Atheism: why no one reaches out
The whiny Democratic atheist brigade – Crunchy Con
In the Democratic Party, every day is secularist day! Cut Obama and the DNC some slack — they’re right to do this kind of outreach.
Now, Mr. Dreber does have a point. Historically, the Dems are more secular. However, there’s a couple other, more subtle things at play here on both sides.
- Atheists (like myself) always say they aren’t a religion. And thats coming back to bite us in the ass. The party wants to reach out to the religious, and atheists aren’t really a part of that continuum.
- The party isn’t actually reaching out to the religious. They are reaching out to Christians.
- Atheists are a small minority. Christians carry votes.
- Atheists are, by and large, not given a public voice. Remember, most Americans still won’t vote for atheists.
- It would be rather difficult to reach out to atheists since they only thing that ties the individuals together is that they don’t believe in god. Reaching out to atheists, in this context, would be like reaching out to programmers. There’s not much of a target.
- Further, what would reaching out look like? What could you say other than “I promise to keep church and state apart.”? And Obama has pretty much said thats part of his vision anyhow (with a couple deviations here and there that I can live with).
But the core bit is that atheists aren’t a part of this outreach because atheism has little relationship to religion. People of the same religion tend to have similar views, similar morals (I’m making some assumptions here, but I don’t see how you can have different views and morality and still be part of the same religion). So you can reach out and say that “yes, I share your values”. Atheists don’t have that. We aren’t a group, per se. We aren’t a religion anymore than people who don’t have cancer are a group.
It makes me sad that we are seen as ‘the other’, that we aren’t openly spoken to, that we are seen as amoral by many.
But this is changing. Young people are realizing that they don’t have to believe in these stories anymore.
Give it time. We are winning. The truth has a tendency to do so.
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2 Comments:
The Democrats are secular? You are kidding, right? That person is confusing them with the ACLU- we haven’t had a secular Democrat since…1800. The recent Dems haven’t been secularists as much as they were not theocrats, which stands in a large contrast to their Republican opponents.
Samuel Skinner
4:23 pm
Man has a point. I suppose that I suppose Miami seems cool and breezy compared to, say, an equatorial rain forest.
Or whatever.
Story on point I like to tell.
I liked (still do, basically) John Edwards. Thought he’d make an interesting president and seriously considered supporting him.
Until…
Edwards gets asked where he stands on gay marriage.
He responds with ‘I am supporting civil unions but my religious beliefs prevent me from supporting gay marriage’
That was pretty much it for me right there. Your religious beliefs??? Where else will those come before the rule of law?
I assume he believes in the 10 Commandments and we’d soon have to keep the sabbath. Oh, and have no other god before you-know-who.
Truly, I am sick of this. I have yet to understand why ‘faith’ is seen as a positive attribute. Is it because it takes great strength to believe in something that goes against all evidence before you? If so, then we should probably embrace paranoids as amazing people.
Of course, ‘faith’ really only means judeo-christian faith (or something not too far from it). Faith is magic or faeries or anything other than mainstream faith is simply delusional and those people probably shouldn’t be allowed to raise children.
moleboy
4:37 pm