Reply #77: Y'know, I grew up in a rightwing southern town. I had people shout

[struggle4progress]

at me that I was going to go to hell because my religion wasn't exactly the same as theirs. During the early seventies, strangers regularly threw glass bottles at me from moving vehicles, and I'm pretty sure it was because I had long hair. Growing up, I regularly saw people scream really nasty things to women who the screamers thought just weren't pretty-looking enough. I heard more than enough people say that anybody who smoked marijuana should be shot. The first time I ever heard a racist "joke," I was in elementary school: it was vicious castration "humor." I was also in elementary school the first time anybody ever called me a "communist" -- and I was called that because I disagreed with some kid's dumb racist theories. Over the years, I heard people say there say they'd fire an employee for not being Christian, for being liberal, for supporting unions, and for all sorts of other reasons. It's certainly true folk there didn't like atheists, but that was the tip of the ice-berg: they didn't like anybody who was different. I knew one guy who really was arrested just because he had a European accent

You're preaching to the choir here. I suspect most DUers have known lots of open atheists: a number of my adolescent friends were atheists, and we had plenty of other stuff to talk about. I also suspect that quite a few of the religious folk here considered atheism carefully at one point or other: I read Russell's Why I am not a Christian when I was twelve, I read some of Marx's critique of religion as an undergraduate, and I took all that seriously

Your post illustrates, I think, one of the essential problems of modern US politics: Americans seem to think that politics is about "beliefs" rather than about organizing coalitions for meaningful change. Useful coalitions can be assembled from diverse groups that do not share "core beliefs": all that is needed is that the coalitions organize people who want to see the same change. But instead of doing that, we Americans prefer to babble about our "beliefs." For example, instead of discussing how health care decisions are made, and who makes them, and how people get to decide who will make health care decisions for them, we Americans wander off into a wilderness of abstract blather about whether or not we "believe" in gay marriage. It dissipates energy without producing results. Frankly, I don't think most people really give a rat's ass about my "beliefs," though they may welcome a "discussion" as an opportunity to express their "beliefs" -- and they are likely to take offense if I belittle their "beliefs." The same comment applies to my "nonbeliefs" and also to your "beliefs" or your "nonbeliefs." To assemble useful coalitions for meaningful change, it is necessary to avoid irrelevant discussions: all manner of technical details, about exact aims and strategies, need to be resolved, and these will create enough tension without wandering into a wilderness flame-war centering on irrelevant abstract philosophical issues. When there are legitimate public policy fights concerning, say, how to avoid using public funds to promote particular religious views, or how to ensure that science (rather than theology) is taught in public school biology classes, one needs to assemble coalitions to achieve particular ends, and these coalitions are likely to be successful only if they do not unnecessarily offend people. In many cases, one's religious views or non-religious views are irrelevant to the public policy fight