When I was in my 20’s, I was called a “God damned atheist” by a man who was sorely disappointed that I didn’t march off to the Catholic Church with his family.   I was dating his daughter at the time, and I had been welcomed to visit her family home for that weekend. Everything was going well until Sunday morning.   After I declined his invitation to go to Mass, the livid father announced that I was no longer welcome in that house.  It was as if I had tried to set the house on fire.  Worse yet, my then-girlfriend’s father was a college philosophy teacher—I had assumed that professors would be more tolerant than that.  I was shocked at his intolerance and I abided by his request.

I could give many other stories documenting that I have experienced discrimination, including discrimination that took the form of wholesale emotional rejection by adults when I was young and vulnerable.  My stories would not be unique. Here is an especially disturbing episode involving another young man. 

In many parts of America, those who don’t believe in God are stigmatized by members of their own communities.  That is the reason for the “Out” campaign.

As more and more people join the OUT Campaign, fewer and fewer people will feel intimidated by religion. We can help others understand that atheists come in all shapes, sizes, colours and personalities. We are labourers and professionals. We are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and grandparents. We are human (we are primates) and we are good friends and good citizens. We are good people who have no need to cling to the supernatural.

It is time to let our voices be heard regarding the intrusion of religion in our schools and politics. Atheists along with millions of others are tired of being bullied by those who would force their own religious agenda down the throats of our children and our respective governments. We need to KEEP OUT the supernatural from our moral principles and public policies.

If you want to make your rejection of bureaucratic religion visible, you can buy t-shirts or bumper stickers. 

I must admit, though, that I am ambivalent about this campaign.  On the one hand, it is shameful that so many people ostracize those of us who don’t claim allegiance to a religion, as though we are per se immoral.  Statistics don’t bear out that non-believers are any less willing to help those in need than believers.  As I’ve argued before, non-religious altruism is a higher form of morality.   It is a purer form of morality to help others because it is the right thing to do, rather than because “God” ordered one to do it under threat of burning in hell.  Yet, somehow, the alleged immorality of non-believers is taken as a given by many Americans. 

For this reason that non-believers are unfairly criticized and politically ostracized, the “Out” campaign is critically important and I do hope it succeeds in its goals.   As Richard Dawkins writes, there are huge numbers of non-believers out there–if more of them would stand up and be counted, it would be harder to discriminate against all of us.

On the other hand, I am not comfortable with the term “atheist” being at the vanguard of the movement.  “Atheist” comes loaded with connotations of immorality and stridency.  “Atheist” is also a term that suggests, to many people, that one does not have a poetically spiritual side, that one does not appreciate walks in the forest, meditation, or the mutually-healing power of doing good works for others.  The problem is that the forces of intolerance have successfully commandeered the word “atheist.”

Personally, I find that it makes a huge difference whether I call myself an “atheist” or, rather, whether I characterize myself as someone who doesn’t “believe in God” or “follow a religion.”  When I’ve described myself in a way that doesn’t use the term “atheist,” I’ve found that the people with whom I am conversing are much less threatened and much more willing to engage in meaningful dialogue. 

An even better approach, in my experience, is to announce that I reject “bureaucratic religion.”  I find that this approach is quite well accepted by most of those who claim to belong to religions.  In my experience, most believers are troubled (some more than others) that religions try to get their members to assert factually vacuous claims in order to inspire or scare the members into conforming to programs that are essentially political.  It is amazing to me how many people, including church-goers, are at least somewhat suspicious of organized religions for this reason (and other reasons). 

What is the alternative to belonging to a religion?   How about making the search for ultimate truth a private decision for each person?  What if each of us undertook his or her search for “God” or “Meaning” in a manifestly unregimented way? Most people are quite open to this idea, at least in principle.  It’s an idea that meshes well with freedom of expression.  This approach would be a lot more work for the many who belong to the most regimented religions.   Many such people consider the search for meaning accomplished by engaging in rote oxymoronic chatter once per week.   I’m not trying to be cruel when I write this criticism–addressing one’s God with a rote prayer makes no more sense to me that if you regularly addressed your parents, children or friends with rote passages written hundreds of years ago instead of talking with them.  Reading things at each other strikes me as an odd way to try to communicate.

I’m aware that the negative connotations could change over time if this “Out” campaign is successful, but I’m afraid that shoving “atheist” in people’s faces might kick up the temperature without generating productive dialogue.

I’m for coming “out,” of course.  All of us should come “out” to our well-founded beliefs.   I just want to make sure that when non-believers do it, it is done in a way that achieves the stated goals of the campaign:  to put a halt to the discrimination and intimidation.