why atheism is serious business
When your worldview gets popular, you're going to get followers who are in it only to jump on the bandwagon.
As atheism gets more and more attention in the media and nonbelievers feel free to announce their worldviews loudly and proudly in a highly religious nation like the U.S., there's something important for the atheist community to consider. The spotlight on doubt in thousands of years of religious traditions could easily attract people who'll shout their atheism from the rooftops, treat prominent atheists like rock stars, then get bored and renounce their atheism to follow the next big thing on which the media descends.
It's not that atheism itself is a fad. To atheists, the universe is a large, complex and mysterious place which requires a lot of research and exploration before it gives us an insight into how it truly came to be the way it is. Atheism involves real, stringent scientific research and a fair amount of doubt and skepticism towards any idea that doesn't have enough solid evidence behind it to at least sound plausibly convincing. However, thanks to lax and superficial coverage, it could be treated as a new way to rebel against the religious establishment and people looking for a new, flashy fad to embrace could declare themselves atheists, start collecting books by Harris and Dawkins, put up atheist bumper stickers and generally act like a "new atheist" caricature until something else comes along.
Like new converts of fundamentalist religions show, those who suddenly find the meaning of their lives in any new philosophy or school of thought can quickly get extremely aggressive in promoting it and often disregard the nuances of what their newly embraced worldview entails. Fad atheists could do for atheism what the likes of Ray Comfort and Pat Robertson do for Christianity. They'll run around waiving a battle flag, proselytizing a pamphlet like list of talking points and misrepresenting the deep thought that goes into a methodical investigation of our world using only tangible, testable evidence. Instead of talking about the Big Bang as a complex event that created matter in our universe in an end result of a currently unknown process, they'll declare that the universe began after a random explosion out of the quantum ether and only a backwards troglodyte could possibly believe it was the work of an old guy with a white beard dressed in a tunic with sandals.
Of course atheists shouldn't strive to become an elitist clique which subjects new members in skeptical, secular and unbeliever clubs to stringent, quasi-theological inquisitions. However, they should be aware that their community will always have members who are more interested in calling themselves atheists and waiving that title over people's heads than actually learning about the universe and the scientific method. And they should be willing to note when atheism is diluted to mere anti-religiosity and rather than backed up with science and peer-reviewed research, it's being presented as a set of aggressive semantic arguments which completely miss the point.
