Here's an interesting juxtaposition of articles on religion at the Washington Post: In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly Vocal and In America, Nonbelievers Find Strength in Numbers, vs. Converts To Islam Move Up In Cells.

One way of looking at this is to see the first two, about the supposedly brave atheists (or humanists, secularists, freethinkers, rationalists or brights) of the West, turning away from and seeking to undermine much of traditional value, and contrast with the the Islamists who know what they're about and gaining ground on us while we turn away from many of the things which made us great.

I find nothing particularly "brave" about being an atheist in the West, where penalties for all but the most extreme personal beliefs are minor to negligible. No, the only brave Westerners in these articles are:

Only Islam still carries a real threat for those who turn away from it even as a matter of personal conscience. In Judaism or Christianity there simply is no serious penalty.

Many atheists, it seems to me, are simply substituting one set of dogma for another, one belief system for another. How do they convince others they are right? How do they convey a coherent message? Why, by developing their own cannon of beliefs and proselytizing for it...as any religious believer would. And ultimately, we're talking about clashing belief systems here. So what's the end game? This is about ephemera -- what we believe, why we believe it, what values those beliefs lead us to hold -- stuff for which categorically imperative answers will likely never be known. Where's the line that says people who hold a "religion" may be likely to compel others to it, but those whose religion is unconventional won't? It doesn't exist. Ultimately, people will impose their values upon others. It's what we do.

Many dogmatic atheists strike me as spoiled children who, having always gotten money from mom and dad's wallet have never learned the value of the stuff. They stand on the shoulders of giants and imagine that all those wonderful Western liberal values they treasure sprang whole from nature like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, as though shared human physiology leads inevitably to a particular cultural value system. It isn't so. These things don't develop in a vacuum. "Universal" standards of human rights are not the inevitable byproduct, nor did they spring from some cloistered academic's exercises in transcendental navel-gazing. Others, who hold dear the important not always rooted in the here and now and the physically obvious, contributed to them.

In fact, I'd hazard that the people who've thought they had a fix on a good, modern, "rational" analysis and value system have, having cast off the limits that the traditional religions had tied them with, have left murders done in the name of the religious in the dust -- witness the tens of millions killed at a pop by Mao, Stalin and a litany of other Marxist monsters.

How, pray, does the atheist propagate their value system? Like anyone else. You write it down, you codify it, you have "high priests" who read, understand, can argue...convert. Soon, much like the Marxists, you've got just another religion, telling people how to think, with all the trappings of same while they shout a protest, "We're not like them!" You are.

Too, I'd hazard that many of the wars supposedly fought because of "what was written in some book," (as the atheist caricature would have it) have actually been fewer than those simply cause by a clash of cultures and people fighting to, as they perceived it, defend "their way of life" -- "The Book" as secondary in the calculation.

I'm not arguing that there are no negatives to traditional religion (I'm an agnostic myself), but I'd sooner trust someone whose guidance in life includes an extra-rational component that includes some aspect of continuation after the physical than I would trust the narcissist someone whose every move is dictated by the here and now, and who thinks that people who "believe in things" are the source of all the world's problems. They're not.

Somewhere in there is a balance, between those who believe in the here and now physical-only (and who delude themselves that a serious value system can be derived from such a thing), and those, like the radical Islamists, who devalue the physical life completely in favor of the unproven paradise of the afterlife. Value of the flesh and of the earth, along with a respect for the extra-rational aspects of human experience and the awesome possibility of the existence of the unknowable are where it's at.

Not all religious traditions are equal. Some are good, some bad, some less good or less bad than others. In this they are mathematically equivalent to secular concepts which don't invoke God or any higher power at all. They all have an equal opportunity to be dangerous ideas.

Of course, since I am a "Western liberal," I believe people have the right to believe pretty well what they will -- from the religious to the atheist -- so long as any harm is held at a distance. People hold different beliefs dear, and they're entitled to. This may sound like it's coming shockingly close to "moral relativism," but it's not. I am a man of a time and a place. Morals in general may vary from person to person and place to place. My own do not. I simply don't arrogate the idea to myself that I figured it all out on my own. Thoughts have roots.

We are locked in mortal combat with a religious foe that knows what it believes, loves it and lives it. We are not going to combat that with a mentality that stopped developing in High School with "Waah, my mommy forced me to go to Sunday School and now I hate religion, it sucks," which is the level I find most "Atheist discourse" amounts to. Labeling and lumping all "religion" into one bucket is counter-productive, doomed to failure, and destined to lead to the destruction of what most Atheists say they hold dear.