Despite the ongoing schism of the Anglican church, which I wrote about in my last post, I'm happy to see that there's still plenty of good sense and reason in the U.K. One outstanding example is this story from last month, where the British Medical Association voted to stop funding homeopathy in public hospitals. (UK readers, do you know if is this a binding vote or just advisory?) There's been some trenchant commentary on the decision, like this column from Ed West:

The most outspoken supporter of the motion, Dr Tom Dolphin, had earlier compared homeopathy to witchcraft, but then apologised to witches on the grounds that this was unfair. Homeopathy, he said, was "pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality which threatens to overwhelm the hard-won gains of the Enlightenment and the scientific method".

And from Martin Robbins, responding to a supporter of homeopathy:

Apparently 'thousands' of people - including Peter Hain's son - get better after taking homeopathy. This is absolutely true, but the problem is that most people get better anyway, whether you give them antibiotics, homeopathy, or a slap to the face. Humans tend to be quite good at healing themselves. Once you control for this sort of variable, the outcomes are much clearer.... the more rigorously we test homeopathy, the more it fails.

By way of response, defenders of homeopathy are reduced to reading from a by-now-familiar script:

Apparently... I'm displaying what Dr Le Fanu describes as "Dawkinsite arrogance", but there's nothing arrogant about researchers collectively testing ideas and accepting the results. What's arrogant is to ignore evidence when it doesn't produce the result you expect. Particularly when that evidence has been accumulating for two centuries – a period of time in which homeopaths apparently haven't even managed to agree on how much you have to shake the vial.

Yes, that's right - in two hundred years, homeopaths haven't gotten around to figuring out how many times a homeopathic remedy has to be "succussed" (i.e., shaken) in the course of dilution to activate its supposed curative powers. Do you really want to take medicine from people who can't be bothered to perform even the most basic tests on their own ideas? And what does it say about the homeopaths' level of devotion to scientific rigor that they've never even tried to determine this?

And this isn't the only good news out of England. It seems that Colin Hall, the recently elected mayor of Leicester, is a nonbeliever, and he's taken some commendable steps toward ending Christian privilege in his town:

Writing in this month's edition of the Leicester Secularist, the journal of the city's Secular Society, Cllr Hall, who will serve as Lord Mayor for the 2010-11 municipal year, said: "Contrary to the myths that certain organisations like to promote, the practice of observing prayers at the start of council meetings is a relatively recent one.

"I am delighted to confirm that I will be exercising my discretion as Lord Mayor to abolish the outdated, unnecessary and intrusive practice.

"I personally consider that religion, in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business... This particularly applies in Leicester, where the majority of council members, myself included, do not regularly attend any particular faith service."

Although Hall's decision appears to have gone over smoothly with the majority, there was some predictable squawking from pushy Christians who are unhappy that their special rights are being taken away:

A Fellowship Pastor, Ian Jones, said: "I find it deeply sad that anyone would want to suppress the rights of others to pray.

"If someone has a problem with this practice, could they not simply join the meeting once it is over?"

Although the U.K. as a whole is friendly to reason, it seems its pastors suffer from the same disease that's endemic in America - the belief that they have the right to force their religion on others and that their free speech is being suppressed if they're denied this. I have a better idea, Pastor Jones: why don't you do your own praying before the meeting if you want to, and spare everyone else the wasted time of listening to your superstitious mumbling?

This isn't Mayor Hall's first action standing up for the rights of nonbelievers. He's hired the president of the local secular society to serve as the town's chaplain. When he took office, he also refused to take part in a service at Leicester Cathedral to ceremonially welcome him into his new role. As he wrote on Twitter, "Bear in mind though, I am Lord Mayor for all people of Leicester and not just those from the Church of England."

Hall's decision to stand up for secularism and conduct the people's business without giving special privileges to religion is a wonderful breath of fresh air, and something I wish we'd see more of in America. And for truth's sake, the U.K.'s current deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, is an atheist! You British people are just out to make us look bad, aren't you?

As we ring in the new year, here's some news to give you a sense of optimism for 2010. This holiday season, we can add another piece of evidence to the growing pile which indicates that atheists are becoming more numerous and more successful:

This Christmas season, 78% of Americans identify with some form of Christian religion, a proportion that has been declining in recent decades. The major reason for this decline has been an increase in the percentage of Americans claiming no religious identity, now at 13% of all adults.

Granted, 13% doesn't seem like much, especially compared to the size of the Christian majority. But considering it was 2% in 1948, and only 6% even as recently as 1998, it can't be denied that this represents a major demographic boom for atheists and nonbelievers of all stripes. I can't think of any religion, historical or modern, that's ever enjoyed such rapid success. And given the steadily increasing rates of secularism among the younger generations, we can expect this rise to continue.

What this shows, as I've said before and will doubtless continue to say, is that we should ignore the brow-furrowing and finger-wagging of the Very Serious theologians who sternly inform us that we're doing a disservice to our own cause by advocating and defending it in public. We have every reason to believe that atheist campaigns of persuasion are working, achieving their intended purpose of convincing more people to become atheists and weakening the social prejudice that treats religious belief as immune to questioning.

Further evidence of this comes from the Gallup poll, which shows not only that more people are walking away from religion, but also that those who stay are beginning to question whether religious belief has all the answers:

Note that the percentage who say religion is "old-fashioned and out of date" now stands at 29%, significantly higher than the 13% of Americans who say they have no religion. We could call these people "soft atheists". Most likely, the majority of these people aren't formal members of any organized church, and either don't attend religious services or attend only infrequently. But because of societal pressure to conform, or their own belief that belief in God is necessary for virtue or community, they continue to call themselves religious even as they reject most of religion's factual claims.

These people are the low-hanging fruit whom atheists can reach. We need to deliver a strong, effective message that belief in God is not necessary for the things human beings care about - that nonbelievers can justify morality with reason and conscience, and build a secular community without reference to faith. And given that our audience's sympathies are already leaning in that direction, we should continue to make the case that religious belief is archaic superstition, contains many immoral rules, and has no solutions for the ethical problems humanity faces today. Let the theologians and mystics continue to carp and complain that atheists are being disrespectful, that we're not acknowledging the magnificence of the emperor's new clothes. We don't require their consent, and they're not our target audience anyway. The continuing growth of atheism throughout the world is all the encouragement we need to speak out.

Among the writers who oppose the New Atheists, one common theme in their criticism is that we're too optimistic about the possibility of human progress. For example, take this essay by Terry Eagleton attacking Richard Dawkins, in which the sneering condescension drips from every word:

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional 'reversal'. 'The whole wave,' he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, 'keeps moving.' There are, he generously concedes, 'local and temporary setbacks' like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee [ed.note: this was written during the Bush administration]. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that 'the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.' So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

The venom is even more apparent in another essay by Chris Hedges, which fulminates against atheists for not all being nihilists like himself:

There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, and economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degradation as well as to nurture and sustain life. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving toward a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere.

...the New Atheists, like all believers in myth, refuse to listen. They peddle the alluring and enticing fantasy of inevitable moral and material progress. This vision is not based on science, history or reason. It is an act of faith. It is a form of the occult. It is no more scientifically legitimate than alchemy.

Despite the flippancy and the anger of those who issue it, this is a challenge worth meeting on its own ground. Are we New Atheists unjustifiably optimistic? Do we too readily discount the potential for evil in mankind? Have we, as some of these critics would surely charge, replaced the unfounded faith in Heaven with an equally unfounded faith in human progress?

These are legitimate questions. To answer them, I'll begin by citing a few statistics.

If you lived in a hunter-gatherer society prior to the advent of modern civilization, what were your chances of dying by violence? The anthropologist Steven LeBlanc, in his book Constant Battles, estimates that in some primitive societies it was as high as fifty percent. And that's solely from deliberately waged warfare between competing tribes, without counting additional deaths from disease, accident, or starvation. As Steven Pinker puts it in What Are You Optimistic About?:

Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the 20th century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries... has shown that the overall trend is downward [p.4].

The wars of the 20th century caused untold devastation and suffering, but part of the reason for the great loss of life was simply that, due to industrialization and population growth, there were more people around to kill. Yet as a percentage of the total population, the number of people who lose their lives to violence has been declining for centuries. The 17th century's Thirty Years' War, for instance, may have killed as many as two-thirds of the population in some areas, whereas in World War II, even the countries that suffered the most generally lost no more than about 5% of their population.

John Horgan, in another chapter from the same book, puts the comparison vividly:

In War Before Civilization, the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley estimates that in the blood-soaked 20th century 100 million men, women and children died from war-related causes... The total would have been 2 billion, Keeley notes, if our rates of violence had been as high as in the average primitive society. [p.7]

By Keeley's numbers, violence in primitive societies was twenty times as high as in ours. And the trend of decreasing violence is on a path to continue. It's widely agreed that the wars of the future, rather than conventional conflicts between great powers, will be what Charles Kurzman and Neil Englehart call "the remnants of war", asymmetric conflicts between states and non-state actors like terrorist and guerrilla groups. For all their power to grab the headlines with lurid acts of violence, these types of conflicts will incur still lower death tolls than the wars of eras past.

In areas aside from warfare, the statistics still paint an optimistic picture. Over the last few decades, global poverty rates, infant mortality and other negative indicators have steadily fallen, while literacy, life expectancy, per capita income, and other positive indicators continue to rise. One of the more underappreciated factors contributing to this trend may be the ongoing urbanization of the world's population. As Stewart Brand puts it, "cities cure poverty" - consistently producing a drop in birthrate and a rise in economic prosperity among those who migrate to urban centers.

We have completely cured smallpox, and stand on the brink of wiping out several other contagious diseases, like polio, through worldwide campaigns of vaccination. "Soft" indicators of progress, like democracy, transparency in government and protection for human rights, are harder to measure, but in these areas as well, there are significant signs of progress globally (with, of course, many exceptions and local reversals).

None of this, of course, is to say that the world is on a smooth and inevitable trajectory towards utopia. A terrible, genocidal war might begin tomorrow, or next year, or in the next decade. There will still be natural disasters, crime and terrorism for the foreseeable future. Human rights, in all places and times, must be vigilantly defended against those who try to take them away. The looming crisis of global climate change still demands swift and decisive action if we are to avert the worst of its effects. And there will most likely be new challenges we must face in the future that we have not yet thought of or foreseen.

But these events, terrible as they are for those who experience them, should still be viewed against the appropriate background: as frustratingly slow as it is, as halting and zigzag as it is, progress is happening. The world is becoming a better place. The world we live in today is a far better place than the world a hundred years ago, and the world a hundred years from now will in all likelihood be better still. If your eyes are always riveted on the latest sensationalistic news report, moral progress is easy to miss - but it's happening regardless. On the grand scale of history, the human species is rising. (And as an atheist, I might add one more hopeful sign: the ongoing rise in the numbers of nonbelievers throughout the industrialized world!)

One wonders at the motivation of those who insist that moral progress is impossible. There's one causal factor that can't be overlooked. Namely, the evidence is unequivocal that happy, contented, economically secure people see less need for religion. Religion always flourishes among the poor, the downtrodden, the underclass - people who console themselves over their lack of power and prosperity in this world by believing that they'll get their just desserts in the next - and understandably so.

But the corollary is that the evangelists of religion have something to lose from moral progress. In a very real sense, they need the world to contain its measure of pain and misery, because the promise of relief from same is one of their selling points. The more peaceful, the more prosperous human society becomes, the less receptive people will be to their message. Small wonder, then, that they insist progress is a fool's dream. Their worldview depends on people believing this to be true!

Granted, it would be too harsh to attribute these sinister motives to every religious apologist. Some of them may just be irrefragable pessimists. But whether their pessimism is a personality trait or whether it's strategic, in either case, there are good reasons to think it's unfounded.

The Fourth of July should be a time for patriotic Americans to reflect on the progress our country has made and to rededicate ourselves to the cause of making it better where work still needs to be done. We can find material for both of those avenues in this article by Katrina van den Heuvel in the Nation, Rediscovering Secular America (HT: DC Secularism Examiner). It's a heartening glimpse into the political progress that freethinkers are making, including at least two news items I didn't know. First, the Secular Coalition for America was invited to the White House to meet with Obama administration officials, the first time an explicitly nontheistic group has ever been extended such an invitation:

After meetings with the Obama transition team in coalition with other groups interested in church-state issues, the Secular Coalition for America was invited to the White House for its own meeting with Associate Director of Public Engagement Paul Monteiro. Kaplan, Silverman, Legislative Director Sasha Bartolf, and Associate Director Ron Millar all attended.

Second, the Secular Coalition has also announced that it knows of twenty-two members of Congress who have admitted to being nonbelievers - although so far, only one has been willing to go on the record about it:

Indeed when the Coalition ran a contest to find the highest ranking official who identifies as a nontheist (or one of the terms within the nontheist nomenclature), 60 members of the House and Senate were nominated. The Coalition spoke to each of them, and 22 admitted it but refused to go public. Only Congressman Pete Stark was willing to be identified.

Both these items show the progress that freethinkers are making, as well as the obstacles that still remain to be overcome. Being invited to the White House is well and good, and being mentioned in presidential speeches is also encouraging. But President Obama has shown a bad habit of trying to placate his supporters with symbolic but largely meaningless gestures, rather than exerting his political muscle to make substantive progress on our behalf. One egregious example is the faith-based initiative, where Obama has failed to keep his campaign promise that federal money could not be used to discriminate in hiring or to proselytize.

His inaction on the issues of gay rights and religious discrimination in the military, as well as his embrace of some of the most corrosive and lawless aspects of Bush-Cheney claims about executive power and secrecy, are other examples. Progressive groups can't take it for granted that our work is done now that Obama is in office - we need to criticize him where necessary and to apply strong, consistent pressure for him to bring about the change he promised his supporters and, so far, has failed to deliver on many fronts.

The revelation of 22 in-the-closet nonbelievers in Congress is also both heartening and discouraging. Even if all 22 of them went public, we still wouldn't be represented proportionally to our numbers. The 15% of nonreligious Americans would imply a proportional 80 members in the House and Senate! We're not there yet. And though it's a good thing that they're there, it's an object lesson in American prejudice that they're too afraid to go public:

"But we see at the very least there are 22 people who think that honestly admitting their worldview would cause them not to get reelected," Kaplan says. "That's an awful commentary on a pluralistic, liberal America."

As much progress as nonbelievers have made, we have a long way left to go. We need to spend more time and money promoting the message of atheism as a positive, worthwhile philosophy, so that it becomes an acceptable option and candidates will not be ashamed to admit it. We need to work harder and to organize in order to put greater pressure on politicians to support our causes.

The steps we've already taken are small ones, and this may be frustrating to freethinkers who were hoping for faster, more sweeping change. But small as they are, they're the vital prelude to greater and more important accomplishments. For now, we can take comfort in knowing that we are being heard. If we continue to stand and fight, our impact and our influence will only grow. The wheels of democracy always turn slowly at first, but the harder we push, the faster their spin will become, until all the world turns in the direction we want it to go.

Although there's been plenty of good news for atheists in recent weeks, stories that showcase our growing influence and assertiveness, this is no time for us to become complacent. We still have significant work to do to shore up the foundations of our movement, as this Times op-ed by Charles M. Blow explains:

...a study entitled "Faith in Flux" issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one.

That Pew study, here, confirms earlier work such as the ARIS in finding that the nonreligious continue to be one of America's fastest-growing demographics. It also notes that the vast majority, 79%, of the nonreligious were raised in a religion and later left, as opposed to being brought up with no religion, and most of those people explained their decision by stating that they did not believe or could not accept the teachings of their church. Interestingly, a majority of former Catholics say that they left Catholicism because they disagreed with its teachings on abortion, homosexuality and birth control, which confirms my earlier prediction that the Catholic church's archaic moral dogmas are a major factor in its continuing decline.

However, Blow points to another important finding: Many people who were raised nonreligious do not stay that way. Of those who were raised nonreligious (which, again, is just a small minority of the nonreligious as a whole), substantial percentages have since joined some religion, with the majority going to Christian faiths. Most of these people explain this decision by saying that their spiritual needs were not being met, or as Blow puts it:

As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs to do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism - that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It's the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs affirmation and fellowship.

As the Pew findings show, the heart of religion is community. Most of the formerly unaffiliated joined a religion not because they preferred its moral teachings (only 26% said that), but because they enjoyed the social and communal aspects: participating in worship services, interacting with other members, and taking part in rituals for major life events such as marriage.

Atheists can draw some important lessons from these findings. First of all, there's reason for optimism: we're still growing, and doing so at the expense of traditional religions. We're making significant inroads among people who have rational or moral objections to the teachings of their church, which shows that our rhetorical campaign against religion is having an effect. This gives the lie to those who complain that we're being "disrespectful". And best of all, we're growing by leaps and bounds among the younger generation.

But at the same time, we have a lot of work left to do. We've done a lot of good in creating a beachhead for atheism, making our voices heard where they were previously passed over and giving an airing to the arguments against religion. What we need to do now is supplement those efforts by creating a secular community - a set of institutions that provide the social grounding and sense of belonging that people usually associate with religion. We're not doing anything wrong; plenty of people are already hard at work on this. But we need to do more, to make further progress along the way we've already started taking.

As well, I think we ought to redouble our efforts to make the case for atheism more widely known. I suspect that many of the unaffiliated, rather than hardcore atheists or freethinkers, simply grew up without thinking much about religion. As a result, they were blindsided when they heard evangelists' apologetics for the first time and ended up being drawn in. We need to do more to equip people with a toolkit of answers to common theist arguments, and to distribute this freethought vaccine as widely as possible, to ensure that the nonreligious will not be taken off guard in their first encounter with proselytizers.

To strengthen the atheist movement and expand the secular community, our strategy must be twofold. We need to hold and build, keeping the allegiance of people who've already come over to our side, while creating the institutions that will be ready to receive the future wave of freethinkers we can confidently expect. Debunking religion continues to be an effective strategy, but for atheism to truly expand and become influential in its own right, we still need to offer positive, appealing vision of what life can be like when free of superstition.

As I've written in the past, I'm an optimist when it comes to human progress: I'm confident that we can overcome the problems that beset us. This isn't to say that I think our triumph is inevitable, or even that optimism is the only possible position for a rational person to take. There are plenty of reasons to despair, for those who seek them out. Nevertheless, I think there's one major, counterbalancing reason for hope, and that reason is this.

Simply stated, our greatest dangers are not external hazards, things over which we have no control, but rather arise from the immorality or inaction of human beings. Just think of all the cases where our only enemy is each other: racism and sexism, secular tyranny and religious theocracy, pollution, war, terrorism, overpopulation, climate change, and environmental degradation. Evils like this are not natural forces that arise of their own accord; they persist because of the inertia of human society, our stubborn self-interest, and our valuing of dogma and superstition over the lives and well-being of our fellow people. Even many epidemic diseases, like AIDS, thrive only because of our actions. If people did not act - whether out of irresponsibility, malice, or simple ignorance - in ways that made their propagation possible, they would swiftly die out.

I won't deny that changing these harmful attitudes is tremendously difficult - moral progress always is - but it can be done. If our primary enemies were natural forces that could never be persuaded to relent, we would face a much grimmer and more difficult path. But as it stands, natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and earthquakes can destroy individuals and communities, but not humanity as a whole. The only global dangers, the only threats that truly menace the entire human community, are the ones that we have created for ourselves and perpetuate through our actions.

The truth of this statement can be discerned through a thought experiment. Imagine that all of humanity was united in purpose, that all people were willing to do whatever was necessary to put an end to these evils. Take this as a given, and then ask yourself: if this were so, what could we accomplish in just a single generation? The possibilities are almost limitless. We could eradicate AIDS and all the other diseases that depend on us for their propagation, as well as all the ones we have vaccines against. We could decarbonize our economy, end our dependence on fossil fuels, and create a green civilization powered by sun, wind and tides. We could end war and tyranny and establish peace, democracy and justice for every society on earth. We could redirect all the resources and energy that are currently wasted in superstition and sectarianism, instead using them for the common good of humanity. Ending poverty would take significant investments in infrastructure and education and would probably be a multi-generational process, but even that could be done relatively quickly if we had the will.

Of course, this is a limiting case. All of humanity will never be united in this way, at least not any time in the foreseeable future. There are too many squabbling political parties, too many stubborn religions and nationalisms, and too many rigid ideologies battling each other across the memetic landscape. We are too diverse and too opinionated for one cause to ever win everyone's allegiance. But, knowing what is possible if everyone were to cooperate, the next step should be to ask what is possible with less than that. Knowing that some percentage of humanity will always react with indifference or outright hostility, is it still possible to make moral progress? And any fair consideration of the historical record would have to answer this question with a resounding Yes!

In spite of everything - all the dogmatism, the stubbornness, the selfishness, the ignorance and hate - humanity's star has been rising, these past few centuries and more. So long as there's freedom to speak our views and to lobby for change, good causes have been able to win out time and again. As slow and difficult as it is to shift the monolithic block of human opinion, it can be done. That's why I'm an optimist, and that's why I dream of a better world. My reason for hope follows the lines of the famous saying attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

As you've surely heard by now, the landmark 2008 American Religious Identification Survey has just been released. The ARIS is an enormous study that questioned over 50,000 respondents to assemble a broad picture of religious belief and disbelief in the United States, building on previous surveys from 1990 and 2001.

The 2001 results showed that nonbelievers had made incredible gains, rising from 8% to just over 14% of the U.S. population in just ten years - a genuine demographic boom. The new findings don't show a continuation of this torrid rate of growth, but on the whole, they're still very good news for atheists. Consider some of the highlights from the 2008 report's chief investigators, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar:

The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. Given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million "Nones."

..."Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly," Keysar said. We now know it wasn't. The 'Nones' are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union."

The percentage of Christians in America, which declined in the 1990s from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent.

Only 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million.

And best of all:

The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.

What these results show is that atheism in the U.S. is undergoing a period of strengthening and consolidation. It was hardly to be expected that we could continue to double in number every ten years. But we are still growing - granted, more slowly than before - but that is a significant achievement when most religious groups continue to lose ground. As the study's findings show, Christianity's share of the total population has declined by over 10% since 1990. Meanwhile, nonbelievers - and only nonbelievers - continue to make gains in every region of the country, especially the Northeast. (USA Today's Flash graphic offers a visual of the rise of the nonreligious in every state over the past eighteen years.)

We should also take courage from the fact that, within the larger group collectively identified as nonreligious or "nones", the percentage of that group which specifically identifies themselves as atheist or agnostic continues to rise: from 0.7% in 1990 to 0.9% in 2001 to 1.6% - or about 3.6 million Americans - in 2008. This is a considerably faster growth than that of the nonreligious as a whole, and shows that our campaign to speak out is working! More and more people are coming out of the closet and announcing themselves to be atheists or agnostics. Prominent atheist spokespeople like Richard Dawkins deserve to be praised for the good work they've done in helping to spread our message, and their success is solid evidence that we've been on the right track all along when it comes to promoting atheism to the public.

But, by the same measure, these results also show us that there's much work still to be done. As mentioned in one of the above quotes, although the people who call themselves atheist comprise only about 1.6% of the population, the people who are atheists (based on their stated beliefs) make up an amazing 12% of the population of America. Another 12% or so are deists.

What this tells us is that, despite the success atheists have so far enjoyed in our evangelism, we have much more ground left to cover. There are millions and millions of Americans who are atheist in all but name, but who choose not to use that term to describe themselves. Most likely, this is due to the lingering negative stereotypes about atheists which make people hesitant to claim that identity for themselves. We "out" atheists need to do more to dispel those prejudices. We need to work harder to depict atheism as the positive and healthy worldview it is, one that people can claim proudly for themselves and need not be embarrassed or ashamed of adopting, and we need to make our case more strongly to deists and other "soft" believers who are most amenable to persuasion.

Although our numbers are growing, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit still waiting to be harvested. If we do our job, we can bring atheism fully into the daylight and give rise to an organized, motivated political and ethical movement. If we can achieve this, the next ARIS may well come up with results that will further dismay and dishearten the forces of theocracy and give hope and courage to secularists and rationalists the world over.

Last year, around the time I inaugurated my Poetry Sunday series, I contacted Prof. Philip Appleman to ask for permission to reprint some of his work which I'd seen in Freethought Today. He graciously assented to my request, and even said a few kind words about "The Gods", my own brief foray into free verse, which I had the brashness to ask for his opinion on.

He called my poem "hopeful," which was an honor to me, but there was one other thing he said which I've been dwelling on - that he was pleased because hopefulness, these days, is a rare virtue. And, I have to say, I understand very well what he meant.

I've been reading more science fiction this past year or two, and one major theme I've noticed is that we have so many dystopias. I've lost count of how many fictions I've read where things fail, where everything goes disastrously wrong, where humanity shatters itself or dwindles away. Why, I wonder, are we so obsessed with our own destruction? Why is it that we seem to delight in imagining the most horrendous fates possible? Writing like this can serve as a warning, I know. But shouldn't we also want something to inspire us, to give us hope? Shouldn't we want to set a goal we can aspire to?

Part of it may be a contingent fact, a sign of the times. Every time there is war, disaster, uncertainty, people feel more pessimistic about the future, and a spasm of despair passes through humanity's literary output. And so far, the first decade of the twenty-first century has given the world a great deal to be anxious about - the resurgent threat of terrorism, the growing danger of global climate change, rising energy prices and food instability, and increased tension in many historic trouble spots. Perhaps the pessimism of our creations is just a symbol of what's on everyone's mind?

But if that's the explanation, we have to face the fact that the world has always been a troubled place. There was never a time in human history when the globe was universally peaceful and life was everywhere good. On the contrary, there have always been wars, famines and disasters; there has always been corruption, greed and poverty; and people have always been lazy, ignorant, corruptible, selfish and credulous. In fact, one might argue that war and violence has taken a greater toll on humanity in every era, culminating in the world wars of the twentieth century, the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts humanity has yet witnessed. Is this a trend which we can expect to continue? As the twenty-first century proceeds, we've seen the rise of several new nuclear powers, the spread of virulent religious fascism, a swelling human population testing the limits of what the planet can sustain, and the natural resources upon which we all depend growing increasingly stretched and thin. It's entirely possible that this century may witness truly apocalyptic wars, with the most awful loss of life ever. And it's not inconceivable that, if such wars happen, even the survivors may be left so bloodied and fragmented as to herald the beginning of a long, slow fall back into darkness - the dystopia of our grimmest fantasies, this time enacted in reality.

Even beside these nightmare scenarios, the more mundane, chronic problems of our planet can still seem overwhelming. Every day, millions of people around the world languish in poverty, feel the bite of hunger, and suffer from entirely curable epidemics. Millions more live in fear under totalitarian governments or in war-torn failed states. Even where life is relatively peaceful, sometimes it seems as if the masses are content to live in stupor, willing to march to war at the command of jingoistic politicians or trade precious, hard-won liberties in exchange for pop-culture anesthesia. Granted, there are brave souls who labor their lives to improve the situation; but against the pervasive backdrop of human misery, and the widespread apathy and self-interest that permits it to continue, their efforts sometimes seem futile. The problems that face us have their own inertia, and some days it seems towering, far too massive to shift. Are there really enough people who care to make a difference?

Then again, perhaps I judge humanity too harshly. I have to admit that I understand why so many people don't choose the course of activism. When you see a problem in the world, or something that disturbs your conscience, you have three options. You can take action to make it better, but that requires time and effort. If you believe it can be fixed but don't take action to do so, this causes uncomfortable moral dissonance. By far the easiest course of action is to persuade yourself that it's a bad situation, but there's really nothing that can be done, or that it doesn't involve you. The course of apathy is soothing and keeps people's consciences intact in the face of evils they can do nothing about. Once again, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma: the more who opt out of action, the greater the pressure becomes on everyone else to do the same.

I am an optimist by nature and temperament, but even I keep being pulled back by the realities of our world. There are days when the effort of caring seems futile, pointless, and the temptation to write it all off and let humanity build its own pyre is strong. I haven't yielded to it so far, but how can I justify being hopeful? Is there any justification for an informed optimism that confronts the daily reality of suffering and is not bowed under?

I believe that there is. Optimism can be and often is caricatured as a starry-eyed, head-in-the-clouds naivete about "the way things really are", as opposed to unflinching, clear-thinking cynicism. But I much prefer a tough, informed optimism, one that takes in all that is wrong with the world and accepts things as they are, yet does not proclaim that losing hope is the appropriate response.

Pessimism is too easy. In a way, it's cowardly. As I said, the pessimist's choice can be a soothing one, a position which reassures its holder that apathy and inactivity are morally acceptable. After all, if you believe that failure is inevitable, it relieves you of the responsibility to have to do anything. To be frank, it's easy to believe the worst of everyone and everything. Even a foolish optimist risks disappointment; the hardcore pessimist never does.

In that sense, pessimism is a self-fulfilling guarantee of failure. True pessimists believe that success in a worthy endeavor is impossible, so they don't participate; and if that endeavor should fail because of their lack of participation, that becomes a self-justifying excuse not to participate in the future. By contrast, even an optimist will fail on occasion, but optimism, unlike pessimism, does not cause its own downfall.

The usual solution to a Prisoner's Dilemma is regulation by a higher authority, but there is none in this case. We can't force people to be dedicated to worthy causes or to care about the welfare of others. The only other solution is for individuals to freely step up and answer the call of need, and trust that their actions can inspire others to do the same. That's the goal I try to strive for. My optimism is not the sort that says success is inevitable, but merely that it's possible - and that this possibility is reason enough to try.

I don't deny the badness in humanity, but we possess many good and noble qualities as well. The naive optimists and the embittered cynics, both of whom deny one of these aspects completely in favor of the other, are both equally in error. The exact balance between our light and dark sides is a matter of dispute, but I'm inclined to say that the goodness of humanity must outweigh the evil. We couldn't have come as far as we have, built as much as we have, if that were not the case. We would never have risen above a state of anarchy. The goodness of people consists in many small, quiet acts, often overlooked against the backdrop of thunderous strokes of evil - but they are there, nonetheless.

And if you look at human history, we do see a trend of increasing moral knowledge and progress. It's not a steady climb, rather a zigzag rise with many backward steps and local reversions, but it is there. Our wisdom still lags our technological prowess, but that is growing as well. It's by no means guaranteed that the one will overtake the other in time. But neither is it guaranteed that this will not happen. The future is open, and we can write the outcome through our efforts. That knowledge - the knowledge that the story is not yet over, that we have the power to control our own destiny, and that we can still choose a good one - is what informs my optimism, and what gives me the continued motivation for hope.

Pope Benedict has released the second encyclical of his papacy, a 75-page missive titled "Spe Salvi" (Latin for "in hope we are saved"). As was widely reported, this statement attacks atheism and calls people to convert to Roman Catholicism as the only hope for humankind. (Here's the text of the statement itself, if anyone's interested.) In this post, I'm going to offer some comments in response.

The major theme of the encyclical is that only belief in a god - actually, in the Roman Catholic god - can give human beings reason to hope. (About ancient religions, he says that "their gods... proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths". I'll leave my readers to respond to that one.) It also says that doctrines that claim to offer hope and progress without belief in a god, by which it means communism, will inevitably fail:

[Marx] thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment.

...It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim.

Surprisingly, I actually agree with Pope Benedict about this. His essay rightly points out that Marx never offered anything like a blueprint for a just society, assuming that problem would resolve itself once the overthrow of the upper class was complete.

That said, to use the misguided ideas of a single man as a sweeping excuse to dismiss all non-religious philosophies is a most dishonest tactic. Communist regimes undoubtedly committed terrible crimes, but for the pope to attack communism as if it constituted the entire spectrum of atheist thought is irresponsible and deceptive. Like many religious apologists, Pope Benedict is stuck in the past, repeatedly attacking an obsolete historical doctrine rather than address the views held by the majority of atheists today.

The encyclical addresses, obliquely, the atheist argument from evil:

To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope... Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so.

It should be obvious that this statement is factually false. Human beings can create justice, and we do. By moving away from superstitious concepts like trial by ordeal, by establishing legal systems where guilt or innocence is judged based on evidence, by creating free societies where increasingly greater spheres of moral obligation can be put forth and enacted into law, we have created a far more just society than formerly existed, although of course we have much work left to do.

By contrast, no god of any description is active in the world creating justice. All the work that has been done, has been done by human beings. The pope's argument would encourage us to give up on establishing justice as a hopeless quest, and instead blindly hope that someday, if we bear our suffering with enough patience and subjection, we will be magically rescued from our troubles. This is an abhorrent idea.

The major theme of the essay is that belief in God is a necessary precondition of having hope: "anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life." Two reasons are offered to believe this. First, unless we believe in a future resurrection of the dead to paradise, we can never undo the evils of the past:

A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering.

If Catholicism was a universalist religion, this might have been a more convincing point. As it is, the argument is considerably undermined by the Catholic belief in Hell - where, according to the Bible, the majority of humankind will end up (Matthew 7:13). If the idea of millions of people suffering in past ages should be an intolerable thought, how could we possibly condone the idea of millions suffering for eternity? If anything, Catholicism is a far worse proposition than atheism by the pope's own argument.

How should an atheist respond to the suffering of those who are now deceased? One way, as the pope suggests, is to remain stuck in the past, endlessly grieving evils that are not in our power to alter. Another, better option is to look toward to the future and ensure that similar things do not happen again. That is a far more laudable and humanist response.

The pope's second reason is that, unless we believe in God, we must run the risk of all our hopes being dashed:

It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love... can then give the courage to act and to persevere.

It's true that atheism does not promise magical hope. It does not promise that everything will turn out all right in the end, no matter what. But at the same time, this makes it all the more urgent - all the more vastly and terribly important - that we work to do good, that we work to defend goodness and establish justice. It is up to us, for if we do not do it, no one will. The freedom to succeed or to fail is ours. Inevitably, that means the responsibility is ours as well.

Despite all the flowery theological language, the pope's lament is at heart the cry of a frightened child, pleading with Mommy and Daddy to make the bad things all better. This desperate craving for reassurance belongs to the infancy of our species. In reality, there are no messiahs who will swoop in at the last moment to save us from ourselves, no gods who will descend to magically alleviate our problems.

These fantasies will not deliver us from the troubles we face. If anything, they may trip us up at a crucial moment by encouraging complacency. When one truly believes, as Pope Benedict does, that a good outcome is guaranteed regardless of human action, the natural and dangerous inference is that we don't have to do anything. For all their soothing language, these ancient and outdated dogmas endanger us and hold us back. What we need instead is reason, clear-eyed acceptance, and the intellectual maturity of atheism.

In the comments of my recent post "On Atheist Janitors", I was accused of being naive for my belief in the possibility of a truly just and prosperous state:

I wasn't even going to address Ebon's utopian comments on how we should ensure a minimum income for everyone on a full time job sufficient to travel for leisure and all. Clearly Ebon's not an economist, but a dreamer. I guess that's his own variety of opium. Heaven not in heaven, but here on Earth... I ask you, is that any less of a pipe-dream than a celestial heaven?

In this post, I'd like to offer an extended defense of why I believe this is possible. But first, I must address an all-too-common fallacy: the school of thought which holds that economics is a zero-sum game and that some must lose for others to win. According to this way of thinking, if the poor are badly off, then the only way to help them is to take money away from the rich and give it to them.

This way of thinking is not unique to one side of the political spectrum. Wealth redistribution leading to enforced equality is the sine qua non of communism, but ironically, this belief is also held by many right-wing, libertarian-conservative schools of thought, who likewise believe that the only way to aid the poor is to punish the rich. Of course, unlike communists, they see this as a bad thing.

Both the communists and the libertarians are in error about this. As I wrote in the third part of my series "Why I Am Not a Libertarian", the great insight of capitalism is that wealth is not a constant but can be created. When it comes to basic questions of social justice, there is no reason why some must lose for others to win. On the contrary, by harnessing market forces to create greater overall wealth, we can all succeed.

That said, all proposed means of attaining this end are not created equal. We should be suspicious of economic theories which claim that we can best promote societal prosperity by lavishly rewarding the rich and trusting that their gains will eventually trickle down to the lower socioeconomic classes. If nothing else, we should be skeptical of such theories because they so obviously align with the short-term interests of the wealthy people who propose them.

Nevertheless, it is true that a rising tide lifts all boats. Even if vast disparities in income persist, it is undeniable that the overall level of prosperity of our society has substantially increased over the past hundred years, and it is similarly undeniable that many of these benefits have been enjoyed by average people and not just by the elite. In terms of life expectancy, of productivity, of innovation, our capitalist society is far richer in real terms than many past societies - including communist states, where poverty, deprivation, waste, misallocation, and hoarding seem to be the rule and not the exception. Marx and other communists thought that history would vindicate them, but instead, the opposite has happened.

So, how do we bring about prosperity for all? One important step, as I mentioned previously, is to commit to creating a social safety net that ensures universal access to basic goods like health care and education. That way, natural differences in talent and ability have the best chance to manifest and are less likely to be stifled by accidents of circumstance, and people are encouraged to take risks and become entrepreneurs since they know failure will not mean total disaster. Another is to require that all full-time jobs pay a living wage. People mired in poverty, working but unable to advance, are a net drain on society and are far more likely to turn to crime and other societal ills. By contrast, people able to support themselves have incentive to cooperate and to pay back into society, creating further opportunities for economic growth. (Fears that this policy will harm the economy usually turn out to be overblown.)

In this respect, I'm in agreement with organizations like the Hope Street Group (H/T Peter Levine). Markets are not a panacea to solve all problems, but when properly guided, they can be a potent force for good. We are so familiar with poverty and inequity that they sometimes seem to be intrinsic parts of the natural order. But human civilization has already reshaped the world in countless ways, changing or eradicating things that once seemed universal and inescapable. Why can we not use our ingenuity to solve this one as well?