Unbelief and the "happy atheist"

So, Adam Gopnik wrote an essay in the New Yorker recently about the loss of faith in religion, which I haven't read properly yet.

But I have read this Ross Douhart post about it, and think he makes a couple of interesting points about "the return of the happy atheist" (or maybe he's just expanding on some Gopnik's points, I'm not sure):

In a related sense, too, the fall of the Soviet Union and the intellectual collapse of Communism have actually been good for atheism’s credibility, in ways that weren’t necessarily apparent before the Berlin Wall came down. You might have thought, back when Kolakowski was writing, that the death throes of the world’s most famous atheist experiment would deliver the last rites to any remaining atheist utopianism as well. But actually, by sweeping the embarrassment of Communism off the world stage, 1989 and all that probably made it easier for atheists to be quasi-utopians again, because they no longer had to defend or explain away a dreadful, cruel attempt at a godless paradise on earth. With the U.S.S.R. gone the way of all flesh, they could simply say that their ideal society is “Sweden, but even nicer” — in which case the argument that atheism and human progress go hand in hand no longer seems so transparently contradicted by reality.

 And then, too, to the extent that any force has replaced Communism as an antagonist-cum-alternative to Western civilization, it’s been Islamic fundamentalism, which almost seems laboratory-designed to give the idea of atheism-as-Progress a new lease on life.

And this:

...I’d throw on, as well, the decades-long crisis for institutional religion in the West that the social revolutions of the 1960s ushered in. Mostly, as I’ve argued at length elsewhere, this crisis has sent people drifting into various quasi-Christian and spiritual alternatives rather than embracing atheism tout court. But among the intelligentsia, it does seem to have helped put to rest certain doubts about the association of unbelief with moral progress, by creating a landscape — particularly around issues related to sex — where all right-thinking people have decided that the Christian churches are on the wrong side of history once again.