At the 2018 American Atheists convention, the ex-president of the American Atheist organization David Silverman declared:
It is a hard time to be an atheist activist. This has affected us. And it has affected our community...
...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before...
We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost.
The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us.
And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have.
In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse.
Later in 2018, Silverman was fired due to allegations of financial conflicts and sexual assault. After Silverman was terminated from his job at American Atheists, The Washington Post declared concerning Silverman, "Since then, he has lost his job, longtime friends, sleep and weight."
The website Atheism and the City wrote about the 2018 cancellation of the first major atheist conference to be held in New York City:
But none of this is going to happen now because the event has just been canceled. The reasons why are complicated, but it started out difficult enough. The atheist community has splintered into a million shards in recent years. There are the atheist feminists and the atheist anti-feminists, the social justice warrior atheists and the anti-social justice warrior atheists. The pro-PC atheists and the anti-PC atheists. There are pro-Trump atheists and anti pro-Trump atheists. Atheists are split over gamergate, elevatorgate, whether we should organize, or whether we should even call ourselves atheists at all. The divisions go on and on.In 2018, the atheist PZ Myers quotes an atheist activist who declares: "It’s quite depressing that movement Atheism has turned into such a joke. I valued it so much once." In addition, Myers says the atheist movement is in "shambles" and this is "quite depressing" for him.
Picture credits:
Source: David Silverman - Flickr
Title: David Silverman
Author: Mike
Photo is of David Silverman, ex-president of American Atheists
Taken: April 22, 2011













