By RAY WADDLE

Let it be said: atheism took the offensive in 2006.

The number of atheists didn’t measurably surge, but their arguments did. Vocal nonbelievers made it clear they are sick of religion, all religion -- sick of pious bullies polluting the world with doctrinal bloodshed and childish certitudes that evade intellectual challenge.

Some Nashville atheists said they hope to organize next year. Other, high-profile nonbelievers appeared on bestseller lists (writer Sam Harris with “Letter to a Christian Nation” and scientist Richard Dawkins with “The God Delusion”).

The classic believer’s response says atheists are at war with a faulty image of God -- perhaps a cartoonish deity of brutality, or a cliched fundamentalist version of God -- and haven’t (yet) encountered the true God of redemption and joy.

But public atheists argue something extra nowadays, saying the world can no longer afford religious passions in a wide-open nuclear age. The stakes are too high, the reckless arrogance of religious extremists too deep, they say. Faith must be hooted off the stage, discredited with cool reason and public persuasion, so global society can move on to grown-up ethical solutions that lack sectarian anger, violence and hypocrisy.

Leading the way with blunt contempt, Sam Harris says religion allows people to imagine they are being moral when acting immoral (killing in God’s name, or opposing abortion without caring about the human suffering of poverty or genocide). Religious liberals aren’t any better – they stand by, reluctant to criticize, unable to grasp that religion (not social conditioning) is the root of global misery.

“We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty,” he writes. “Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.”

Believers should face these arguments, if only to clarify their own beliefs and understand those souls who are bitterly disappointed in the failure of devout people to live up to humane ideals.

Last month, one Nashville minister, David Foster of The Gathering, did face the atheistic storm. He was a panelist with Harris on the Today Show. Later Foster blogged impressions of his experience: Harris was pleasant and well-meaning, but also dogmatic, demonstrating that atheists believe in faith and trust too, a faith in the assumptions of science. (see www.davidfoster.wordpress.com)

For all their fury, atheists surely know they can’t make religion disappear. Spiritual yearning for wholeness defines the human condition. Despite its awful failures, only religion gives the modern world what secularism cannot -– a meaningful story about the universe, the conviction of the infinite worth of people, and the imagination to forgive.

If the world’s religions retreat from these responsibilities, and merely quote scripture, atheism will only grow louder.