Well, it's a long story, but we can see the produce of it around here.
If you think back not so far in history, but let's run about twenty years, because part of what I'm discussing in this moment involves the Sciforums experience, we can find, nineteen years ago,or so, discussion that might almost seem petulant, about atheists having better educations, making more money, and in many aspects showing greater material generosity. But it wasn't petulant; it was atheists justifying themselves in ways they shouldn't have to.
But also imagine, please, questions about "conversion"; to what degree does any of this opposition to religion have to do with curing religion, and since we're clearly not talking about doing so through coercive violence ... er ... wait ... are we? Let us presuppose we are not talking about violence as a cure to religion.
Okay, now what?
A lot of the discourse leading up to and during the New Atheist period has been mostly complaint and pretty much nothing for solution. It is easy enough to argue on behalf of freedom from religion, but we also need to remember that the legal status of atheism as
de facto religion—
i.e., religious position or belief, a rhetorical circumstance for juristic purposes—does not simply guard atheists against religious persecution; it also protects others from bullshit in the name of atheism.
• An extreme version: I tell a story about an atheistic advocate who needed to redefine religion to mean, merely, belief in God, in order to protect other behavior from ever being called religious; it was a personal priority, and cannot at this time be applied as any sort of stereotype.
Yet if we convene a symposium historical, it will be easy enough to agree that we ought to protect the discourse from all that fouled up political religion; in this gathering, we would instead be making formal inquiries into the historical record and arguing philosophy of history. That is to say, no, excluding the exclusionary political evangelical Christianity wouldn't be excluding Christianity, and those working their way through, say, the anthropology of the Great Awakening, or index and concordance of Original Good in the American literary record—both massive undertakings—would not, in excluding two-bit evangelical atheism that has nothing to do with anything beyond a status "without god", be excluding atheists from the discussion of religious history. To the other, if we must start redefining everything at the outset in order to suit atheists, we've pretty much wrecked the discourse just as we would letting Regents University write the agenda. It's kind of like a choice between sitting down with scholars historical from around the country, or maybe putting Kevin Swanson, Mike Huckabee, and Megyn Kelly in a room with Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins; the latter will be entertaining and irrational as hell. The former would seem boring by comparison, but if we know how to rationally attend the resulting discourse, we might learn a lot about religion, society, and humanity.
It's one thing to redefine for the sake of what the record tells us; it's another to do so for the sake of those who can't be bothered with the record.
For our purposes, we need to remember that atheism does not automatically correlate with rational argumentation, and here is an interesting notion: That story about redefining religion has another vector. It stands out to me that some atheistic evangelists around here seem to think they don't really need to know much about the religions they criticize; but if we simply hold to a constrained definition of religion, then not only can nontheists cult it up as much as they want—just don't call it God—we also find that critics of religion need never actually study the history and anthropology. In that context, without defining religion down like that, atheism has nothing to do with the most part of religious discourse: Rationally speaking, if all atheism has to say is its refusal or absence of God, then it has nothing to say about code, cult, and creed, for instance. Or, as some Sufis say, the rest is the balance of religion; by that aspect, atheism would have nothing to say about religion.