Excellent post by Daniel Dennett in WaPo's "On Faith" series:

Not Yet The Majority But No Longer Silent
There are many more atheists and agnostics in the country than is generally recognized. For instance, we atheists and agnostics are as numerous as Southern Baptists, and we are also the fastest growing category–-faster even than the Mormons and the evangelicals.

Listening, politicians? (Talkin' bout you, Hillary).

And, once again, I think we can see the Bush administration give yet another extreme proof of the Law of Unintended Consequences: That the Christianist in the White House has produced the greatest strategic disaster in American history and destroyed Constitutional government is an excellent reason to regard their professed religion as a Bad Thing. And policies like torture and prison camps give excellent reasons to regard Christianists as Bad People. And people do tend to resist Bad People doing Bad Things. (True Christians, if any, are welcome to repudiate the Christianists in comments, if they wish to do so.)

The Republicans gave God a bad name. That's why we're the fastest growing category.

So, if we're so powerful, why don't we flex a little political muscle? Basically--and I know regular Corrente readers will find this very hard to believe--because we're too polite:

But recent trends in America have suggested to many of us that this diplomatic reticence has been exploited by sectarian ideologues, evangelists, politicians, and others intent on maintaining the illusion that we are a negligible fringe community, so we are encouraging those who agree with us to come out of the closet.

Dennett then has a long discussion of the merits of propagating "bright" as a positive term for the un-, a-, or anti-God community, in the same way that "gay" propagated successfully. My take is No, since "bright" seems condescending to the non-bright. Good idea, though.

Dennett concludes with this zinger:

As long as those who are believers will acknowledge that their allegiance gives them no privilege, no direct line to the absolute truth, no advantage in moral insight, we should be able to get along just fine.

Which is why I classified this post under The Department of Fat Chance....

NOTE Transitioning to interview mode, here:

So, lambert, what are your views on The God of Your Choice, If Any?

As regular readers of this blog know, although I can quote scripture (Proverbs 23:23), and regard the Bible as a great work of literature (at least, in English, if the translation is decent), I am in no sense a believer and I am not "churched." I ran across this dictionary entry the other day, and it describes my current position as well as anything I've read:

Ignosticism is the view that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because it has no verifiable (or testable) consequences and should therefore be ignored. (See scientific method.) The term was coined by Rabbi Sherwin Wine, founder of the Society for Humanistic Judaism. Ignosticism is often considered synonymous with theological noncognitivism.

This doesn't have to imply, however, that the idea of God is emotionally or aesthetically meaningless. It is sufficient to say that the idea of God as a being makes no sense.

The consistent ignostic, therefore, awaits a coherent definition of God (or of any other metaphysical concept to be discussed) before engaging in arguments for or against.

Although, I must admit that the fact that no amputee has ever recovered a limb through prayer is a powerful argument against the existence of a good, caring, or just God (or Gods).