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Sometimes a humorless, self-serious argument -- whatever its merits -- is most vulnerable to satire.

That's one of the lessons of Mary Eberstadt's new book "The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism" (Ignatius Press), the collection of fictional letters by the young nonbeliever A.F. Christian to her atheist teachers meant to lampoon the new atheists' with their own arguments. (A.F. Christian stands for A Former Christian.)

"It was a lot of fun," Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former speechwriter for Secretary of State George Schultz, told The Jewish State in a phone interview May 24. "It's meant to be a very up-to-the-minute, contemporary story told in a contemporary voice, with the purpose of hooking people that way."

First serialized at National Review Online a couple of years ago, Eberstadt said the letters are meant as a handbook for believers, in the style of C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters," to arm readers with the knowledge to parry the aggressive attacks on spirituality and belief in God by, in Eberstadt's opinion, the newfound belligerence of the atheist community.

"The main substantive difference I see between the old atheism and the new is that the new atheism has lost any sense that religion's disappearance from the world will result in calamitous consequences," Eberstadt said. "I do think the new atheists have had the positive effect of making at least some of the believers and apologists think more clearly and forcefully about what they believe themselves."

Some of the book is autobiographical, while some is not based on anything in Eberstadt's life -- though certain episodes are reflective of events that have taken place in the lives of people Eberstadt has known personally. A.F. Christian, she said, is Everygirl -- she attended secular college, lost her faith amid the engaging swirl of carefree secularism, and then took that new worldview out into the world.

"In making my protagonist a young woman, I was doing something very deliberately because I think that young women are uniquely vulnerable in an increasingly secularized world," Eberstadt said.

That's because, Eberstadt said, women are generally the drivers of family faith, and if you take away the family, you break the moral connections most people develop from the familial environment.

"I think there's a certain condescension in this new atheism toward women, toward families, toward the world that most of us are rooted in," she said. "There's almost nothing in their writings about family and children, there is very little in their writings about women per se, and I think the reason is that it's the experience of family life that draws a lot of people to religion in the first place."

One point on which A.F. Christian hits the new atheists is the lack of not just female converts to atheism, but converts in general to that line of thinking. This doesn't mean the atheists are harmless, according to Eberstadt.

"The threat is that they're going to have a formative effect on a lot of people, especially kids -- by kids I mean college students, people in their 20s -- who don't know very much about religion in the first place, and who are going to follow this atheist idea that religion has been nothing but a toxic force on humanity," Eberstadt said.

Moreover, the campus environment tends to give atheists a home-field advantage, she said. And although atheists profess to be taking their audience away from "superstition" and into the realm of the realistic, Eberstadt said they are doing the opposite by isolating them.

"In the real world, we live in families, we deal with other people, that's how we figure things out -- as a community, whether it's believers or nonbelievers," Eberstadt said. "The new atheism hits young people at a very vulnerable stage, when they're away from their families, typically on campus. And there's something weird and artificial about sending all our late-teenagers and early 20-year-olds away to a place where they're instructed by, for the most part, secularists and atheists and learn to discard everything that they grew up with and, at the same time, don't have anything like a normal family environment."

Another new atheist argument A.F. Christian parodies is the idea that people created God, especially the God of the Torah, to comfort themselves -- yet they blast that God as warlike, jealous, and wrathful.

Who, Eberstadt asks, would create that God for comfort? And who would create all those rules they don't really want to live by? "It's what makes satire so easy about this," she said.

"The Loser Letters" is available from all major booksellers.