RE: Does Atheism have a Generally accepted Symbol (and do we need one?)
December 4, 2014 at 4:01 pm
(December 4, 2014 at 3:49 pm)FatAndFaithless Wrote: But what political force? A bunch of people getting together and saying "we don't believe in God"? Not only are there vast differences in political ideas among atheists, there is not a single political idea that directly comes from atheism. Hell, I have numerous atheist friends that honestly could not care less about religion in government and just 'go with the flow', and ones that really do think "marriage" should be defined as a man and a woman since it's a 'religious' idea.
I don't think there's any reason to try to organize a political party around a single, neutral, non-proscriptive stance. It's like forming a political party based on the non-belief of Leprechauns.
Except for the fact that a fundamental belief in Leprechauns isn't encroaching upon people's rights and trying to stick it's nose into every facet of government.
It is naive to think that there isn't a significant majority of atheists that votes a particular way. One quick poll of this site would tell you that.
I am not suggesting that there be an 'atheist party.' That would be silly. I am suggesting that if a symbol that became the sigil of atheism normalized atheism more, made it easier for people to recognize that the people that they knew pretty well were atheists all along, and allowed closeted atheists to realize that there are more of us out there than they thought, then maybe that may lead to a wider recognition of atheists as as a portion of the voting population that shouldn't be ignored---giving rise to more secularism.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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