Tranching Reality

Over at the Friendly Atheist, Hemant talks about a NYT article on atheist political isolation:

With their trust in the power of reason, atheists might also be ill-equipped for the gritty work of retail politics — the phone banks, the door-knocking, the car pools to the polls. If nothing else, they are coming late to the craft.

Sadly, I’ve found all that to be fairly accurate. We’re bad at organizing and we’re difficult to organize.

Until we can get enough atheists willing to band together on communal issues, we won’t get much done. The Secular Coalition for America is an anomaly in that sense.

Reading atheist blogs is fine. Reading atheist books is fine. But unless we can transform our thoughts into action, it’s all pretty useless.

Another problem that we seem to have is that while atheists seem to be connected to the Internet, we use it in many different ways. Many of the attendees of my local atheist group don’t even read blogs. They have a forum that gets a lot of traffic, but it seems like staying insular is the M.O. Only recently has a Facebook group started, and even then, there are few members.

I think that there are communities out there, just in different forms than what we’d like to see. I also think that until atheism stops receiving the stigma that it does, atheists will continue to protect themselves either by seeking insular groups or by calling themselves something else, like “agnostic” or “secular,” and continue to avoid becoming active.

(Please note that I’m not disparaging either of the terms “agnostic” or “secular”; I merely suspect that there are many people who are de facto atheists who eschew the atheist label for various reasons.)

I think that we also need to remember that while it’s now safe or even desirable for many of us to adopt the label, it’s not safe for many people still. In fact, it can be downright dangerous. All that means, though, is that the rest of us who are safe need to work hard to show that we belong in this nation and this world. What I think that means is that we can’t just stick to ourselves; groups like Americans United and the SCA are vitally important to us, but we also need to consider other, less secular-specific causes that we can attach ourselves to (Amnesty International or the ACLU might be good examples).