Transcript of talk between Ricky Gervais and Steven Colbert RG: An agnostic atheist is someone who doesn’t know there is a God or not, as no one does.

SC: So you are not convicted of your atheism?

RG: Well, I am. No I am because atheism is only rejecting a claim that there is a God. Atheism isn’t a belief system. This is atheism in a nutshell. You say, “there is a God”. I saw, “can you prove that?” You say, “No.” I say, “I don’t believe you then.” So, ummm, you believe in one God I assume.

SC: Uhhhhh, in three persons but go ahead.

RG: So, okay, but there are about 3,000 to choose from..

SC: I’ve done some reading, yeah.

RG: So basically, you believe, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 Gods and I don’t believe in just one more.

SC: Right.

SC: Do you ever have a feeling of great gratitude for existence?

RG: Of course. I know the chances are billions to one that I am on this planet as me and never will be again.

SC: I know that I can’t convince you there is a God, nor do I really want to convince you that there is a God.

RG: No

SC: All I can really do is explain to you my experience which is that I have a strong desire to direct that gratitude towards something or someone and that thing is God.

RG: Of course, we want to make sense of nature and science and it’s too unfathomable. That everything in the universe was once crunched into something smaller than an atom..

SC: But you don’t know that. You are just believing Stephen Hawking and that’s a matter of faith in his abilities. You don’t know it yourself. Your accepting that cause someone told you.

RG: Well, but science is constantly proved all of the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years time that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result.

SC: That’s really good.

RG: So, I don’t need faith in science. I don’t need faith to know that probably if I jump out of a window, every other time people have jumped out of the window they have smashed to the ground because of this thing called gravity.

LucyDreamly I like to use the classic Greek statement.
I’m an atheist. I simply lack a belief in gods.
Just like the countless other things I’ve not found a reason to believe in.
From there I just go on with my life. It’s not a cornerstone I build my life around.
It’s not a religion.
It’s not even a belief or disbelief.
It’s a lack of belief.

Key-Performance-9021 This idea of atheism as a kind of ideology is mostly limited to religious cultures, such as the United States. I live in a larger city in a fairly secular country, and here atheism is more or less seen as the ‘default setting’. Furthermore, ‘believing in science’ isn’t really a thing, science is simply viewed as a tool. You might not trust certain scientists, but that doesn’t mean you don’t trust science itself. There’s also no inherent contradiction in trusting scientists while being religious, which most Americans here seem to recognize.

But we don’t have any radical evangelicals here, and the Catholics here don’t believe the Bible literally. They also don’t try to restrict the rights of women or homosexuals. It’s likely that people in the US have to fight much harder, like people in islamic countries, which is why it’s so important to American atheists.

justwhatever73 "Science is constantly proved over time"

More importantly, it is constantly disproved over time. And then a new, better hypothesis is developed that is closer to reality (to the extent that we are able to observe and measure reality).

Show me ONE religion that is constantly questioning itself and seeking to disprove itself. People argue that science is just a different flavor of dogma, but that's patently untrue. If done correctly, it is the antithesis of dogma.

ActiveCollection And I think it is still absolutely fine for people to believe in God. As a personal belief. It's just very, very problematic when religion is somehow linked to state power.

Transcript of talk between Ricky Gervais and Steven Colbert RG: Well, but science is constantly proved all of the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years time that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result.

(Feb 1 2025, 8:35 PM)Colibri “If you take the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and the rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will disintegrate and the words will be gone. Our bible is the wind and the rain.” -unidentified Native-American

(Feb 2 2025, 1:05 AM)drdee 'You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years time that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result.'

True to an extent, but maybe not as true as you might think:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99793.The_Golem (the last chapter describing a high school science experiment is hilarious)

Explore the topic 'sociology of science' for more interesting reading on the subject. Even 'the scientific method' as we define it was historically contingent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_and_the_Air-Pump

Kiloku I was on Reddit in the golden age of /r/Atheism.

The "cringe" was okay. The problem is how it, as a community and identity, descended into all types of bigotry. The anti-arab hate was especially off the charts, and it quickly opened the doors for many other types of hatred, all behind a veneer of "logic" and "rationalism", like saying that being gay is "harmful to the human species" because of natalist ideas. Or stuff about women being "biologically predisposed" to being submissive.

I am an atheist, and I will not ever give the benefit of the doubt to online atheism-centric communities.

iwishyouwerestraight God I remember seeing in the mid 2010s how the cringy atheist rhetoric eventually turned into the alt-right “feminists destroyed with facts and logic” grift. There was one YouTuber (forgot his name) whose whole shtick was atheism and being a facts and logic guy, but that turned into hating buzzfeed and more grifty stuff.

Found him. Goes by screen name Dr. Shaym…

Edit: turns out he has a new channel where he does movie reviews. Haven’t watched them fully but they seem super tame compared to other stuff he made in the past.

Simple_Confusion_756 Bro, I was on Atheist YouTube at that time and it’s what directly lead me down the 2016 Alt-Right pipeline as an 13 year old second generation immigrant girl…It’s a very cringe time of my life, I don’t like to think about

Quote:There was one YouTuber (forgot his name) whose whole shtick was atheism and being a facts and logic guy, but that turned into hating buzzfeed and more grifty stuff.

The way like four names popped in my head 💀

Elite_AI Yeah there is ultimately a reason that most of that side of the internet gleefully slid into the modern alt right. 

zuzg Please Misogyny is still so prevalent on the Frontpage, among other things like ableism.     
Especially on funny meme subreddits

SupervillainMustache 2015 was the year that the online skeptic community shattered.

Suddenly we were all talking about the "dangers of third wave feminism and social justice". 

I won't ever forget the people who built or joined that movement, even though they've probably backtracked now.

Possumnal Nothing precludes an atheist from harboring racism, homophobia, sexism, etc., even though many like to think so.

I’ve been an atheist most my life, but when I went looking for a like-minded community I found approximately the same ratio of backwards dickheads justifying their prejudice with “because pseudo-science” as there were chodes in my former church justifying it with “because Holy Book says so”.

Lucky for me, I have like a dozen better things to build community around so I just left that whole debate. I got nothing to prove and I lack the hubris to claim to know the face of the universe.

ArchmageIlmryn The core flaw, I think, was that a lot of the online atheist community was motivated by feeling intellectually superior to "those idiots who believe in religion". The community was superficially progressive, because the main progressive issue back then was gay marriage and basically all the anti-gay-marriage arguments were religious (you didn't really have the pseudosciency ones to the same extent you do today). It was less that people cared about LGBTQ rights, and more a sense of "well the dumb religious sheep are against gay marriage, so gay marriage is good".

Unfortunately, that motivation is all too easily hijacked, which is pretty much what happened when the online right secularized between 2012ish and 2016. That smug sense of intellectual superiority played all to well with stereotypes about "hysterical" women when dismissing feminism, or aligning with the liberal-conservative view of "once we ban discrimination, inequality is solved and people should shut up", or with the non-intuitiveness of trans issues when turning against the LGBTQ community - especially once the online right started to portray LGBTQ as a religion.

asvalken I think you've absolutely nailed it. Internet Atheism was all about getting those middle school debate club "shut down" moments, and then everyone clapped! It's no surprise that Steve Bannon later targeted young online white men with another platform that told them they still get to feel superior to everyone else.

"Reason" is a way to win arguments, and "science" is when you measure intelligence by number of facts known. They skipped critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and above all how to be wrong and learn from it. NDT's insufferable smugness, or Dawkins' "dear Muslima" post are pretty good indicators that Internet Atheism needed a looong look in the mirror.