Living without religion campaign

Center for Inquiry has a new ad campaign:

You don’t need God — to hope, to care, to love, to live.

Why is such a campaign necessary? CFI answers:

One popular myth is that the nonreligious are immoral, or at least that they can’t be relied upon to be as good as those with religious beliefs. If you know any nonreligious people (and almost everyone does—see below), you already know this is not true. Human decency does not depend on religious belief. There are good believers and good nonbelievers; there are wicked believers and wicked nonbelievers. You can’t predict a person’s moral character just from knowing his or her metaphysical beliefs.

I agree with this concern, based on the fact that hundreds of people who have no idea what kind of life I am leading are willing to condemn me for my lack of a belief in “god.” I’ve written about this proud ignorant judgment repeatedly.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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  1. Avatar of Tim Hogan
    Tim Hogan

    Erich: I read your post on Facebook about the “Reason Rally.” The piece in the link to Daylight Atheism contained the following;

    “Big gatherings are a safe space for nonbelievers: a place where we’re among friends, where we can open up and speak our minds, and where we can take part in enlivening conversations with fellow freethinkers rather than rehashing the same debates over and over with the religious.”

    I cannot think of a single time when I or any of my fellow theists or Catholics that we spent time with anyone an atheist “rehashing the same old debates” ever.

    So, you don’t believe in God, whoopee! It’s a free country (for a while, anyway).

    The passage gives me the perception that atheists sit around by themselves expounding on the various idiocies of believers—a fruitless endeavor, if ever there were one. Talk about anything but whether one believes in any deity, if a person cannot give someone else the courtesy of repecting their beliefs or skepticism, they probably aren’t worth knowing.

    Being a believer does not mean one has a totally closed mind and is necessarily judgmental and perhaps not a skeptic in some aspects of their lives.

    If atheists relate to me solely through the lens of their religious skepticism, such an approach is flawed.

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