Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.
The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.
And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.
New York Times: More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops
(via Disinfo)
April 28, 2009 at 1:53 pm
The number one revelation I had when I tabled an atheist literature booth at Portland Community College was how many people came up and quietly said “I thought I was the only one.” Atheists (and perhaps also doubters, skeptics, agnostics, the indifferent, etc.) are a large percentage of people in the USA. I think we’re partially cowed into silence, partially something else. The something else is a lack of a need to cow other people into silence, thus we ourselves are relatively ‘silent.’ Knowing they are being listened to sympathetically and rationally allows many people to be talked out of unreasonable beliefs – it’s happened for me many times.