Atheists vs. the Majority
• Skeptics & Atheists
It does look as if atheism and skepticism may have had their heyday.
I'm not sure that there is more belief. My suspicion is that rabble-rousers like TV preachers and conservative politicians who want donations and votes have awakened the historically silent average ignorant people.
Fundamentalist rhetoric aside happy atheists have always been a minority. And most people have such a dim talent for living that they can't help but pine for that day when bye and bye in the sky they get their apple pie. With ice cream on top.
They want their notions of propriety made into law. To Hell - literally - with people who love members of their own sex.
And they don't have enough fully functioning gray matter to accept just how complicated even the apparently simple things are. Evolutionary theory is discomforting and weird.
From a roundup of recent books by atheists:
At the sight of Stephen Colbert the studio audience begins cheering with anticipation: It's time for "This Week in God." Colbert calls up the "God machine" and gives it a tap, and a window begins spinning to the most unholy sound as a panoply of religious symbols and images—the pope, believers in the shroud of turin, assorted rabbis, imams, ministers, priests, creationists, spiritualists, even those those professing secular humanism and atheism ("The religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority")—flash on the screen. Finally the machine comes to rest on a particular target. We see a Jerusalem rabbi, imam, and priest set aside their mutual hatred long enough to denounce that city's gay-pride parade. Or we watch Colbert conduct a blind taste test to see whether he can tell the difference between holy water and Pepsi. ...
No wonder, then, that it is a bit jarring, after Colbert's polished irreverence and his audience's unforced delight, to return to the real world and be reminded that it is irreligion, and not religion, that is on the defensive today.