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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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New Atheism

24 Jul 2026 - 26 Jul 2026
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    • An intellectual fad, now must be a couple of decades old, where a bunch of writers decided to go war against religion at about the same time. I'm 90% sure that the Epstein/Brockman network had something to do with this
      • Ask Claude
        • You're thinking of the New Atheism movement, roughly 2004-2011, centered on the "Four Horsemen": Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris.
        • The Brockman connection is real and significant. John Brockman's literary agency and Edge.org network represented and promoted several of these figures. Dawkins, Dennett, and others were Brockman clients. The Edge "reality club" overlapped heavily with New Atheist circles.
        • The Epstein connection is murkier but documented. Epstein funded and socialized with several figures in that network - Krauss (a prominent New Atheist adjacent figure) had a particularly embarrassing relationship with Epstein that got attention later. The overlap was more about the broader Brockman/Edge scientific-intellectual network than specifically a coordinated anti-religion campaign.
        • What's worth noting is that Brockman genuinely operated as a node who could get multiple prominent thinkers moving in similar directions simultaneously - through book deals, introductions, and the Edge platform - so the "coordinated fad" feel you're picking up on had some structural basis, even if it wasn't a conspiracy per se.
        • The timing cluster (Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Dawkins' God Delusion, Hitchens' God is Not Great, Harris's End of Faith all within a few years) was partially organic post-9/11 but the Brockman network likely amplified it.
    • I used to be firmly in this camp but somehow it never became home. I suck at ideology. Anyway these days I am Neither atheist nor theist.
    • Anyway, it occured to me that this movement took several thinkers who were original and interesting, and turned them into tedious cranks.
      • Christopher Hitchens
      • (and Sam Harris but I never read much of his stuff and not sure what the point of him is)
    • Dennett in particular seems to have refused to accept the obvious conclusions of his illusionist stance. He's happy to say the self is a kind of useful fiction, a kind of story we both construct and inhabit – but then why can't gods be an equally useful fiction, no more or less real than selves? But no, religion is a spell to be broken, selves are spells to be lived with. See Weirding [[Dennett]].