On the gay father who wishes to marry gay son, and atheist indoctrination

According to a recent polling, the proportion of Americans who self-identify as non-religious has grown, and more of the non-religious have become non-believers.

This is pretty strange when you consider exactly how much money and power religion in America has.

Religion has the entire TV channels promoting it, it has presidential candidates proclaiming their religious faith as some sort of qualification for office, heck it very nearly gets a veto over other people's human rights.

And there is no shortage of attempts to slime the atheist position - whether it is the bullshit charge of "scientism" or "crass materialism" it isn't like atheism is exactly popular with the press.

So why is religion falling, and atheism rising in America? Well consider the following stories.

1: Teacher makes Christian pupil say God is a myth?

Jordan Wooley of Katy Texas told an investigation that her teacher had forced her to say God was a myth in a test. She said she feared that if she didn't, her grades would suffer.

Atheists were horrified (this is the exact sort of thing that atheists protest against when Christians do it) and Christians proclaimed that it was an example of Christian persecution.

The testimony went out on Fox News, and pictures of Wooley solemnly reading the test were spread all over the conservative media.

And then according to Snopes the school board investigated and found she wasn't exactly giving an honest account.

It turns out the "test" was an ungraded critical thinking exercise which required pupils to identify the difference between a fact, an opinion and a common assertion. Not one of Wooley's classmates backed up her version of events.

Not only that, but the teacher who designed the test, and who was apparently trying to indoctrinate pupils into atheism?

She is deeply distraught at how people who have never met her are questioning her Christian faith.

But that hasn't stopped the governor from meeting with Jordan Wooley, or praise for Wooley's 'courage'.

2: Gay father wishes to marry gay son?

Gallo Images/Thinkstock 

Charisma News reported "You won't believe this: Gay father wants to get married to his gay son".

Roland Bosee Jr. and Nino Esposito had been a couple since the 1970s, and for most of that time they couldn't get married.

That has legal consequences regarding issues like inheritance and being able to visit each other in hospital.

In 2012, Esposito, who is 78, adopted Bosee, 68, as a work around for these issues. It was the nearest thing they could legally achieve at the time to a marriage.

Now gay marriage is legal - and so is the adoption.  They still can't get married.

“We thought never in our lifetime — or in 20 lifetimes — would same-sex marriage happen,” said Mr. Bosee according to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

But hey, don't let that stop Charisma News breathlessly headlining it as if it was a case of incest.

What do they illustrate?

Atheism has always had a major disadvantage in the US, and worldwide in that even we atheists say that atheism has no moral content. All you know about me from me saying I'm an atheist - is that I don't believe in God.

Atheists as a whole do not claim that atheism makes us better people - it just doesn't make us worse.

With religion however, there is a common thread in that following religious dictates is supposed to endow you with a superior morality, an objective morality which makes you, the religious reader, better than me.

But stories like the two I have just highlighted close that gap considerably. Christians in America constantly proclaim that they're being persecuted in some way, so they were very willing to believe Wooley's account.

Much as Christians for a long while were very willing to buy the claims of "Heaven tourism" books - books by people who had suffered near death experiences and claimed to have gone to heaven. These books have in time been revealed to be, well, frauds.

It has gotten so bad that lying is now a natural association with Christian apologetics, which means that in real terms it isn't atheists who have closed the credibility gap but Christians.

The Catholic sex abuse scandal, the various abuse stories coming out of the evangelical movement, the money grubbing nature of so many pastors, it all narrows that gap.

The greatest debaters for atheism aren't your Richard Dawkinses, or your Christopher Hitchenses, they're the scam artists who proclaim that God wants you to plant seeds in their bank accounts, or the liars who tell you what you want to hear, only for you to later find out the truth.

The greatest enemy of faith is not the atheist, but rather the betrayal of the faithful.

The second story has a bit of that too - it isn't exactly lying, but it shows a sort of callousness towards the facts and circumstances of the story.

Which itself drains the credibility of the Christian side of the debate. It makes it seem as though for all that Christian apologists wish to proclaim their morality objective - it can hardly be considered compassionate.

And that is kind of more important - because morality without compassion seems to invariably lead to injustice, as you no longer consider the needs of others in your judgements.

Religion is dying in America, and I suspect it will do the same here too. Not because of people like me arguing for atheism, but because of those betrayals.