hentropy said:
It's a little disingenuous to suggest there was open hostility toward atheism- on one hand it's true, atheism was more or less illegal in the Christian west- on the other hand there wasn't really any attempts to discredit or attack its ideas, why would you waste your time on something that doesn't exist in any kind of significant number? Atheists still existed because you don't have to wear it on your sleeve and you can still go and perform any kind of ritual required of you by society.
It's markedly different now, now that there is a significant open atheist population. Atheism has attempted to become a "brand" like all the other religions, with organizations pushing atheist views and secularism. Since it is, at its heart, a blank slate, it makes it more threatening than other religions that come with their own set of issues and things to learn. Someone can become an atheist with little to no effort. But now you see Christians trying to define the character of atheists as a group in a similar way as other religions. That cold science is their religion and Charles Darwin is their prophet. It's not something that is super recent, but it has ramped up in recent years as Christians see the rise of organized and pushy atheism.
From my perspective, this looks less and less like "pushy atheists" and more and more like "atheists pushing back". Take many Christian groups lobbying several U.S. States to change the science curriculum to teach "intelligent desigh" rather than evolutionary biology.
Maybe I'm misreading your tone but I'm hearing you say that atheism is only okay so long as you're a "closet" atheist. In North America atheists (or Deists in my case) have the same right to
publicly share their beliefs (or in this case, rejection of a belief) as any of their other neighbours. Respectfully sharing one's thoughts on a subject is
not an attack upon the beliefs of one's religious neighbours. It is simply expressing your own beliefs. Unfortunately, it just so happens that many of one's neighbours are often scared or insulted by the idea that the diety or dieties they believe in very strongly don't exist. After all, to reject the existence of dieties involves directly or indirectly asserting the universe is a cold and empty place where nothing but other unreliable humans can stop bad things from happening. Followed by death. And then nothing.
Consequently, since atheists keep talking about scary things, religious types tend to protect their beliefs by framing the "God Debate" as "science vs religion" and misrepresenting atheists as worshipers of science. This despite the fact that atheists
by definition don't "worship" anything! Atheism is not a religion!
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. Period. While we're at it, while you might find the odd atheist "club" or something, you'll never find "organized" atheism in the same sense as church groups or other forms of "organized" religious belief. What you're seeing is more and more high-profile
individual atheists getting public recognition of and for their beliefs.
Or, to put this another way (I'm a Neil deGrasse Tyson fan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5yWdVHv3o
I just wish that for once that scriptwriters for these religious movies would actually let God linger on the other side of the "gaps" rather than outright "prove" his existance. It would probably make for a much more effective narrative. But then again, these movies aren't
for me.