You don’t believe in a god. Neat. That wasn’t really the problem, though, was it?

Imagine Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins weighing in on a social issue, or how YouTube atheists feel about feminism, intersectionality, or structural racism.

If you’ve never heard the term “cultural Christian”, that’s the sort of thing we’re talking about. They tossed the part that believed in a supreme deity but kept most of the rest of the hierarchy, which is why the alt right has long included so many who were prominent “skeptics” in the past.

The problem ain’t that they say they’re atheists with their whole chest; the problem is all the superstitions they maintained and in some cases pushed even further.

If you are the sort of person who thinks Charles Murray of “The Bell Curve” fame has important things to say, and ought to be lifted up on your platform — you are not an ally to basically any non-white person, any person with disabilities, anybody on the left at all.

Charles Murray was employed by the American Enterprise Institute for 30 years specifically so that he could peddle scientific racism in the service of cutting social welfare programs. And Harris was like, “This guy was ‘deplatformed’ by some college, therefore I am going to make sure other people hear this guy (who is paid to go out and peddle racism by a conservative propaganda nonprofit)”.

White supremacy is a superstition, but apparently not important or odious enough to Sam Harris to reject.

In the opposite direction, we have the myriad ways in which religious belief functions for people, which is not a matter of faith or barbary.

For a lot of people, ritual is actually, literally what helps them to go through their lives, deal with trauma, whatever. It brings people together, it makes things real. Thinking “I won’t care about this anymore” actually, literally doesn’t work as well as writing something down on a piece of paper and burning it to be able to process that it’s done with.

People who have aphasia can sometimes still curse easily. Cursing seems to live in a different part of the brain than much of the rest. The profane and the holy don’t mingle totally with all the rest of language. Which doesn’t make it supernatural or inexplicable, but it is interesting.

Someone whose idea of themself is not fully individual but extends backward to all previous generations, forward to many not yet born, and to animals, plants, and physical resources could be described as superstitious. Or, this way of storytelling and understanding the self could be an incredibly useful and persistent way of passing pertinent information across thousands of years and doing shaping of the environment meant to last indefinitely rather than less than a hundred years. In that way, the capitalist superstition of ever-growth is way more harmful and the egregores of “the market” and “the nation” are literally much more dangerous.

There are religions that can continue to engage in ritual and continuity with the past while being ambivalent or atheistic, and that’s fine. But it’s important to locate where harm is coming from, and it’s usually not “religion” but power structures, hierarchy, and coercion that can involve religion and just as often or more do not.