I have never been a confrontational person except when I feel that something is being unfairly taken from me. I cannot imaging that happening any more in this world, the loss of my right to dis-believe in a way I see fit. In a country that is 14.1% "No-Religion" I think that there is enough people in that group that atheists can stop being seen as a quaint social movement. This is a country where there are more people that say they have no religion than all other religions, aside from Christianity, combined! I don't think I want to brow-beat a person into rationality but live as an example of it's virtues. Hitchens' and Dawkins' methods, get lots of high profile attention, and that is fantastic, but I guess I like working on a more personal level.
But Like MLK and Malcolm X, two opposing methods merged into a successful social movement, whose efforts have come to fruition today.
What Dawkins and Hitchens argue is for religion to gain the same kind of opinionated treatment just as any other form of a point of view.
Douglas Adams put it this way:
'Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we are so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that.'
I can see your point, but it the cases of politcs or other topics, there is more than one way of approaching them, both democrats and republicans have methods that are both right and wrong, or the issue has multiple facets. But with religion you are either right or wrong, you can't be sort of right and sort of wrong. Those kind of situations call for a bit more finesse than a water cooler chat about the election. But Hitchens and Dawkins and Adams do make a good point of showing that what we take as sacred is rarely so and some topics NEED to be questioned