violating the unwritten rule of good manners ... finally

Over at Halfway There Zeno looks at a real problem in the Catholic world:

If you haven't read your summer issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review (June 2007), you may be unaware that nonbelievers have been getting feisty. In fact, atheists are breaking the unspoken code of conduct that is supposed to prevent them from saying unkind things about religion.

He quotes from an article by one David Carlin of the Community College of Rhode Island:

The sociologically interesting thing about these anti-Christian, pro-atheism best-sellers is that they violate what has been, for most of the 20th century, an unwritten rule of American cultural good manners, namely, that you are not supposed to attack the religious beliefs of a fellow American in a public and conspicuous way....

It followed from this rule of good manners that atheists and agnostics were not allowed to attack theism in general or Christianity in particular. There was of course no law against such attacks, but for an unbeliever to attack Christianity was regarded as a great breach of courtesy.

One notable and rather inconsistent feature of this speak-no-evil taboo was that it did not require reciprocity between theists and atheists. Atheists were expected to abstain from criticizing religion, yes, but religious believers were not expected to abstain from criticizing atheism.

... Those days are gone-and probably gone forever, despite the wishes of some cultural conservatives who would like once again to define the United States as a Christian nation, or at least as a Judeo-Christian nation. There are now too many atheists in America for the US to return to that old self-definition of itself.

Zeno takes the whole article apart thoroughly. Read the whole article - it's long and it's good.