So when offered a chance to join some group like FFRF and go to meetings to advance "freedom from religion", we're not interested. So who is interested? Activist types. The type of people programmed to be tone deaf to any melodies but their own. So that's why you get a lawsuit objecting to the Star of David on a Holocaust exhibit. Not that the rest of us heathens can't see both their points, but because we're not there when the vote to proceed is held, atheists end up looking like a$$holes.

2. I disagree with Phred's comment below about Richard Dawkins going too far. It is a criticism I have heard from many really smart people - that Dawkins style alienates people who might otherwise question religious faith, but i still think they are misguided. Here is why.

Debates in general rarely convince the other side, but none more so than religious debates. Christianity and Islam in particular are beautifully constructed to make apostasy highly unlikely no matter what evidence and logical arguments are brought to bear. (Or as I see it, tragically made.). The disencemtives of conceding error are simply too great to ever expect a Christian or Muslim to ever say in the course of a debate, "You're right, that does make my beliefs seem rather absurd." I've never seen it happen and don't ever expect to. The whole heaven and hell carrot and stick thing on top of the social pressures are just too powerful for believers to go down without far more fight than can be mustered in even a series of debates.

So it is incorrect that Dawkins is turning off the otherwise convinceable. Most aren't unsavable anyway. But more than that, IMO his style, and that of the other antagonists like Harris and the late Hitchens, actually increases the probability of reason over faith. That is because their failure to dumb down their rhetoric sticks, it is memorable. It is impactful. In the dead of night when believers are left with only their thoughts, they have something truly meaty to confront that cannot be reconciled with their otherwise comfortable picture of the world. It is in that dead of night that any prospects for the triumph of science over superstition for the individual is going to occur. And it is then that we need our best case to be memorable.

That is what the a$$hole version of atheists provides.. The memorable, undodgeable, unavoidable logic - for those willing to be honest with themselves - that can crush faith when the heat and motivations of debate are over and all that subset of people is left with is their own thoughts.

I just wish I had read his stuff much earlier in my life.

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but the militant way.  The give them something to think about way.  Then I realized people are programmed to believe by nature itself.  It's like asking 16 yro guys not to be horny.  It's natural.  And it is unbecoming to belittle others beliefs.  Dawkins does that.  You can have a debate without being an ass.  You can change minds without being an ass.  But a majority of the population will always believe in something religious and it accomplishes nothing to point at them in smugness and claim you have a lock on reality.

)

"We're borrowing 10% of GDP each year to get 1-2% growth. That isn't"
an improving economy. We're simply mortgaging the future.