My Zen Arcade

Recently, I was watching an episode of West Wing.  Toby and Josh have been talking about the upcoming election and candidate.  Josh says something to the effect of “Toby, you want to beat this guy, but I want to win”.
Thats something of the problem I’m seeing with atheism of late.  The Xmas sign, the lawsuit to get “so help me god” removed from inauguration, and so forth.
Are they right?  Of course.  Religion should be kept apart from government and, in fact, religion is just a series of myths (or lies). 
But these tactics don’t get us the win.  They make the religious folks, even those just nominally so, go on the defensive and that doesn’t help.  I’m not suggesting that we get all cozy and cutesy and humor the theists, just that we not smack them…yet.
We have to become more present, more open.  That will cause our ranks to swell as atheism becomes more accepted. 
Once we have taken that step forward, I think that many theists will begin to understand our perspective.  They will see that including ‘god’ in our texts isn’t any different than including ‘jesus’.
Smacking our opponents around may be very satisfying, but that doesn’t mean it progresses the cause any.