It's self-defeating for atheists to attack other atheists for being insufficiently atheist in a country like this where self-conscious atheists are a small minority. To be sure, America has a way of making atheists feel beleaguered, and a beleaguered minority tends to become sectarian (compensating for the lack of popularity by competition for purity), but sectarianism in turn dooms the said minority to obscurity, as you can see in the culture of American leftists. So, we can't afford sectarianism like Dawkins's, attacking the late Stephen Jay Gould no less, whose contribution to popular scientific education was second to none.
Instead, we have to draw a political line in such a way as to make us irreligious a part of a political majority, marginalizing the most dangerous theists on the Right. To do so, we have to bundle together the irreligious, religious leftists, and the religious who are not leftists yet but are open to considering left-wing approaches on select key issues. Only by doing so can we hope to make any political progress here.
For that purpose, it is generally not advisable to debate theological questions with theists. For, after all, theology is only relevant to believers. Instead, we ought to approach all religions mainly as social phenomena, ways for people to organize themselves into social networks for the purpose of mutual aid and political mobilization, and study various theological views only in so far as they aid the understanding of religions as social phenomena. Once we understand religions in this way, we can then see which congregations have to be a part of any potential coalition on the Left. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>