Atheists caught behind?

Commenting on the stigma attached to atheists, Sam Harris goes out to bat for us - he sets out to deflate some myths about atheism. He doesn't do too bad a job. Atheists do not believe that life is meaningless; we impart our own meanings to our lives in the way that we live them. And atheists aren't closed to spiritual experience, being perfectly open to 'experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe'. And so on.

In two of his answers, however, Harris is merely waving his bat airily outside the off-stump.

Thus, in response to the charge that 'atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history', he says that fascism and communism were 'too much like religions', when all he needs to say is that atheists as well as religious people are capable of fanatical and dogmatic belief - but that they don't have to be, and not all of them are. The claim that communism and fascism were really religions is a way of evading the issue, since they weren't religions in the specific meaning of religion that atheists reject. Then, in response to the suggestion that religion has had some good effects, Harris uselessly disputes this fact, though it is manifestly true. He says that 'religion gives people bad reasons to behave well'. It may give them some bad reasons; but it also gives them some good ones: like the teaching that you should do what you can to alleviate suffering.

By indulging in these weak argumentative moves, Harris helps to feed the myth that atheists are dogmatically impervious to the merits of belief systems other than their own. Some atheists are; but others aren't.