Backwards-Compatible Atheism

Via BoingBoing, a call for backwards-compatible atheism:

With religion, I think atheists have the same dissonance going on. If they really think the world would be better off without religion, they shouldn't hate religion and call believers fools. Any successful new belief system must appreciate the beauty of what it's replacing and strive for backwards-compatibility. If Matthew 1:1-16 hadn't explained how Jesus' lineage fulfills the prophecy in Isaiah 1:1-5, it wouldn't have gotten where it is today.

So I put it to declared atheists-- the ones who fly the flag about it, not the ones who are quiet or closeted: Do you think that most of humanity is A) hopeless and doomed to kill each other because of their stupid religious beliefs, or B) capable of coming to and benefiting from your views?

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

This actually gets at something I was trying to address in my last post: absences only are meaningful in the context of presences. Christianity attempts to fulfill what it sees as the legacy of Judaism, but it explicitly doesn't require the following of most Jewish laws. The more interesting argument here would be to claim that atheism should fulfill the point of religion without requiring religion. I don't see that coming out of pure science or the triumph of the Anglo-American analytical philosophers.  But "quiet atheism" only makes sense if you belong to a community where faith isn't the point of religion, where the community, and its practices, are the point. 

If the distinction I'm trying to draw between Judaism and Christianity seems to abstract, think of it this way; we think of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc, as being religions just like monotheistic religions, even though worship, festival, and law aren't really linked to promise of an afterlife per se, though they have transcendent implications. Many subtypes of Judaism are a hybrid between a focus on practice, and a focus on belief. Atheism has a healthy place in the first sort of religion, but I'm not convinced it can in the second.