[SEQ RERUN] Raising the Sanity Waterline

That's not an argument that religious apologists really use, though, so much as it's a parody of apologetics.

For one example of non-inclusiveness, politics. Most the atheist groups I've encountered deliberately exclude uncloseted conservatives. Open hostility towards conservatives is pretty common, as well. Back in the Bush era, when libertarians were treated by the left as honorary liberals, this wasn't quite as big a deal for me personally. Since Obama is in office, we've been lumped in with the conservatives again.

For a specific example not involving politics, the last atheist - in that case humanist - meeting I attended featured a supposed neurologist who came up to the podium and started claiming that religion was a mental disorder and started describing the similarities of the disorder to dyslexia (getting the details of dyslexia grossly wrong, to boot). My dyslexic sister, who I had narrowly convinced to attend the meeting with me, was -not- amused.

(Every organization wants to be a cult, and all that; the extreme people drive off the moderates. Religion is actually -really good- at keeping its less extreme members interested. Contrary to all expectation, my experience is that religious organizations tend to be the -least- cultlike ideological organizations.)

Religion, for all its own extremists, hasn't actually made any effort at going around and knocking down atheist organizations. That's a rather flimsy rationalization for why atheists have been completely incapable of replicating the good aspects of religion - we can't build our own stuff until we've knocked down things that aren't actually standing in our way?

Consider all the secular activities churches support and engage in. Hell, a church near me revised its policies a few years back - it added a second day of religion-free services. No, I have no idea how that works, and have never attended one. But as an atheist I have to acknowledge that I've taken advantage of a lot of the organizations, buildings, and services churches make possible. Until and unless there are secular alternatives to at least most of those offerings - supported on the same voluntary basis that churches exist upon today - atheism has absolutely no business even -thinking- about tearing religious institutions down.

The question has nothing to do with me, but I'll give it a whack:

1. Climate science has gotten a lot more scientific and open to criticism.
2. The public seems considerably more aware of the potential downfalls of legislation as it pertains to computing and the internet.
3. The increasing availability and quality of open-source software has tempered the goals of the open-source movement from destroying copyright law (a very messy issue) towards gradually making it obsolete.
4. I count the increasing libertarian trend among youth as a positive; YMMV
5. Marijuana decriminalization is finally getting some inertia behind it.
6. Feminism is getting some pushback (arguments shouldn't appear one-sided and all that)
7. Political correctness and reactionary anti-political correctness both seem to have faded

Negative trends... I'm not sure I really see any trends I can firmly pin down as a negative, at least in terms of the sanity waterline.

ETA: And wow. Writing that list made my mood improve a lot more than I would have expected.

But in a long term this metric would keep failing

The law you linked only applies if the people you're studying care about that metric, which I'm not sure is the case here.

You seem to suggest that the sanity waterline is increasing very slowly.

Well, I don't intend such a reading. Is the rest of your comment still relevant?