Posted on 05/20/2005 7:16:31 AM PDT by SmithL
As they watch religion increasingly dominate American political discourse, nonbelievers will gather in San Francisco today for their first "All Atheist Weekend" -- in an effort to put a friendlier face on godlessness.
"We're trying to do what church people call outreach," said Jim Heldberg, a Pacifica software salesman and onetime Methodist who coordinates the group San Francisco Atheists.
"We feel very threatened by what's going on in this country, but we realize that we can't just sit here in a corner by ourselves," Heldberg said. "If we do, the religious right is just going to run us over."
So Heldberg and other leaders of the Bay Area's five chapters of atheists -- from the "Godless Geeks" club of the Silicon Valley to the crew at the Rossmoor retirement community in Walnut Creek -- have put together a weekend designed to bring together the God-unfearing and "have some fun," Heldberg said. They will chat about their favorite mainstream film, "Contact," the 1997 flick in which Jodie Foster plays an alien-seeking astronomer with a lot of atheistic questions.
The president of a national atheist organization will speak this evening in a room at the Commonwealth Club, which is not sponsoring the event. A Michael Moore-styled atheist "opinion documentary" will have its world premiere Saturday at a small theater in South of Market, and atheists will be treated to a one-man multimedia presentation and a fund-raising dinner (to pay for the Commonwealth Club rental).
The goal is to do what organizers commonly call "herding butterflies" -- turning atheists into activists.
The challenge in that?
"Atheists are not joiners," said Ellen Johnson, national president of American Atheists, which the country's most famous modern atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founded in 1963.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I assume it's to pass the plate.
The spiritual conflict cranking up another notch.
It is a sobering and yet exciting time and place to be a believer in the Lord.
this is very weird. I've always been suspicious of "organized atheists." I know dozens of atheists (I'm in a PhD program) and while there are a few who constantly bash believers and seem more obsessed with religion than most religious people are, most of these atheists keep their unbelief relatively private. They don't let it define them, they don't make a big deal out of it, and they don't really care if other people disagree with them. In general they are very individualistic people and their atheism is an outgrowth of that. Joining a group devoted to promoting atheism would be the last thing most of these folks would want to do.
Atheists merely disbelieve in the existence of Deity, or at least the Abrahamic Personal G-d. They try to live their lives along non-religious ethical and philosophical grounds, and let their actions, rather than their words, serve as the example.
Militant secularists not only disbelieve, but are immensely frightened by the fact that most people have some sort of religious or spiritual belief, ridicule and belittle any philosophy not based on the Holy Trinity of Sts. Charles, Karl and Sigmund*; and work to purge any mention of religion or G-d from public discourse.
I would guess that 90% of these people in the article are part of the second group.
*AKA Darwin, Marx & Freud -- the apostles of modern atheism and materialistic determinism.
With SUVs no doubt. : )
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