The more thing change, the more they stay the same. I wonder who said that first? Okay, I looked it up and it appears to be some French guy back in 1856. For some reason, I’ve always known that quote but never knew who used it first. Now that I do, I’ll end up dying with more useless information stuck in my brain. What brought that to mind was thinking about the current state of atheism and where it stands today compared to where it was say, fifteen or so years ago. Back then, I began using the Internet for more than just making orders from Amazon and emailing friends and family. I actually found a lot of people that were atheists and well, some of them even had blogs!

Everyone I know today as a fellow atheist I met on Twitter(X). At the time, I was new to the platform and there seemed to be a lot of atheists online, so I began to reply to some posts, follow a few people I found interesting, and everything just took off from there. I was able to discover other websites with some good content, and some that were, to me, concerned with niche issues. I think we could find the same kind of group that were loosely identified with a single characteristic and at first, I really didn’t care. In the meantime, I began this blog, about atheism and skepticism. I read several other blogs regularly when I started out and I kept coming across at least one common them. That was the idea that atheism is now a movement. Movement? How and where is that happening? All I see, at least online, is a loose confederation of people that openly (not all, by the way!) identify as atheist. There were noted speakers, writers, and educators among us, but there was no one organizing anyone beyond the local level. So, atheists even though we represented at the time, some 3% of the population, were unable to affect change even st the local level because of s lack of organization. We talked about it, a lot, but did nothing.

Even today, there are various atheist skeptical organizations (beyond American Atheists) that were at least once, singly identified but none that would step up and try and bring together, not only the individual associations, but the individual atheist, hiding out in the fringe of society, hoping there’d be another like-minded person nearby, All these skeptical organizations seemed to care about was receiving yearly membership fees, and then, clogging your mailbox, begging for more money throughout the yesr. I joined snd a couple and that was my experience. For a bit, I was even cynical enough to believe that these were no more than grifts, like any other religion.

Enough history. If you were around those few years ago, you’re more than familiar with the entire story (which didn’t end very positively). Today, it seems as though interest in atheism has somewhat declined, mainly because it’s difficult to find any online. Sure, there are local groups in many places, but that doesn’t account for the majority of us and even attending a weekly or monthly group gathering is really not much more than a social venue, with an occasional serious presentation that is completely forgotten before the next meeting. Heck, why not just go back to church?

This is not a movement because movement implies motion, which there has been none that I’ve ever seen. It’s just been a lot of talk, leading nowhere, adding nothing to the natural discourse. You can’t just change the name (New Atheism) and expect a different outcome.