Atheist Chic

For atheists, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. Holy Rudolph, the star of Wal-Mart, the iPod in the manger--yes! Never are the divine mysteries of Advent more mysterious than when they come in a large bag carried by a fat man who is, let's face it, an elf-slaver.

This is an especially exciting time to be a heathen. In the space of two short years and one rather drawn-out midterm election, conservative Christian hegemony has been rolled back, Intelligent Design has been slapped down in court (the Dover case), and the evangelical movement itself is wobbling, unseated by its overreach on issues such as stem cell research, vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, abstinence-based education, the War on Christmas, tombstone-like monuments to the Ten Commandments in courthouses . . . oh, right, only 800 words. Even some of the faithful have grown restive with God's apparent fixation on below-the-belt morality. Late last month, the president-elect of the Christian Coalition of America, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, resigned after the group resisted his efforts to broaden the group's agenda to include issues such as poverty and global warming.

As for the Rev. Ted Haggard, let's not go there. It's Christmas.

And I wonder why I'm covered in boils.

The revenge of the godless nerds is well underway at your local Barnes & Noble. I'm in the middle of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' latest work, with the poke-in-the-eye title "The God Delusion." As proof that there is, if not life, then literary receipts after death, Carl Sagan has a new book out, "The Varieties of Scientific Experience," a collection of his 1985 Gifford Lectures that returns to the whetstone he used in "The Demon-Haunted World." Meanwhile, a half-dozen learned ripostes to Creationism occupy the science shelves, a la Leonard Susskind's recent "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design."

True story: I was in the aisles of the bookstore looking over Dawkins' book when a man came up to me and recommended the Susskind book, and between us passed a look of fellow travelers. He's an atheist too! Had we been early Christians we would have drawn the sign of the fish on the ground with our sandals.