I have my disagreements with Chris Stedman — he’s kind of representing the ooey-gooey side of atheism, while I’m typically on the harsh, strongly worded side (I know, you’re surprised). So, goddamn it, I hate it when I have to admit that he’s right, and that my side has been too accommodating to the fanatically godless side, which just luuurves ’em some alt-righties.

I’m still an activist, but after nearly a decade of active participation in online atheism (a loose community of forums, blogs, YouTube channels, and fandoms of figures like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and writer Sam Harris), I mostly stepped away from the online side of atheism a few years ago. One of the biggest reasons for this was my growing concern over its failure to adequately address some of its darker currents—such as overt sexism, racism, and anti-Muslim bias.

I’ve been backing away myself, and I was smack in the middle of online atheism for years. It’s for the same reasons.

By neglecting to address its darker currents, online atheism has perhaps unknowingly planted the seeds for the alt-right’s harvest. Three years ago Reddit’s atheism subforum, perhaps the largest community of atheists on the internet, was found to be the website’s third most bigoted—meaning not just tolerant of overt displays of bigotry, but actively supportive of them. Last year, the Daily Beast revealed that the study’s most bigoted Reddit subforum, the Red Pill, was founded by Robert Fisher, a Republican state lawmaker who is also an atheist.

The problem is more widespread than figures like Spencer and Fisher, too. While championing liberal views on some issues, many of atheism’s most prominent advocates—the majority of whom are, like me, cisgender white men—have expressed troubling sentiments that align with views held by the alt-right and faced little to no consequences.

Last year Sam Harris hosted Charles Murray—who has famously argued that black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs than whites—on his immensely popular podcast, calling Murray a victim of “a politically correct moral panic.” Harris has in the past called for profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.” (When I challenged him on this, he suggested I “wear a t-shirt stating ‘There is no God and I am Gay’ in Islamic countries and report back on [my] experiences.”) Outspoken atheist Bill Maher rightly came under fire last summer for using racist language on air. He has also argued that “most Muslim people in the world do condone violence,” told “transgendered” [ sic] people to be quiet, and gave alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos a sympathetic interview on his HBO show. Lawrence Krauss, a popular skeptic who now faces numerous sexual harassment allegations, has criticized the #MeToo movement. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist in the world, has mocked women for speaking out about experiences of sexual harassment, shared a video ridiculing feminists, and railed against “SJWs” (short for “social justice warriors,” a derisive term for social justice activists). Look beyond atheism’s biggest names and you will find vocal Trump supporters like author Robert M. Price and immensely popular atheist YouTubers with more than a million subscribers. Their views are likely shared by more atheists than many would like to admit.

Yeah, what good is atheism as a philosophy if it can’t even find within itself a reason to condemn Nazis, bombing campaigns against Muslim countries, and discrimination and harassment against women? I know that several of the big organizations, like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and American Atheists, are quite clear that they are pro-feminism and anti-Nazi, but it seems like the base have been drifting away to the siren song of the anti-Muslim, racist right (or, as they prefer to call themselves to the point that the word has lost all meaning “centrists”).

Trav Mamone has identified one of the deeper problems in the atheist movement.

One thing I suggest is getting rid of the concept of the atheist celebrity. By declaring just a handful of prominent atheist activists to be the movement’s leaders, it creates a hierarchal system where the same arguments against God get repeated ad nauseam, and newer ideas about how to put humanist values into action are ignored. Everyone should be a leader in the atheist movement, whether that person is fighting for church and state separation in a small town in Pennsylvania or creating a community for liberal atheists living in the Bible Belt. Martin Luther King once said, “You don’t have to know the theory of relativity in order serve.”

There’s always got to be a figurehead, apparently — even MLK has become one. I agree wholeheartedly that we have to get out of that stupid “four horsemen” mindset and recognize that an effective movement has ten thousand leaders, and no one is just a follower, and we’re always ready to criticize, and listen to criticism. Another of our problems is that our “leaders” have been remarkably thin-skinned and unwilling to tolerate disagreement, let alone act on it to change course. We need to be more adaptable.

Until we achieve that kind of breadth and resilience, though, clearly we need to make Trav the King of Atheism. All bow down and worship their wise words.

It happens every time a natural disaster occurs: the ghouls creep out of their crypts and get national press coverage for their rationalizations. One example: Rick Stedman, generic Christian pastor and apologist, has emerged to ask a stupid question.

When hurricanes like Harvey devastate so many lives, where is God?

That’s a really good question—one which I’ve heard whenever a hurricane, tornado, or tsunami wreaks havoc—and it deserves an honest, though maybe surprising answer.

No, it’s not a good question. Where is Harry Potter? Where is Dread Dormammu? Where is Aquaman? These would also be stupid questions, because they are fictional characters, and we know exactly where they are: in the pages of books and comic books. They’re not going to emerge when a catastrophe strikes.

The only people who ask that question are religious apologists. It never occurred to me, for instance. This is the kind of question people ask when reality comes up and smacks their mythologies in the face, and they have to figure out an excuse for why their all-powerful superhero didn’t show up to help out. The rest of us…nope, we have known all along that nature isn’t necessarily our friend, that good and evil don’t apply in the cosmic scheme of things, and we have no expectations of beneficent super-beings feeling obligated to ride to our rescue.

As you might expect, though, Stedman is going to give us his stupid answer to his stupid question, and — big surprise — it’s not going to be surprising at all. His excuse is that his God was there, expressing himself in the charity and kindness of human beings in the face of adversity, because, apparently, people are incapable of recognizing the importance of their friends and neighbors and family, or even strangers, unless they are possessed by a supernatural entity. Whenever you see someone doing something nice, that’s God, not actually that person acting ethically. I think it might be part of that odious Christian doctrine that says we’re all evil sinners who deserve Hell, except Jesus somehow ‘saved’ us. How the idea that goodness is a manifestation of God could be compatible with Christian versions of Free Will that say our actions are our choice, so evil is our problem, not God’s, I don’t know.

It seems simpler to me to cut out the imaginary phantasmal middle man and credit human beings themselves with the good and evil they do, but then, I’m not soaking in Christian dogma.

Then there’s also a purpose to God unleashing hurricanes on us:

In a world that assumes there are no objective rights and wrongs, tragedies recalibrate our moral compasses and remind us that some things are always right.

See, God killed those people and destroyed their homes and livelihood sorta like how he tortured Job: it’s a test to help them see what is right and what is wrong. It really makes it crystal clear that when someone kills your dog and your aunt, turns your home into a mudhole, blows up your workplace, and spews chemical poisons all over your neighborhood, it reminds us that there is an objective good and evil, and if your moral compass is properly calibrated, you ought to realize that the omnipotent agent (if there is one) who spawned that death and destruction to wake us up to the nature of what is good and evil is Himself an evil mofo, and we ought to stop making excuses for him. Right? If your moral compass is still so fucked up that you scribble out apologias the deity you love, then presumably you are now in need of a colossal natural death strike on your home to straighten you out.

I don’t think even that would help Stedman, though. He’s drunk so much Kool-Aid he’s oozing Purplesaurus Rex and Incrediberry out of his pores. Look at this bullshit:

Families wept over the death of loved ones, just as Jesus wept near the tomb of his friend Lazarus. Could our tears and sorrows be reminders that death was not part of our original design, that we were created to be like God—immortal?

I have never in my life grieved over the death of a loved one because it reminds me that, oh yeah, I’m supposed to be God-like and Immortal, and gosh, the loss of this loved one sure is a painful prod to make me think of how I got stiffed out of my Cosmic Destiny by that Eve chick. I’m not crying for them, it’s for getting cheated out of my supernatural inheritance.

Jebus, but I despise Christianity.

And then he has to top it off by sniping at evolution.

(Think about it: if atheistic materialism is true, don’t you think we would have become used to death in 3+ billion years of life on planet Earth? Wouldn’t we have settled the case that human deaths are par for the course and shouldn’t trouble us more than the death of a plant or pet?)

Any time a Christian says something along the lines of If evolution is true, then…, you can predict that they’re going to say something that reveals the depth of their ignorance.

It seems to me that if evolution would predict anything along those lines, it would be that successful lineages would evolve mechanisms to promote survival and to resist death, even inevitable, ubiquitous death. Getting “used to death” is such a weirdly narrow anthropomorphism, since most organisms are going to lack the awareness that is behind the concept of “getting used to”, and because we would expect that successful organisms would resist death.

But then, maybe this is part of the Christian experience. They get used to the unutterable boredom of having to sit through miserable church services every week, so they imagine that is what life is all about — getting accustomed to the intolerable. That’s what they think their imaginary afterlife is all about, too…an eternity of repetitive, predictable slavery. They expect they’ll get used to it. Rick Stedman will help them!