Another reader joins the Spaghetti Monster debate:
The first philosophy major is correct that atheists are very rare indeed if the atheist is defined as a person who has managed to step completely outside the cultural norms and values that have been expressed and codified by the many religions over the years. But very few atheists try to make such a claim: Richard Dawkins, for instance, is happy to call himself a "cultural Christian."
What assertive atheists like myself (and Dawkins, if I read him correctly) argue is that because religion can be understood as a product of human culture, human culture itself can be improved by denying the absolute, allegedly objective truth of the claims made by particular religions on our allegiance.
Rather than believing in the objective truth of the commands of a particular god named Yahweh, we can instead look at the human cultural universals that Yahweh’s followers exhibit when compared to the followers of Allah, Shiva, Buddha, and so on. Rather than evaluating the truth and goodness of our received values by referring to scripture, we can evaluate the effects of both universal and local values in terms of their results on human happiness and well-being, and we can make changes where our received values fail. We can see if declining to believe in a particular god or its commandments causes people to erupt in spasms of self-indugence and violence (it doesn’t); we can see if devout faith reliably prevents people from being cruel (it doesn’t); and we can conclude that something besides religion’s scriptural and bureaucratic authority is at work in the phenomena of human goodness and evil.
The Dish 