well, i have to say i agree on the importance and usefulness (and fun) of humor, but you can't expect to bring people around to your side by ridiculing them, i don't think. i'd be interested if there is data sugesting the contrary. or do you simply, um, "believe in" ridicule? ahem. if we take the daily show as an example, it is always very specific religious claims, practices, or persons that are ridiculed, not religion as such and not religious people as such. there's a difference. if we recognize the variety of religious experience, we can be honest about it without claiming that anyone who calls themselves christian is as moronic and even evil as pat robertson or bob jones.
beyond that, i'm not convinced that religion is reducible to superstition. it seems to me much more complicated and much more interesting than that (althought superstitions sometimes have their charms, so to speak). it's always the reductionism that drives me crazy. last time i checked, there was no conclusive, definitive argument against the existence of god. and this is my job. even dawkins rates himself as a 6 on the 1-7 scale. which is to say that even dawkins -- does anyone despise the idea of god more than dawkins does? -- acknowledges that you simply can't prove that there is no god.
does that make it reasonable to believe in any particular god(s), much less in the trite god of american evangelical protestantism? dawkins of course would say no. and i would say no to the latter. but it certainly doesn't give you a right to jump to 7. dawkins's point, if i understand this (and i've not yet read the book), is probably that that 7 is itself *non-scientific*; it's a faith-claim. and so even dawkins recognizes it as intellectually dishonest to make the truth-claim "there is no god" and call it scientific or factual (strictly speaking). there is no possibility of empirical verification. the claim, "there is no god" can no more be tested scientifically than the claim "there is a god." to begin with, we'd have to agree on the meaning of the term "god."
more importantly, i think, religious thought and practice reflect some pretty ancient and cognitively fundamental categories and processes of human thought. if cognitive science and evolutionary psychology tell us anything useful, they certainly tell us that. you can call denigrate it all you like, but it hasn't gone anywhere in, what, 50,000 years, probably? let's be conservative and say 10,000 (that'll get us the ancient egyptians) and i don't reckon it's going anywhere soon.
perhaps some other strategy than ridicule into non-existence will be more successful at bringing people around politically.
j
-- http://brainmortgage.blogspot.com/