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Lymantria Since: Apr, 2015
Tropiarz Since: Sep, 2022
2025-01-02 02:26:44

Hollywood Atheist is close, but that covers characters who are just non-religious to a silly and/or strawmannish degree

... and you just described such case, so what are you expecting here?

Bomber-Boi (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded)
2025-01-02 03:30:54

…someone who actively hates religion, rather than merely not believing in any gods.

Tropiarz Since: Sep, 2022
2025-01-02 03:44:51

Let me quote to you bits of Hollywood Atheist, then:

  • Atheists show contempt, dislike, or even hatred towards religion and gods, which may become contradictory to the point of them seeming to be Nay Theists instead. They may not just argue against theism, but may actively mock, harass, and even persecute believers, sometimes in ways ironically reminiscent of religious extremism.
  • Atheists are smugly convinced of their own intellectual superiority and usually blinded to the "truth" by their own elitist pretensions. Even whenever the medium doesn't take a position, these traits are often used to show atheists as being similar to their religious opponents, especially the more fanatical ones.
  • Atheists only seem to have a bone to pick against their culture's predominant religion. In the real world this is most often Christianity, and to a lesser extent, its brethren Judaism and Islam, called Abrahamic religions. This does sometimes happen in real life, on the basis that people tend to be more critical with the religions they are most directly familiar with or knowledgeable about, especially if they have personally experienced their social and political ramifications,note  but its portrayal in media often conflates atheism with criticism of religion, which are related but ultimately different fields.note 
  • Atheists are hardline materialists and/or have an overtly pseudo-religious belief in science and logic (which is scientism, not atheism). They might even be technophiles, transhumanists and/or roboticists as well, effectively having that as their religion. Under the right conditions of power and superiority, they might consider and/or proclaim themselves God(s), often fully meaning it.

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And what you are postulating is a strawman character, fighting in The War on Straw

Edited by Tropiarz
Chabal2 Since: Jan, 2010
2025-01-02 04:26:55

There is a fictional example that isn't a strawman in Father Brown, based on a very strong anticlerical movement in French government at the time.

Scorpion451 (Edited uphill both ways)
2025-01-02 09:27:29

The Fundamentalist can apply to atheists as much as anyone else when they start down the path of unshakable conviction, actively trying to force their beliefs on others, and actively seeking the destruction of other worldviews, Demonization of those who disagree, etc.

Nthing Hollywood Atheist (aka Straw Atheist) as the general trope here, though. Poe's Law is in full effect when it comes to the extremes some take their non-beliefs to, so the straw part is mostly in representing these as representatives rather than outliers.

Edited by Scorpion451
Bomber-Boi (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded)
2025-01-15 06:26:46

Yeah, Hollywood Atheist does cover a lot of cases of this situation now that I've looked it over again. I was viewing it more through the lens of "atheism being depicted as a silly attitude, usually by strawmanning it".

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