I posted this question on Reddit a while ago and it was an interesting discussion so I wanted to hear what Lemmings think.
It’s common for religious people to be against the above mentioned things due to their beliefs, but how common is it for atheists to be against them? What reasons would they have? How would they base their opinion if there was no belief system/religion to rely on?
I’m not trying to provoke or insult anybody with this question, and I don’t wish for people to hate on each other’s beliefs. I just think this is an interesting concept to think about.
I don’t know how common, but I remember enough of middle school to know that just because you’re a budding atheist does not prelude deep homophobia.
Or racism.
The American scientific community was all in on eugenics prior to WWII. We were sterilizing people left and right for mental illness, being a minority with “too many kids,” etc.
STIM doesn’t include ethics, psychology, and sociology. It’s amazing how many book-smart people are terrible humans.
The thing is, teenagers (usually) are a reflection of what they are taught in their houses. They are not mature enough to have their own opinions.
Better question is, how common is for adult atheists to be against homosexuality/abortion?
“Teenage pseudo-intellectual edgelords” is a demographic targeteted for recruitment by the far-right and its a scene that was filled with them decades ago.
So now they’re not racists and sexists, they’re “race realists” and armchair biologists. All it took was a crooked scan of a figure in a published paper.
But there’s no critical thought behind it at all. Give them a list of IQ grouped by race and they’ll declare there are no contributing systemic problems or historical events, black people are just genetically inferior.
There are so many obvious threads they could follow.
Scientific ones like “Is IQ actually objective or can you easily be primed and trained for the test?”.
Moral ones like “Should people’s rights and freedoms be decided by their intelligence and if so, why is that being extrapolated from the color of their skin rather than giving IQ tests to white supremacists?”.
Innate ones that don’t require any further context like “If white people aren’t at the top of that list anyway, why is the ‘okay to abuse’ cut off at second place?”
Ultimately, they’re no different from the religious extremists. They’re bigots and they’ve worked backwards from that to find an excuse.