Doesn’t it seem like atheism is all over the news? I’m probably falling victim to some form of perceptual bias here, possibly selective perception — like the time when I bought a solid gold baby, and suddenly it seemed like everyone had one. Okay, so either I’m imagining it, or else I became an atheist at the exact time that atheism began to command an unprecedented amount of media coverage. I think the latter — I’m on the crest of a trendy atheist wave!

A lot of the recent articles are from people who aren’t happy about the trend. They liked it when atheists wouldn’t tell people… much of anything… just felt guilty about not believing, and kept to themselves. Now we’re militant totalitarians! Cool! When do we get the uniforms?

It’s sad to see theists turn to blather so abjectly, but I suppose it’s inevitable. Without facts to support them, they have to take issue with the way atheists present their case: atheists are ‘arrogant’ or ‘dogmatic’, or, irritatingly, members of a ‘religion’.

One debate that I keep seeing is this: aren’t atheists turning off moderate theists by being confrontational? Sure, Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are going after the fundamentalist believers, but aren’t they also alienating religious moderates who would have been likely to slide into the disbelieving camp but for the nasty atheists?

Well, atheists aren’t all that mean, though people do sometimes feel confronted when I get started. Science is like that (and so is truth and so is life). But more to the point: The conflict is not between religious fundamentalism and religious moderation. The conflict is between people who think you can believe what you like, and people who don’t. I could have said ‘between religion and science’, but I think saying it the other way neatly encapsulates the problem.

Some people think that you can believe what you like, as long as you feel ‘good’ about it, or it makes you ‘happy’. These are religious fundamentalists, but it also describes religious moderates and the entire spectrum of new age woos. People who ‘do science’ or ‘accept science’ are different. If you have a scientific outlook, you can’t believe just what you want. There’s an external reality independent of anyone’s perception that can be measured and experimented on, and evidence from that reality is the standard for truth.

A theist on another blog asked this thought-provoking question:

What are your thoughts on interaction with and influence by those of different beliefs/ideals? Do you feel easily influenced when you open yourself up to their opinions? Do you see this as detrimental or beneficial?

And here’s part of my response:

I guess my message for True Believers would be: Don’t worry. Exposure to other beliefs won’t necessarily change your mind, especially if changing your mind would be especially threatening. You’ll be able to revert to whatever you want to believe. People are good at that. … As long as you hold on to the idea that you can believe what you like, your beliefs are safe.

What you should worry about, in my view, is science and reason. Reject those, and you can believe what you like. Accept them as valid, and you can’t. Once you are aware of critical thinking and the scientific method and you decide to apply them to your life, including your belief system, without being afraid of the consequences, then — in my view — loss of faith is the likely outcome. It just so happens that I now think that’s the right answer, but it’s not an easy one to accept.

Reason’s a bully, and once you accept its validity, you can no longer honestly deny facts. No wonder then that many belief systems avail themselves of some variant of ‘believe what you like’, ‘believe what feels good’, or ‘create your own reality’.

UPDATE There’s a really good interview on Salon with Chris Hedges, author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Doesn’t it make sense for the Democrats to reach out to the huge number of evangelicals who aren’t necessarily part of the religious right, but who may be sympathetic to some of its rhetoric? Couldn’t those people be up for grabs?

I don’t think they are up for grabs because they have been ushered into a non-reality-based belief system. This isn’t a matter of, “This is one viewpoint, here’s another.” This is a world of magic and signs and miracles and wonders, and [on the other side] is the world you hate, the liberal society that has shunted you aside and thrust you into despair. The rage that is directed at those who go after the movement is the rage of those who fear deeply being pushed back into this despair, from which many of the people I interviewed feel they barely escaped. A lot of people talked about suicide attempts or thoughts of suicide — these people really reached horrific levels of desperation. And now they believe that Jesus has a plan for them and intervenes in their life every day to protect them, and they can’t give that up.

So in a way, the movement really has helped them.

Well, in same way unemployed workers in Weimar Germany were helped by becoming brownshirts, yes. It gave them a sense of purpose. Look, you could always tell in a refugee camp in Gaza when one of these kids joined Hamas, because suddenly they were clean, their djelleba was white, they walked with a sense of purpose. It was a very similar kind of conversion experience. If you go back and read [Arthur] Koestler and other writers on the Communist Party, you find the same thing.

People who believe what they like are easy to manipulate. It just takes an influential and charismatic con artist to show them a vision they like, and they’re in.