While I was working out in the great basin, I overheard some Christians talking about a professor of theirs. They were going on about what a great professor he was, how nice he was, how understanding he was, and so on and so forth. One of them mentioned that the professor is an atheist. Dead silence followed. They were shocked (shocked!) that anyone so nice could be an atheist. One person remarked "Why would he be considerate if he didn't think he would go to hell otherwise?" The conversation moved on to how it was surprising that any atheists weren't criminals - why not lie, cheat, steal, and kill, if you're not going to be punished by eternal damnation? I didn't think much of the incident at the time. After all, every group its unthinkers, even now, centuries after the age of reason.
Last year, when I took a job in Hill Country, I ran into the same attitude again. This time, it was from somebody who really should have known better: a youth group leader, educated in one of the nation's leading universities, who had years of experience working with "troubled teens". He tried to convert me by asking me two questions. "Don't you think that the universe is too complex to have happened by chance?" and "Without god, how can you say that anything is right or wrong?" How is it possible that a liberal arts graduate of one of American's elite schools is not only not familiar with any philosophy from plato to rawls, but not even aware that there is such a thing as ethics outside of religion?
Nowadays, I run into people like that every other day. Perhaps my exposure to a high dosage of unthinkers has made me allergic. Maybe the existence of even trace amounts of unthinking moral conviction causes my moral indignation to swell up, now. It can't be that the number of unthinkers is increasing. Not now.
Oddly, all of these people that I run into are well educated (whatever that means). Those that are derided as having wagon-train morality have some reason for believing what they do; there is a deeper moral system there, and it is understood. The people that "know better than that" are the ones that I worry about. What if they come under the spell of a charismatic religions leader? What will they do if they lose their faith? I'm glad that the religious are so often of "a discoursing tong, and a factious harte". The idea of a religious monoculture scares me, now.