Thanking the Religious

There is a thought-provoking opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal (link) in which the atheist author suggests that he is grateful for the past two thousand years of vocal theism:

Why should unbelievers welcome this emergence of belief? Why not? We should be glad that there are people, even the devil's disciples, who take religion seriously enough to uphold it, especially in these days when unbelief seems to appear in quarrels over holiday displays, during political campaigns or on the self-help shelves of Barnes & Noble. Should the primary goal of atheism really be to fund municipal crèches, allow scientists to end every speech with the tag "We are all stardust," or inspire works like "Why religion posions everything" and "Why God does not exist"?

In attacking the cloistered monks and nuns of my Roman Catholic Church, the brilliant, if occasionally logorrheic, John Milton wrote in his defense of free speech, "Areopagitica," that "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed." And what will possibly make us exercise and breathe more fully than challenges by intelligent, thoughtful opponents?

In other words, he has two reasons for praising them:

• They take religion seriously enough to argue for it, which is unusual in this skeptical age.
• They cause skeptics like us to rethink and re-energize. Some of the greatest works in human history were written to rebut fundies (e.g. David Hume's works).
  

However, while all this may be true, something tells me that the parents of someone who is convinced by these believers to join a fundamentalist religion is not going to be thanking them.

So, thanks but no thanks.