Undoubtedly, there's pretty hardcore rage on the issue. They are taking it far more seriously than most of the issues they've had with Obama. If they have to choose between their jobs and their conscience, doesn't that mean they'll be unemployed? Will they then have to claim benefits in order to subsist? Then, presumably, they'd have to vilify themselves, being as conservatives hate people on benefits!

Sounds flippant, but I honestly have thought it when I've seen Catholics and evangelicals make this claim, as they frequently do.

As for some practising Catholics ignoring their church's teachings, it is just another case of people being culturally Catholic without having much in the way of religious beliefs, a bit like many Jewish Americans... and indeed Catholicism often is linked to ethnicity if you're Irish, Polish, Italian, Mexican, etc.

Tha's definitely the impression I got too, and the first few pages of "The Greatest Show on Earth" would certainly bear this out. He gives the impression of having initially tried to share his love of science with the world, and gradually built up a rage as he came across the inexpllicable "history-deniers".

I also wish to state that I liked his latest book, it certainly isn't just for children, but also for humanities-eduated adults like me whose scientific understanding barely exists!

Magnificent post. And I think your question can be answered quite easily, Alain de Botton doesn't know half as much about leading atheists as the average commentor here, and Hitchens and Dawkins were the only two he'd heard of.

I'd recommend him Greta Christina, Maryam Namazie and Ophelia Benson to be getting on with, and I like Miranda Celeste Hale as well. But then, I suppose he won't be reading this!

Thank you, that was exactly what I meant! As you can see my recollection is less than perfect, but it was such a striking passage that it's stayed in my mind for years.

And I think the US Congress is full of people who don't have any religion, but are afraid to say so, as well as those who (especially the Jewish and Catholic politicians) are more tribal than religious in their allegiances. It was actually Dawkins who gave me this idea, oddly enough.

When religion is obligatory or almost so, you get the situation I've noted amongst American conservatives, where they will profess a faith they privately don't believe in. And I've said to real believers that surely this doesn't help their own cause that people pretend to believe in it. Wouldn't an avowed atheist be better for them than someone who pretends to be one of them?

Besant does come off very badly in this account, though I can't claim to know much about her, and I suppose having had such a lengthly career there's certainly a case to be made for her.

I hope you understand the relevance of what I was saying, in case it wasn't clear. I'm saying that the role played by people like John Morley, who were "discreet" atheists in the Victorian age, is akin to that of Alain de Botton and his many friends today. Yet they achieved far less than someone who was prepared to upset apple carts. Many such people are in fact quite unpleasant, though there's no reason to think this about Dawkins, and I think his detractors generally don't know much about him or his work.

This study of the past has just convinced me further that we need people who are going to be provocative to the indifferent majority and make John and Jane Average wonder what they're so angry about.

Anyone who can find the exact quote along these lines (it could well have been in War and Peace) will have my eternal gratitude!

For that matter, has the church itself changed now that it's no longer the default option? I note with interest the rising sense of victimhood amongst right-wing Christians in America that I can't imagine having existed in the 1850s. Sensing the tide turning against them, they've reacted in all kinds of ways, one of the most interesting being an alliance between Catholics and Protestants that would have enraged/mystified anyone living when you inevitably belonged to a religion that was taken seriously, it was just a question of which religion.

I'm fairly sure it was a Tolstoy charachter who said something very relevant here, though I can't recall since it was in a library book I read some time ago (this is one of the good things, btw, about buying books, or about being properly able to use the internet- I'm just about old enough not to 100% understand it!).

Well, this person rued that the quality of atheist thought had declined because now that religion was no longer taken for granted, people were being brought up in godless homes, and they were no longer kicking against the pricks in the way that, for example, Maryam Namazie would.

This goes for me, I've actually never held any religious belief because I wasn't brought up with one and never acquired one. I didn't become a New Atheist out of abstract thought, not quite, because it was seeing the growing self-confidence of Islam and considering what it might lead to in years to come. Then, when I discovered books and blogs on the subject, I devoured them. But it was certainly not a case of, say, being molested by a priest or have an imam advocate that I be beaten vigorously in order to keep me in line.

Personally I found Elevatorgate one of the most depressing and unedifying quarrels I've ever seen. I hated the way people I like and whose work I admire turned on each other so viciously, and just wish the whole thing had never happened.

Wouldn't it have been funny if this bloke actually wasn't propositioning Rebecca Watson at all, he just had some really great coffee that he wanted to tell the world about, and it wwas so good he went round at 4am looking for people to innocently and chastely share it with?