iPhoney iDol?

Best-seller lists have lately been topped with a proselytic brand of atheism, contained in books such as Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion; and Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Rather than seriously examine Christianity or any other faith, these authors make the case that "real" religion is fundamentalist, unquestioning, and guided by superstition, and that mainstream, analytical spiritual beliefs merely form a slippery slope toward extremist dogmatism.

When read alongside another atheistic favorite, Dean Hamer's 2004 The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our Genes, these books beg the question: What takes religion's allotted brain space once we've turned away from religion?

Taking a cue from the fact that Hitchens' book is distributed on Apple's iTunes, SF Weekly's video investigative team recently visited Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. We discovered that company CEO Steve Jobs has been preparing for this godless putsch since 1984, with a marketing message designed to quench mankind's innate thirst for spiritual belief.

Our investigative results suggested Congress should pass laws requiring atheist authors to register with the Securities Exchange Commission and disclose all links with companies who'll benefit from mass conversion to faithlessness.

The French conglomerate that owns Hitchens' publisher, for example, has an online music venture similar to iTunes. Dawkins' publisher has produced guidebooks for Apple computers since the 1980s. And Harris' publisher comes out next year with a book chronicling Jobs' stewardship of Pixar, the Emeryville animation shop.

View SF Weekly's video iTeam investigation on the Web and decide for yourself: Are anti-religion authors colluding with metaphysical-minded appliance makers to give the masses a new opiate? Click here.