Evaporating atheists? Keep praying monkeyboy.

PZ over at Pharyngula pointed out this little gem of an op-ed by some schmoe by the name of David Klinghoffer. The title alone is enough to annoy me, "Prophets of the new atheism".

Of course, the writer commits several standard errors starting with calling atheism a religion.

Can disbelief in God be considered "religious"? Sure. Just ask Zen Buddhists, who worship no deity. By religion, I mean any faith-based set of values that makes exclusive claims for its truth and explains the mysteries of the universe. Yes, atheism begins with a faith, namely that only material and physical (not spiritual) causes make the world run.

No, no no no no no no. If lack of religion is a religion then not playing baseball is a sport. (Switchin it up there, see?) Atheists can be religious, but atheism is not a religion. It's a lack of belief in a god or god's. That's all, no more. Unlike Zen Buddhists atheists don't have any particular philosophy that we all share.
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He then blathers on about how Dawkins isn't addressing the ID movements "latest arguments" as if the Discovery Institute has ever put up anything worth even countering (apparently this guy works for DI according to the article).

Here's the next piece of excrement that bugged me:

Dawkins, for his part, mocks the God of the Hebrew Bible as "arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Such a wild caricature will be unrecognizable to any believer (like me) in the God of Israel. But Dawkins and Harris seem unfamiliar with religious tradition as biblical monotheists know it from personal experience and deep study. Frankly, the success of the new atheist faith would be hard to imagine without today's soaring levels of societal religious illiteracy.

Really? It would only be unrecognizable if you hadn't read the Bible. Dawkin's is absolutely right when he calls the god of the Bible those things. It's not mocking either. There are plain examples for each of those charges in the Old Testament (and some in the New) if you've got a reading comprehension above that of a 3rd grader.

The writer closes with:

Certainly, you can have an ethical individual atheist, an instinctively caring, generous person who happens to disbelieve in God. But an atheist society could not survive. It would first live on the fumes of ancient moral traditions. In the end, racked by despair at life's apparent meaninglessness, its members would return to more nourishing faiths.

That's what we see happening now in formerly communist Russia, with its Christian and Jewish revivals. The evaporation of atheist communism is a lesson worth pondering, and a sobering one, for the new atheists.

This is plainly mindless conjecture of what an atheist society would be like. It's pointless as well, as we won't see it in our lifetimes. Ask any "Awakened atheist" (thanks Hank) if they think their life is meaningless. On the topic of morality, once again we can also turn to science to see where our morals "come from" instead of religion as seen in some recent articles. Finally, the only lesson that the state imposed atheism can teach this current generation of atheists is that atheism cannot be foisted on a populace. No ethical atheist would ever attempt to do so. People have to come to their own conclusions in life, whether they're right on wrong. As long as there are rational, thinking people who don't rely on woo to run their lives and determine their fate there will be atheists. We will not evaporate into the mist no matter how hard you pray.