Over at Talking Squid, Chris Lawson offers the definitive response to the question -- famously voiced by Karen Hunter in a recent segment with CNN's Paula Zahn -- "why don't atheists just shut up?"
Not too many years ago, I was of the persuasion that the most important thing in the world was learning to get along with other people. I especially applied this to atheism and religion. I knew that atheists had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition, beheaded by Caliphs, imprisoned by Kings, and so on, but I also saw that the Enlightenment had already taken place; that whatever the influence of the church, there were no true theocracies in the West; that slavery had been abandoned in every Western nation; and that, by and large, things were improving over time. That is, I bought the old notion of progressivism. The world is always getting better.
Under these circumstances, I thought the best way forward was to make compromises and be firm but polite in argument against those who would wind back the Enlightenment. I reasoned that, with time, people would eventually see that what the world needed was more freedom, more tolerance, more willingness to accommodate. I knew that many others shared this view. And I was happy, at least moderately.
Then I noticed a few things. Despite the clear idiocy of creationism, it wasn’t losing ground. It was gaining ground. That was my first inkling that all was not right with my way of thinking. Then I noticed that the Muslim states were also not advancing. In fact, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, which was fully understandable in terms of mass uprisings against oppression, was followed by the installation of a terrible, noxious theocracy. The Iranian people, inheritors of the vast Persian empire, had thrown off the yoke of the Shah only to replace it with the straightjacket of the Ayatollah. And although there were many Iranians who did not want this outcome, the fact remains that as a nation Iranians chose theocracy. And then, against all belief, an even worse theocracy sprang up: the Taliban, which made the Iranian religious police look like hippies. Finally, I saw that in the most advanced nation in human history, the US, science was losing ground to rank irrationalism — and worse, the irrationalism was gaining traction in the highest offices of the land. My belief in progressivism was shattered.
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