I've been thinking lately about the difference between the rational and the emotional response I feel I should make to people when they flip out over the existence of atheists and start saying stuff.

You know, all the shouting about how you can't have morals if you can't believe in god-- as if nobody's ever heard of utilitarianism or dreamed of any kind universalist ethics aside from playing simon-sez with politically redacted, mistranslated ancient mythology.

There are rational answers to all that of course.

But I think there's reason to respond to the emotional and social aspect of it too. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that the basis of the reaction they have is: trying to defend all the time they've wasted on religion.

And really, need they? Professing faith, even if you don't believe, remains an extremely effective way to trade away (what seems like only a little bit of) your honesty for a whole lot of support and acceptance, with all the vilification of everybody who falls outside your group that goes along with it.

So maybe it's a mistake to think about it as though it were ethics or live-and-let-live or any bigger picture or philosophical problem, for them, at all. In the end atheists are people who aren't willing to pony up the lies it takes to join. They won't get with the program.

Not about a real assessment of somebody else's values, at all.