Another Christian claims that atheism will spell some sort of shadowy doom for us all.

So I ran across this tonight.  Go ahead and read it:

As atheism rises, America declines

So now I'm going to offer a few thoughts on this spiteful bigoted piece of journalism.  First, it should be noted that even though the title of this article is the claim that atheism is destroying America he provides not one shred of evidence that America is even in decline, much less that atheists are causing it

First we get this statement.

Man rebels against Him, and is offended by the mere suggestion of His authority. This culminates in an inevitable downward slouch that has accompanied so many great civilizations of the past. So it appears to be with us.

So he is claiming that all or at least most civilizations have failed because they failed to acknowledge a god. Exactly how does he propose to prove this claim?  I have studied a bit of history, and I could give you a run down of the causes of, for instance, the fall of the Roman empire.  At the top of the list was an invasion by Germanic tribes in the north, not abandonment of god.

Where does he go next? I'll give you a hint, presuppositional apologetics.

They fail to grasp that apart from the eternal consistency provided by the biblical God, they would have absolutely no basis for reason at all.

Logic fail, reason is based upon axioms. Axioms are intrinsically true, they do not become true because a god wills them to be true.

And this:

The very fact that an atheist can argue about the laws of science "proving" there is no God, is actually proof in and of itself that He must exist.

Yes, he actually argues that if we proved there was no god it would prove there IS a god. How does one even engage with this level of delusion?

Rationalwiki has this to say about presuppositional apologetics.

Presuppositionalism is a bullshitting tactic cooked up by Christian apologists when they realized that their old arguments were not working .

That pretty much sums it up, this is circular reasoning at it's finest, and when employed it's how I know it will be functionally impossible to have a rational conversation someone about logic or morality.

He goes on to call us fool...well technically he just quotes a bible verse that calls us fools, but that's a rather minor distinction.

Then he delves into the most sublime of all arguments: "I know you are but what am I"  He responds to the claim that atheists make that Christians are arrogant by saying:

Obviously, when it comes to the claims of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians believe we have it right and others are wrong. But it is wholly inaccurate to suggest that Christians think they alone are right on the most fundamental question there is, and that everyone else is wrong. That distinction belongs to ... you guessed it ... the atheist.

Well, to be frank he is right that we think people who believe in god are wrong, though we don't believe their incorrect belief will land them torture forever like Christians do, so there is that.  I would also question the claim that god's existence is the most fundamental question.

He ends with an analogy:

Imagine a four-lane highway full of traffic all traveling in one direction. Then suddenly, one singular car traveling the opposite way down the same roadway appears, heading into oncoming traffic. While it's possible that the driver of the one car was the only one who knew the right way and everyone else was just mistaken, logic and rationality would suggest otherwise. It would take an extremely arrogant driver to stick his head out of his sunroof and start screaming at all the other drivers about how dumb they were, without ever pausing to consider he might be in the wrong.

He uses this as the basis for his claim that atheists are "irrational, arrogant and foolish" but lets look at this analogy.  The analogy fails for several reasons.  First, the direction one drives is selected arbitrarily, the way everyone is driving becomes right by default because that's the way people are driving.  The question of God's existence is not arbitrary, everyone believing in him is not an indicator of his existence.  Second, at it's heart this analogy is an argument from popularity.   The reality is that large groups of people are wrong about things all of the time.  If people lived by this analogy we would still think the sun revolved around the earth.

In conclusion guest columnist Peter Heck doesn't understand logic, history, or American culture.  He's also kind of a jerk.