Invincible ignorance, sho nuff.
Latest issue of New Superstitionist has a surprisingly even-handed article about a new perspective taken by some anthropologists. But an editorial introduces the subject, and the editor shows us how an atheist will blindly follow his own dogma regardless of facts:

If you're one of those committed atheists in the Dawkins mold who dreams of ridding the world of religious mumbo-jumbo, prepare yourself for a disappointment: there is no good evidence that education leads to secularization.

In fact, the more we learn about the "god instinct" and the refusal of religion to fade away under the onslaught of progress, the more the non-religious mindset looks like the odd man out. That is why anthropologists, psychologists and social scientists are now putting irreligion under the microscope in the same way they once did with religious belief.

The aim is not to discredit atheism but to understand how so many people can override a way of thinking that seems to come so naturally. For that reason, atheists should welcome the new scrutiny.

Fine up to here, except for "progress" and "many". It's not technical progress that creates atheism. What causes large numbers of people to doubt their faith is the brutality and randomness of war and disasters, which are the opposite of progress. For instance, 1920 was a very good year for progress and a very good year for atheism. Radio, airplanes, automobiles, and Einstein were fresh in the public mind. None of them created atheists. It was the purposeless cruelty of WW1 that did the job.

But after all that fine buildup, the writer then turns down the wrong path:

Atheism still has a great deal to commend it, not the least that it doesn't need supernatural beings to make sense of the world. Let's hope the study of atheism leads to new insights into how to challenge such irrationality.

No, dummy. "Not needing supernatural beings" is not a characteristic of rationality, it's only a boast by Laplace in the midst of the French Revolution, which was itself the first dramatic proof that official atheism leads to brutality and disaster.

Hmm. Atheism ---> brutality. Brutality ---> atheism. Do we see a hypothesis here? Only if we're not blinded by Laplace.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

The article itself is more objective. The kernel of its argument:

It appears that Enlightenment assumptions about the decline of religion as the population becomes more educated will no longer do - at least, not without considerable qualification. Why is it that, despite the long history of the study of religion, the picture seems to be getting more and not less confused about what it means to believe in God?

This oversight might seem remarkable (or remarkably obtuse on the part of the social scientists) but it is one with deep historical roots. Many of social science's 19th-century founders, including Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Auguste Comte and Max Weber, were unbelievers, or "religiously unmusical", as Weber memorably put it. For them, religion was the great explicandum: how, they wondered, could so many people believe in something so absurd? What they failed to recognise was that their own, taken-for-granted, "lack" of belief might itself be amenable to inquiry.

What we need now is a scientific study not of the theistic, but the atheistic mind. We need to discover why some people do not "get" the supernatural agency many cognitive scientists argue comes automatically to our brains. Is this capacity non-existent in the non-religious, or is it rerouted, undermined or overwritten - and under what conditions?

I love Weber's phrase "religiously unmusical". Exactly hits the mark.
[No surprise, considering that Max Weber discovered Polistra's favorite curve...]

Polistra's First Law: All human traits, talents and tendencies are partly innate, with varying proportions and spectra.

Some of us are tone-deaf, some have perfect pitch, most can be trained to sing competently with considerable work. Some are unstoppably evil, some unstoppably good, most can be trained to do the right thing with sufficient practice. Some have a perfect broadband connection with God, some are religiously retarded, most can see the light with guidance.

I'm in the religiously retarded end of the spectrum. I can intellectually spot the obvious signature of a designer, but can't snap over into genuine belief.
  ¶ 6:03 PM