolution’ to talk about ‘the role of the Internet and social media for the increased visibility, interest in, and awareness of the atheism in the first decades of the twenty-first century.’

With the internet, information, reliable or otherwise, could be accessed without the need for a physical book or newspaper. In an isolated community, the religious sceptic could now participate in a community of other atheists. Whether in the United States, Egypt, or Indonesia, the sceptic was no longer alone.

In the early 2000s, the internet was a major factor in explaining the success of New Atheism. Even if New Atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens published in traditional print mediums, their debates with Christians, and other religious people, received millions of views on YouTube.

Likewise, the internet made it easier for sceptics in religiously intolerant countries to covertly access their works. For example, as of 2016, the unofficial Arabic translation of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion had reportedly been downloaded over 10 million times.

But the internet did much more than merely spread the work of ‘celebrity atheists’. It also enabled individuals to express themselves and communicate with other like-minded people from across the world much more easily.

In an article on the Slate Star Codex blog, Scott Alexander gives a number of examples of influential websites from the early 2000s atheist scene. The Talk.Origins group carefully catalogued Christian arguments against evolution and their rebuttals, with examples including CA114. Many famous scientists were creationists, or CD610. The erosion rate of Niagara Falls’ rim indicates a young earth.

A similar group, the Skeptics’ Annotated Bible, catalogued every absurdity in the Bible. Another site compiled and ranked the top 15,000 (and counting) atheist quotations. The website of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, first created in 2005, received tens of millions of hits and quickly became an internet phenomenon.

In the above-mentioned article, Scott Alexander recalls

‘…just how intellectual the Internet was around the turn of the millennium. You would go to bulletin boards, have long and acrimonious debates over whether or not the Gospels were based on pagan myths. Then someone would check Vast Apologetics Library tektonics.org and repost every one of their twenty-eight different articles about all the pagan myths the Gospels weren’t based on, from Adonis (‘yet another unprofitable proposition for the copycat theorist’) to Zalmoxis (‘there is no comparison, other than by illicit collapsing of terminology and by unsubstantiated speculation’). Both sides had these vast pre-built armories full of facts and arguments to go to.’

The internet allowed atheists the chance to subject religion to criticism on a collective scale. But it also provided a possibility for anonymity and a supportive community as they encountered these kinds of arguments for the first time. Consider the case of the Clergy Project, set up for clergy members who were doubters or full-blown non-believers to be able to talk about the issues they faced, anonymously. The Richard Dawkins Foundation site likewise gave people the chance to tell their own stories, including on its Converts’ Corner.

Blogging sites, such as PZ Myers’s Pharyngula blog, Rebecca Watson’s SkepChick blog, and Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog, likewise became a huge medium for atheists, while atheist YouTubers could create their own content and connect with others. Most importantly, perhaps, the Reddit subforum r/atheism, created in 2008, was at the time one of the most popular subreddits and now has 2.7 million members. This allowed people to share stories of their own experiences as atheists and have discussions, as well as to share memes and the like mocking religion.  

These developments also created the unfortunate stereotype of the ‘internet atheist’. According to the Urban Dictionary, this is ‘typically an angry teenager or other power inhibited individual who thinks that all religion across the globe is either Islamic Terrorist or American Christian Fundamentalist and that their arguments are sound because they have watched a Dawkins video online.’

More generally, there came a frustration with the trolling, mocking nature of online atheism and the ways in which online atheist spaces seemed to be dominated by white men. This led to the creation of the site Atheism+, active from 2012 to 2016, which aimed to discuss other issues like sexism, racism, and social justice from an atheist perspective.

Even with these flaws and imbalances, the internet offered a much more democratic and much less hierarchical space than any of the preceding mediums. But it is also true that the internet was not the sole factor that accounts for the increasing number of atheists. For most, online engagement was part of a larger puzzle that involved books, discussions with family and friends, and real-life encounters with other atheists. The website, meetup.com, allowed atheists who wouldn’t otherwise have met in person to do so. In this way, the internet did not replace physical interactions and the forming of communities – but it did sometimes facilitate them.

Conclusion

It would be too simplistic to say that more media means more atheists. Why some ideas gain traction at some times and not others concerns political, social, and economic factors that I have not been able to discuss in detail here. The industrialisation and urbanisation of the nineteenth century, as people relocated to cities and away from traditional rural communities, could well be equally important in explaining the growth of irreligion.

Moreover, the impact of communication revolutions might not always lead to the loss of religion in straightforward ways. New mediums also provide new diversions. Whether it be nineteenth-century novels, or social media and streaming in the twenty-first century, the expansion of options for entertainment, and the creation of new imaginary worlds, might have led people simply to have less time for engaging with religion, along with other, more traditional forms of civil society.

Another corollary is that while media revolutions have the power to disrupt societies, this disruption can also produce religious revivals. We have already seen how Martin Luther and the reformers used print to propagate a new form of Christianity; this may have been radical, but it was not friendly to atheism. The same was true in the nineteenth century, with the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society using print to spread their message. Groups like these were sometimes much more effective, thanks to the much greater wealth at their disposal than was available to their comparatively impoverished freethought opponents. The internet has also helped to connect religious communities in new ways; for example, church services were streamed on Zoom during the pandemic.

Furthermore, just because new media allows for the spread of information, that does not by any means guarantee the accuracy of such information. If anything, in recent years, especially since 2016, we have seen how the internet allows for the spread of all kinds of misinformation, fake news, quackery, and conspiracy theories, at a scale not possible before.

It seems that opening possibilities for spreading information will inevitably also mean a spread of disinformation. Yet it is hard to think of an alternative. One must simply have confidence that over time, through the messy process of debate and discussion, truth will prevail. There are, again inevitably, issues of power (economic, institutional, and so forth) that will hinder and distort our collective search for truth, but if there is indeed a truth out there that can be obtained, as free as possible a flow of information seems the preferable – and perhaps only – option we can choose to get there.

As far as religious beliefs specifically are concerned, what the history of these media revolutions shows, above all, is that the more freedom there is to discuss and investigate them, the more they are found wanting.

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