Atheism +

[TaraJo]

Doesn't it make some sense to consider yourself "atheist and [x]"? Like, an atheist and a secular humanist, or an atheist and a liberal, or an atheist and an Objectivist, or an atheist and a phenomenologist?

You can identify any way you want. I can't expect someone's identity to revolve entirely around their being an atheist. However, I don't like the divisiveness of it.

History lesson here; I may have to recheck my research, but from what I've heard, politicians never use the 'Christian' title to promote themselves prior to the 50's or so. Why? 'Christian' as a political label didn't exist. We had 'Catholics' and 'Baptists' and 'Methodists.' You couldn't promote yourself as a member of one church without alienating the others. Remember the shitstorm over JFK being Catholic? Then abortion got to be an issue and so did GLBT issues and the churches were able to lay their differences aside to promote candidates who used the label 'Christian.'

So, the different branches of 'Christian' have come together and, yeah, they're pushing their agenda. What about us? Getting a group of atheists to work together can be like herding cats, can't it? We each have our own individual issues and causes and beliefs and instead of fighting the fact that the religious groups of the world are successfully using the government to push their political beliefs onto us, we're dividing ourselves along even more lines. We're dividing ourselves into pro-feminist or pro-communism or pro-GLBT or anti-military or whatever else there is. And while we're fighting among ourselves, the religious fundamentalists of the world are successfully forcing themselves onto each of those individual groups.