Eskow: questions for militant atheists
RJ Eskow has some questions for "militant atheists" and their as-yet-unproven hypothesis that "the eradication of religion would improve humanity:"
Instead of pandering to prejudice, or to decent people's understandable frustration with fundamentalism, the militants should engage in the hard academic work of either proving their core hypothesis - or allowing it to be disproved.
In lieu of a new experiment designed to test that hypothesis, there are several studies comparing atheists to theists within mixed societies. (See this post about a study from the Journal of Religion and Society.) Atheists tend to fare quite well by comparison, and I see no reason why the results would be different in the absence of theism altogether.