Thanks. It is indeed hard not to ridicule that which is plainly ridiculous. It's irksome, though, that religious fundamentalists have the same urge since they regard secular society as absurd. Indeed, I criticize both on very different grounds, as opposed to whitewashing secular society in the new atheistic or secular humanistic manner.

There's a tribal dynamic to consider here, which is that anything that's demonized, that's been pushed to the outside will seem foreign and preposterous from within the rules of the local social game. That's my point here about theistic religion: it's anachronistic and foreign to modernity, which is the root of its preposterousness.