Atheist leaders are better? Really?

I couldn't believe how badly thought out this particular philosopher's diatribe about atheism was. Grayling is someone I have tended to think of as more careful than this; but this really is more like one of the worse of Dawkins' anti-religious rants. Let me share with you what he writes and why I think it is difficult to sustain. Overall, I think that his difficulty is that the rant assumes that being an atheist, per se, confers superiority, and he tends to compare the best atheists with the worst of the religious. This latter attitude is well known in interfaith relations as likely to lead to much heat but little light. It's about time atheists recognised that they too have a belief system which in certain crucial respects is comparable and analogous to religious belief. So here we go:

Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Blair came perilously close to doing when interviewed about the decision to invade Iraq.

Now the real issue here is constitutional: are there checks in place to stop an individual from 'going off on one', whether religiously-motivated or the result of atheist dogma (such as Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot's, for example). It is as easy for an atheist to sense the 'hand of destiny' or the 'dialectic' or 'progress' and act on that as for a religious person to have a God moment, rightly or wrongly interpreted.

Atheist leaders will be sceptical about the claims of religious groups to be more important than other civil society organisations in doing good, getting public funds, meriting special privileges and exemptions from laws, and having seats in the legislature and legal protection from criticism, satire and challenge.

And if the boot is on the other foot? Not sure that this amounts to anything more than prejudice. I would agree that in a democratic society the kinds of privilege hinted at in this are fair-game: we should reform the Lords, including the religious representation and we should, imo, repeal the blasphemy law or better, replace it with something more suitable. On the other hand, in a fair society we should not, either, assume that a non-religious perspective is more valuable than a religious one. Grayling seems close to making this assumption.

Atheist leaders are going to be more sceptical about inculcating sectarian beliefs into small children ghettoised into publicly funded faith-based schools, risking social divisiveness and possible future conflict. They will be readier to learn Northern Ireland's bleak lesson in this regard.

This seems to presuppose that this is what faith schools are about and there is debate about that and evidence to suggest that the insinuation is untrue. It leaves unaddressed too, the issue that a secularist approach is also a belief-system and is not necessarily as neutral as assumed in this bit of the rant. The solution to education in a multi-belief society is not as easy as imposing a soi-disant 'neutral' perspective. That is to swap one 'tyranny' or set of dogmas for another.

Atheist leaders will, by definition, be neutral between the different religious pressure groups in society, and will have no temptation not to be even-handed because of an allegiance to the outlook of just one of those groups.

No they won't; they will favour ones that accord more nearly with their own views and they will favour the faith of the self-declared unbelievers. The mistake here is to assume that atheists are not, in a multi-philosophy-of-life society, another belief group. Again, the real issue is constitutional, not personal.

Atheist leaders are more likely to take a literally down-to-earth view of the needs, interests and circumstances of people in the here and now, and will not be influenced by the belief that present sufferings and inequalities will be compensated in some posthumous dispensation. This is not a trivial point: for most of history those lower down the social ladder have been promised a perch at the top when dead, and kept quiet thereby. The claim that in an imperfect world one's hopes are better fixed on the afterlife than on hopes of earthly paradises is official church doctrine.

Also not necessarily true. I know, personally, of few Christians who would not make a very high priority of the this-worldly welfare of living people. I can also think of atheist positions which are willing to sacrifice people for the cause, and for whom life is cheap because 'merely' biological and of no ultimate significance. Tu quoque.

Atheist leaders will not be tempted to think they are the messenger of any good news from above, or the agent of any higher purpose on earth. Or at very least, they will not think this literally.

And yet, that's just how some of them act. Maybe not a message 'from above', but messengers of the 'good news' that God is not. I think he should look again at how, eg, Dawkins behaves (I use him because I have recentlly viewed some video of him at work). Or how Marxist leaders have often behaved.
Could do better, I think. This is a thinly veiled attempt to back-slap an atheist just for being atheist; it doesnt' thereby actually help us to address the questions of a multi-philosophy society.