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The nation’s largest freethought association is debuting a new “friendly neighborhood atheist” video campaign to showcase the growing numbers of unbelievers in the United States.
The Madison, Wis.,-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, with more than 21,500 members nationwide working to keep religion out of government, is “calling all nonbelievers to come out of the closet.”
“Although the nonreligious — including one in five U.S. citizens — is a significant segment of the world population, many Americans have never knowingly met a nonbeliever,” notes FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor.
FFRF says you can “help dispel myths, educate and promote reason by adding your voice, face and message to FFRF's friendly neighborhood freethinker campaign. This is your chance to proclaim you're a freethinker and why. It's working for the gay rights movement. Now it's time for atheists and agnostics to come out of our closet.”
“Many faces make enlightenment work,” notes Bill Dunn, editor of FFRF’s newspaper, Freethought Today. Dunn is one of about 20 FFRF staffers, interns, volunteers or student workers who recorded a short video statement to launch the campaign. Raised a Catholic, Dunn recalls carrying a card in his billfold to alert emergency responders, "In case of accident, please call a priest." Forty years after leaving the church, Dunn says, “Now if you find me alongside the road after an accident, please call an ambulance and an EMT.”
Charlotte Stein, a part-time FFRF staffer who just came back from a stint in Morocco in the Peace Corps, noted she’s come to three conclusions that dictate how she leads her secular life. “One: I find people of faith to be more exclusionary and less accepting. Two, I’d rather work to please the people around me whom I care about than something that to my knowledge doesn’t exist. And three, I would rather help people than pray for them.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison law student Jarvis Idowu, one of FFRF’s capable legal interns, notes: “The religions of today are the entertainment of tomorrow. Everyone, I hope, is an atheist about Zeus and Apollo and Poseiden. I just added Jesus and Muhammad to that list.”
“I’m an atheist because our universe is far more amazing than the paltry miracles of the bible. I’m an atheist for the same reason you are an atheist about Allah, Osiris and Thor,” says FFRF Staff Attorney Andrew Seidel.
“We’re undertaking this campaign because we think freethinkers are our movement’s best advertisement, and we’re very proud of the statements of our staff and other members,” says Co-President Dan Barker. His video briefly recounts his odyssey from evangelist to godless, noting, “I threw out the bathwater, and there was no baby there.”
Also posted are brief statements by bible scholar and agnostic Bart Ehrman; Michael Nugent, co-founder of Atheist Ireland; Candace Gorham, the North Carolina author of “The Ebony Exodus Project: Why Some Black Women Are Walking Out on Religion — and Others Should Too” and Mandisa Thomas, founder of Black Nonbelievers, among others.
FFRF asks participating nonbelievers to record a brief statement of 60 seconds or less, upload it to YouTube and submit it to FFRF to post on its website with many other “out of the closet” freethinkers. Directions for participating in the campaign are found here.