Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris: The Unholy Trinity . . .Thank God.

"Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are not bigots. They are an unholy trinity of bestselling atheist authors who are fed up with having to tap dance around people of faith whose religious beliefs are as irrational as they are ubiquitous, and as potentially deadly as they are personally cathartic.
This unholy trinity is the rising voice of over ten percent of Americans who identify themselves as atheists (closeted or otherwise) who are mad as heck—we don’t believe in hell—and who aren’t going to take it anymore. What else can account for the phenomenal sales of the unholy trinity’s recent books?
Think of it, at least ten of your hundred closest friends are the “pissed off faithless” . . . a sizable cabal at any backyard barbecue, or polling station for that matter.

If the faithful would just keep their religious beliefs in their own pocket and out of public school classrooms and bedrooms and women’s wombs, I doubt much would ever be heard from the unholy trinity or the POF. What would be the point?"

Robert Weitzel, Opednews.com, August 7, 2007

Indeed. Religious people have brought this upon themselves.

Ancient Atheism

"As the menace of the religious right has become increasingly clear, atheists have been increasingly driven to speak out in response and have become more visible. Viewing this trend, some commentators have erroneously concluded that atheism is a modern movement. But this is not so. Atheism is not a recent innovation. If we travel back into history, we can find clear evidence of atheists in many cultures and many eras, though their voices were sometimes more scattered and harder to discern.
In a thought-provoking post, Diganta of The New Horizon provides evidence by telling us about the atheist philosophies of ancient India:

"In Ancient Hinduism, there were a couple of schools who used to teach non-existence of God. The first one, Samkhya, used to believe in duality of existing things - as per the book, saamkhya kaarikaa. Prakriti (Nature) and Purusha (Consciousness) were thought to be the basic building blocks of everything.""

Daylightatheism.org, June 17, 2007

Rise of the New Atheists

"A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs, namely, the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say" -- and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans."

Ronald Aronson, The Nation, via Alternet June 16, 2007

The article deals with much more than statistics, and is well worth reading. See also: Are Nearly One-Fourth of Americans Non-Believers?

[Stats] Atheist Books Overtaking Christian Titles in Best-Sellers Lists

"The Association of American Publishers (AAP), the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry, recently released its annual estimate of total book sales in the United States, and according to its findings, religious books had a "difficult year."

[...]

Coincidently alongside the sag in sales of religious books has been a rapid interest in atheist books over the past months. Books that had not sold that well in the past are now beginning to turn into purchases."

Humaniststudies.org, June 6, 2007