THE BORROWED MORALITY OF THE UNBELIEVERS : Patrick Ruffini notes a column from the New Republic in which Peter Beinart complains that the Bushies aren't sufficiently respectful of the views of atheists :

Many cultural conservatives equate secularism with relativism, and they genuinely believe that religion is the only source of morality. I think that's theoretically simplistic and empirically absurd--I doubt atheists and agnostics lie, cheat, steal, or fly airplanes into skyscrapers any more than anyone else. But if Bush and Ashcroft really think that, then they should have the courage to say it, and open up their arguments to scrutiny and rebuttal. What they are doing instead is worse: implicitly writing atheists and agnostics out of America's moral community. When they describe the country they love, they describe a place where people of different faiths live in harmony and equality, and where people who follow no faith simply do not exist.

Unfortunately, Beinart begs the question. It is not, as he seems to be suggesting, just a bizarre theory of conservatives that unbelievers can not construct a coherent moral system without God; this is actually widely understood. The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has even called himself and others on the Left "freeloading atheists", because they want to be able to deny God, on the one hand, but to maintain Judeo-Christian moral standards on the other. It is simply a truism that secularism is relativistic.

And the point is not (as Beinart suggests conservatives believe) that atheists don't exist, but instead that they may in fact be less deserving of our respect and that their ideas may be unworthy of our consideration, may even be dangerous. After all, suppose they were to prevail and society were to become genuinely Godless, wouldn't it also necessarily become amoral?