Or enlightened.

Or progressive.

The only way that author is correct is to add something else to the premise of atheism, simple nonbelief. Hence, Atheism+.

Once that happens, it is no longer atheism.

Maybe I'll ask George Will. Or Greg Gutfeld. Or Penn Gillette.

Atheism is a position on a single issue: the disbelief in theistic claims. Now after rejecting theistic claims this means many of the philosophies around theistic claims are also generally not followed so new ones are selected to fill in. Personally I'm not willing to stick to the "all humanity are sinners and must worship a human sacrifice to appease a wrathful ultimate authority" philosophy so I choose Humanism. I find Humanism is far more positive about people in general.

of good is still what's being fought-over

all past attempts at creating an "objective" ethics have fallen by the roadside--because they ended up being empty and filled only with contemporary stuff (like, you can tell to the half-decade if you're a Wiki addict): for a half-century it was the height of reactionariness to oppose eugenics, the Ethical Culture movement didn't do a thing to prevent WWI, Ardrey and Lorentz used baboon trooping behavior to say we had to go into Cuba NOW before the Russian tribe finishes its expansion, and we all remember what sociobiology said about the wimminfolk!

even now Harris types' use of fMRI to justify torture and Iraq is as dead as the 17th-century argument against Catholicism on grounds of atomism

thus ultimately people on all sides of the debate get stuck at a touchingly naive moral instinctiveness: every gay-basher absolutely feels it in their gut, that they're instinctively reacting to someone who just shouldn't be; if the Golden Rule and guilt are good because they're instinctive, we're right back where we started--that enough people kneejerk AGAINST other people's kneejerks because they're not PC for the moment

the only way out people who dismiss/haven't read philosophy have ends up in a sort of cul-de-sac of humanism ("humans are valuable because they're human&quot ; a larger issue is that they also end up stuck in Rousseau's paradigm of anything innate as good and any corruption of that coming from "society"

working only by negating: so there've been efforts to build up a "churched" atheism with meetings and scriptures and the like; so it's of course going to build up ethical codes--but it's just been an assumption that those codes have to be leftish

OTOH others see atheism as the default, as an unproblematic contentment with merely what "science" provides (which they typically bend to a very bizarre version); they see science as what leads you to liberalism--"chemical ethics" I guess

it's a lot like (and based on) Cold-War fights where whoever was First in Space would be recognized as the most moral world-system (hence another dimension to the Sputnik panic); I recall one Soviet SF where the writer insisted that any spaceflight-capable alien would be both peaceful and Communistic, because they were scientifically advanced ...

A declaration of nonbelief, period, has no momentum. Something else has to get the ball rolling in one direction or another.

or, worse, that politics is a sort of physics