Culture

Free Minds and Freakin' Awesome License Plates

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Atheists are apparently coming out of the same closet as gays (it must be a walk-in!) and comparing their strategy to that of gay-rights activists, who in turn, have compared their struggle to the civil rights movement. Really, is

Ten national organizations that variously identify themselves as atheists, humanists, freethinkers and others who go without God have recently united to form the Secular Coalition for America, of which Mr. Silverman is president. These groups, once rivals, are now pooling resources to lobby in Washington for separation of church and state.

A wave of donations, some in the millions of dollars, has enabled the hiring of more paid professional organizers, said Fred Edwords, a longtime atheist leader who just started his own umbrella group, the United Coalition of Reason, which plans to spawn 20 local groups around the country in the next year….

Part of what is giving the movement momentum is the proliferation of groups on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance now has 146 chapters, up from 42 in 2003.

At the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, 19 students showed up for a recent evening meeting of the "Pastafarians," named for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster–a popular spoof on religion dreamed up by an opponent of intelligent design, the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.

Whole damned thing here.

In 2005, Contributor Chris Lehmann discussed the tedium of dogmatic atheism. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum on Mitt "remember-that-guy" Romney's atheist bashing. Back in 2007, Radley Balko noted that most Americans would elect a president who was "Catholic, black, female, divorced, elderly, Mormon, or gay." But not atheist. And Tim Cavanaugh reviews The Atheist here. Prostrate before the Spaghetti Monster here. Earlier this year, Sullum blogged about my home state's atheist ban. Don't worry though, they're working on the problem.

Jeff Winkler