Atheists deserve better than the "good without god" campaign

In one way, the success of atheist advertising is encouraging. It shows that today the godless exist in record number and are easily mobilized (“We’re here, here is all there is, get used to it.”) But can’t we do without the triumphalism and mawkishness? A few years ago, Dawkins and Daniel Dennett contrived to rebrand atheists as something more — what’s the phrase? — “market-positive,” much the way “gay” had been adopted as a euphemism for homosexual. They arrived at the term “bright,” a term that implies equally that all atheists are intelligent and that all faithful are stupid. If this is so then, again, why bother arguing with one’s adversaries? Such crudity injects kitsch and self-parody into a good cause. Atheism deserves better.