Under Iran’s theocratic dictatorship atheist Soheil Arabi faced death for blasphemy

Thousands were released in Iran, but not atheist prisoner Soheil Arabi

The activist and blogger sentenced to blasphemy is on hunger strike

By Rahila Gupta  

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Soheil Arabi. Photo: Nano GoleSorkh

If lockdown has deepened our empathy with the predicament of inmates in our jails, it has also released innovative means of protest on behalf of political prisoners locked up in brutal conditions. On 14th April, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain organised a self-declared first: a three-hour online protest, live-streamed on Facebook, mixing music, poetry and an array of international speakers, in support of Soheil Arabi.

Arabi is an atheist, activist and blogger. He’s in an Iranian prison, in bad shape both emotionally and physically. His crime? Blasphemy: writing insulting Facebook posts about the prophet Muhammad, the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials. Arabi was arrested in December 2013 and sentenced to death for blasphemy. In July 2015, upon appeal, his death sentence was reduced to seven and a half years in prison and two years of religious studies to cure him of his atheism. In addition to physical problems caused by various hunger strikes, Arabi has been tortured, resulting in blunt trauma to his testicles and a broken nose, amongst other injuries.

Refusing to be silenced, he was later sentenced to an additional three years in prison, exile and a fine on charges of “propaganda against the state” and “insulting the sacred and the supreme leader” because of his open letters highlighting inhumane prison conditions of political prisoners in Iran. As if to rub the mullahs’ noses in it, he signs letters as Soheil Arabi, Atheist.

Iran, Pakistan and Yemen are the three worst countries in regard to the implementation of blasphemy law, often used to harass religious and ethnic minorities. (See my interview with Saif ul-Malook, the lawyer who represented Asia Bibi. A Christian woman, Bibi spent nine years in prison on confected charges of blasphemy, many of those on death row, before the sentence was commuted to life.) According to The Freedom of Thought report 2019, blasphemy laws exist in 69 countries and is punishable by death in six.

We don’t know the number of prisoners sentenced to death for blasphemy in Iran. Figures are hard to come by. A 2018 Amnesty report put the number of individuals executed at over 253, while 18 were convicted of moharebeh (enmity against God) and 14 of “spreading corruption on earth”, vague terms for blasphemy much in vogue in Iran. Any criticism of the state can be deemed a religious offence and has proven a handy mechanism for controlling dissent.

Arabi resumed his hunger strike on April 4 in protest at the Iranian regime’s denial of medical care, inhuman prison conditions and the denial of leave for prisoners during the coronavirus pandemic. In a bid to stop the spread of the virus, more than 85,000 prisoners were released on temporary leave, including the more well-known political prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian citizen imprisoned for allegedly “plotting to topple the Iranian government”. In his letter to the Greater Tehran Penitentiary announcing his hunger strike, Arabi asks, “And I have been imprisoned for telling the truth. Those who had embezzled money were granted prison leave and are now at large. Armed robbers are now at large. What is the danger of a journalist?”

Atheism is a red rag to religion in a way that religion rarely is to atheism – unless we are talking about authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union. It’s a point that is often eclipsed in liberal democracies where freedom of belief often trumps the freedom not to believe. Of course, in countries like Iran, neither freedom exists.

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American atheist blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh

American atheist blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh

Avijit Roy, whose Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog championed liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation, attacked along with his wife in Dhaka

Avijit Roy’s wife Rafida Ahmed Banna is carried on a stretcher after she was seriously injured by unidentified assailants. Roy, founded a blog site which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim majority nation. Photograph: Rajib Dhar/AFP/Getty Images

 

A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin was hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, police said, with the atheist writer’s family claiming he had received numerous threats from Islamists.

The body of Avijit Roy, founder of Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation, was found covered in blood after the attack which also left his wife critically wounded.

“He died as he was brought to the hospital. His wife was also seriously wounded. She has lost a finger,” local police chief Sirajul Islam said.

The couple were on a bicycle rickshaw, returning from a book fair, when two assailants stopped and dragged them onto a sidewalk before striking them with machetes, local media reported citing witnesses.

Roy, said to be around 40, is the second Bangladeshi blogger to have been murdered in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004.

Hardline Islamist groups have long demanded the public execution of atheist bloggers and sought new laws to combat writing critical of Islam.

“Roy suffered fatal wounds in the head and died from bleeding… after being brought to the hospital,” doctor Sohel Ahmed told reporters.

Police have launched a probe and recovered the machetes used in the attack but could not confirm whether Islamists were behind the incident.

But Roy’s father said the writer, a US citizen, had received a number of “threatening” emails and messages on social media from hardliners unhappy with his writing.

“He was a secular humanist and has written about ten books” including his most famous “Biswasher Virus” (Virus of Faith), his father Ajoy Roy told AFP.

The Center for Inquiry, a US-based charity promoting free thought, said it was “shocked and heartbroken” by the brutal murder of Roy.

“Dr Roy was a true ally, a courageous and eloquent defender of reason, science, and free expression, in a country where those values have been under heavy attack,” it said in a statement.

Roy’s killing also triggered strong condemnation from his fellow writers and publishers, who lamented the growing religious conservatism and intolerance in Bangladesh.

“The attack on Roy and his wife Rafida Ahmed is outrageous. We strongly protest this attack and are deeply concerned about the safety of writers,” Imran H. Sarker, head of an association for bloggers in Bangladesh, told AFP.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, a fellow blogger and friend of Roy, claimed one of the country’s largest online book retailers was being openly threatened for selling Roy’s books.

“In Bangladesh the easiest target is an atheist. An atheist can be attacked and murdered,” he wrote on Facebook.

Atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was hacked to death in 2013 by members of a little known Islamist militant group, triggering nationwide protests by tens of thousands of secular activists.

After Haider’s death, Bangladesh’s hardline Islamist groups started to protest against other campaigning bloggers, calling a series of nationwide strikes to demand their execution, accusing them of blasphemy.

The secular government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina reacted by arresting some atheist bloggers.

The government also blocked about a dozen websites and blogs to stem the furore over blasphemy, as well as stepping up security for the bloggers.

Bangladesh is the world’s fourth-largest Muslim majority nation with Muslims making up some 90 per cent of the country’s 160 million people.

A tribunal has recently handed down a series of verdicts against leading Islamists and others for crimes committed during the war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

Everything We Know So Far About The Alleged Chapel Hill Shooter

Everything We Know So Far About The Alleged Chapel Hill Shooter

• Craig Hicks was charged with first-degree murder Wednesday.
• He has shared many atheist and anti-religious posts on Facebook.
• He appears to have defended Muslims and freedom of religion in past online comments.
• He does not appear to have a serious criminal record.

 

David Mack

BuzzFeed News Reporter

1. Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, was charged Tuesday with the murders of three of his Muslim neighbors in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Chapel Hill Police/Durham County Sheriff’s Department via Associated Press

2. On Wednesday, police said their initial investigation suggested the murders were linked to an ongoing dispute over parking between the neighbors, but they haven’t yet ruled out the possibility of a hate crime.

“Our investigators are exploring what could have motivated Mr. Hicks to commit such a senseless and tragic act,” police said in a statement. “We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if this is the case.”

3. Hicks’ Facebook page contains a long list of atheist and anti-religious posts.

4. One post he shared on Feb. 8 compared radical Christians to radical Muslims.

5. Another shared post mocked the notion of God saving people from death.

6. Last month, Hicks described himself as a “grumpy old man” after spotting a couple have sex in a vehicle in his parking lot.

“It is official, I am a grumpy old man,” the post read. “I now am sure of this, as when I saw a couple having sex in their vehicle in my parking lot a little bit ago instead of just ignoring it I called Chapel Hills [sic] finest on them.”

7. Hicks does not appear to have serious criminal record.

The records department of Winchester Police, Virginia, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that a man with the same name was charged and fined with the misdemeanor offense of “dog running at large” on Jan. 2, 1995. Their records showed his date of birth as Aug. 3, 1969, while Chapel Hill police say Hicks was born on Aug. 3, 1968.

8. On his Facebook page Hicks lists himself as married, says he owns a cat and dog, describes himself as a “patriotic American,” and states that he studied as a paralegal at Durham Technical Community College.

9. He is registered to vote, but is not registered with any party.

10. He lists himself as a fan of the cable access television show The Atheist Experience, as well as the religious horror film Stigmata.

11. An Amazon “wish list” that appeared to belong to Hicks had requested a gun concealment belt…

12. …a battlezone scope and 9-inch knife…

13. …and a camouflage suit and drone.

14. In a post on Aug. 19, 2010, debating the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” on XDtalk.com, an account that appeared to belong to Hicks posted that he had known “several dozen Muslims” and believed “that they aren’t what most think of them.”

When a user took a poll of the forum, the account that appeared to belong to Hicks voted in favor of a response reading, “I am indifferent about the project itself — I can see the arguments both for it and against it. But this is a free country, and the developers certainly have a right to express themselves.”

The full post reads as follows:

I voted #2 for several reasons.

The first amendment to our constitution guarantees freedom of religion, which takes precedence over any other “feeling” that any of us as Americans may have.
Beyond that though after being in D.C. for a decade and knowing several dozen Muslims for most of that time I can say that they aren’t what most think of them. In fact, I’d prefer them to most Christians as I was never coerced in any way by the Muslims to follow their religion, which I cannot say about many Christians.
While the terrorists who did the 9/11 attacks were Muslims, they were extremists in that faith which isn’t common. I know of many Christian extremists personally, much less the ones we have heard about on the news. People of this country don’t seem to hold that against Christianity though(probably because they’re a majority in this country).
While it may cause problems with those that don’t want it there with vandalizing and such, what if that excuse stopped our forefathers from starting a new nation. Civil rights, suffrage, heck even our own gun rights have been “fought” for at times. On that matter, the vast majority of our own ancestors in this country had to fight for their rights as Americans as most of the ethnic groups in this country were looked down on at some point(some still are).
This country was founded on freedoms, and many forget that one of the biggest freedoms that was fought for was freedom of religion. Then after all was said and done, Americans pushed west and took the lands of the Native Americans, put them on reservations(land that has no use), and stuffed religion down their throat. Their children were often taken from them to be taught Christianity(brainwashed might be a better word). They were not allowed to have their ancestral hair or garments, not allowed to use their given names but had to use the Christian ones assigned to them, and not allowed to speak their native tongue among other things. Funny how during World War 2, the same government that violated the Native Americans 1st amendment rights in the previous century were called upon because of their ancestral language.
With all that being said, I don’t see how anyone who calls themselves American can claim that a Mosque shouldn’t be TWO BLOCKS AWAY from what is known as ground zero.

16. Hicks also appeared to hold accounts on a number of gun websites.

17. In a profile that appeared to belong to him on RimfireCentral.com, he said he was a NRA member and listed his occupation as “Professional Bum.”

18. On Jan. 20, Hicks shared a photo of a handgun on scale with a caption reading, “Yes, that is 1 pound 5.1 ounces for my loaded revolver, its holster, and five extra rounds in a speedloader.”

19. On Wednesday, Hick’s wife Karen, a nurse with the Durham County Department of Health, told reporters the incident was not a hate crime.

WNCN / Via wncn.com

“I can say with absolute belief that this incident had nothing to do with religion of the victims’ faith, but it was related to a longstanding parking dispute that my husband had with the neighbors,” Karen Hicks said.

She said her husband of seven years treated people with respect. “He often champions on his Facebook page for the rights of individuals. … He believes everyone is equal – doesn’t matter what you look like or who you are or what you believe.”

21.

Here Are The Three Victims Of The Chapel Hill Shooting

22.

Three Muslim Students In North Carolina Shot Dead, Police Investigating If Attack Was Hate-Motivated

Check out more articles on BuzzFeed.com!

David Mack is a reporter and weekend editor for BuzzFeed News in New York.

Contact David Mack at david.mack@buzzfeed.com

Why You Shouldn’t Teach Your Children That Hell is Real

Why You Shouldn’t Teach Your Children That Hell is Real

The book is called Parenting Without God:

In the exclusive excerpt below, Dan explains why you shouldn’t teach children that Hell is real:

If teaching heaven is bad, teaching hell is downright mental child abuse. There is no way around this one. You are telling a child that for bad deeds done, or not worshipping the right (or any god), you are going to burn in a lake of fire for eternity. Pure torture, unimaginable pain and it is forever.

The myth of Hell needs to be destroyed faster than the myth of heaven by far. Children and countless adults fear any of their actions will result in them spending eternity in Hell. Why? It is such a childish and illogical idea. For starters, their almighty God created an evil angel, and instead of destroying him, gave him his own kingdom? And let’s not get started on the fact that if Satan is the one punishing the bad guys for their evil, doesn’t that make Satan the good guy? If Hell is for the most evil people in the world who listened to and or worshipped Satan, wouldn’t Satan be glad to have them? It simply doesn’t make sense and even Christians and other religious followers are deciding they don’t believe in Hell anymore. It seems that all the rest of their religion is true, but Hell sounds too mean, so that part is obviously just an allegory. So, just like the endless rape, murder, genocide and other atrocities of the Bible, let’s go ahead and cherry-pick Hell right out of it.

Now of course Hell gives many people a sense of justice. Hitler got the easy way out by killing himself and never answering for his crimes, yet many take comfort in the idea that he is in hell for eternity. For non-believers, that comfort does not exist, we take comfort in knowing he is not alive anymore to continue causing harm. We take comfort in learning from past mistakes and working to not repeat them. Pretending that we don’t have to worry about evil actions that seem foreign to us, because we believe someone else will handle it, is exactly what leads to such atrocities in the first place. It is always someone else’s responsibility.

…

I don’t think there will be much argument that Hell is one of the most vile or religious beliefs, so much so that it sickens me to think that people can claim to be good and god loving people who actually believe in, and are okay with, the idea that the invisible man they worship would torture their own children forever if they deny the existence of said invisible man. My very own grandparents believe I will burn in Hell and they believe that my son, their great grandchild, if he does not find a path to their God, will burn in hell. Where is the morality in that thinking?

The only morality you will find in this thinking is immorality! Anyone who believes someone will, or deserves everlasting suffering because they did not believe in the right god, or didn’t worship your god correctly, is not a moral person.

…

Now, to touch back on the child abuse aspect of Hell. This is a tricky area, because it is easy to label this abuse when you are on the outside looking in. However, if you really sit down and think about it, if you are a parent and you, with all your heart believe in Hell and believe people are sent there, wouldn’t it be child abuse to not tell your child about Hell? If you thought by keeping your mouth shut your child would burn in hellfire, it would make you a worse parent than trying to save your child’s eternity.

The reason this is important is that you will have encounters with countless parents who believe this. They will tell their child about hell, and they may discuss this with your child, or you. The incorrect action would be to attack them as abusive. I instead would suggest using a more Socratic method of questioning their beliefs and seeing if you can take them apart from the bottom up. These are the same methods we looked at when dissecting faith.

These parents have faith in Heaven and Hell and honestly believe they are doing the right thing by their child. If you wish to dig deeper into that and maybe help their child out, you will need to talk to the parents, learn what they believe, and work through how that baseless and harmful belief can be removed from their lives.

This sounds like a daunting task, and it is. It may not be a task you are up for, and even if you are you may never be successful, but I know some of you reading this right now know a child in a household that fears Hell more than anything on earth and needs someone, somehow to reach out their parents and remove this from their lives. We know their church won’t be doing it.

Parenting Without God is now available online. Check it out!

Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers

Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers

By Yasmin Anwar

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

Study finds highly religious people are less motivated by compassion to show generosity than are non-believers

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious.

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.

While the study examined the link between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly examine the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others. However, researchers hypothesize that deeply religious people may be more strongly guided by a sense of moral obligation than their more non-religious counterparts.

“We hypothesized that religion would change how compassion impacts generous behavior,” said study lead author Laura Saslow, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.

Saslow, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco, said she was inspired to examine this question after an altruistic, nonreligious friend lamented that he had only donated to earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti after watching an emotionally stirring video of a woman being saved from the rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.

“I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated in three large, systematic studies,” Saslow said.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed data from a 2004 national survey of more than 1,300 American adults. Those who agreed with such statements as “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them” were also more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as loaning out belongings and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train, researchers found.

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person, non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: “These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the study found.

In the second experiment, 101 American adults watched one of two brief videos, a neutral video or a heartrending one, which showed portraits of children afflicted by poverty. Next, they were each given 10 “lab dollars” and directed to give any amount of that money to a stranger. The least religious participants appeared to be motivated by the emotionally charged video to give more of their money to a stranger.

“The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity,” Willer said. “But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants.”

In the final experiment, more than 200 college students were asked to report how compassionate they felt at that moment. They then played “economic trust games” in which they were given money to share – or not – with a stranger. In one round, they were told that another person playing the game had given a portion of their money to them, and that they were free to reward them by giving back some of the money, which had since doubled in amount.

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than other participants in the study.

“Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people,” Willer said.

In addition to Saslow and Willer, other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley psychologists Dacher Keltner, Matthew Feinberg and Paul Piff; Katharine Clark at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Sarina Saturn at Oregon State University.

The study was funded by grants from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, and the Metanexus Institute.

Atheists can’t be Republicans | The secular have no place in today’s GOP — and libertarian atheists should realize that now

Atheists can’t be Republicans

The secular have no place in today’s GOP — and libertarian atheists should realize that now

By CJ Werleman

Enlarge (Credit: AP/Reuters/J. Scott Applewhite/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Jonathan Ernst/Stacy Bengs/WDG Photo via Shutterstock/Salon)

We atheists like to chastise the religious for their child-like belief in an imaginary friend, but, equally, the time has come for the atheist movement to grow up. It’s understood that the so-called new atheist movement began at the start of the new millennium with the mainstream emergence of luminaries Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others.

For much of the first decade of the new century, the atheist movement behaved like a curious child in search of meaning to its own existence. Now that the child is a teenager on its way to adulthood, it needs to start acting like a grown up. The atheist movement comprises more than 2,000 groups and organizations in the U.S. today, but the movement, in composition and purpose, has failed to establish a coherent cause outside of validating non-belief and offering platitudes towards protecting the separation of church and state. Another thing one notices with the atheist movement is the fact it is predominantly upwardly middle-class, white and male. Sikivu Hutchinson writes, in her essay “Prayer Warriors and Freethinkers”: “If mainstream freethought and humanism continue to reflect the narrow cultural interests of white elites who have disposable income to go to conferences then the secular movement is destined to remain marginal and insular.”

The movement has an image problem. An image that isn’t helped by the ceaseless and over-simplified fear-mongering over Islamic terrorism from the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — rhetoric that not only ignores our long history of foreign policy blunders in the Middle East, but also echoes the neo-conservatives, the Israel lobby and the entire right-wing echo chamber. Nathan Lean, author of “The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims,” writes, “The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.”

It’s time for the movement to address bigger and real issues, and the biggest issue of our time is income inequality. Of all the developed nations, the U.S. has the most unequal distribution of income. In the past decade, 95 percent of all economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent. A mere 400 individuals own one-half of the entire nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, median household income keeps falling, and our poverty levels resemble that of the Great Depression era. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is being decimated. Atheists like to talk about building a better world, one that is absent of religiosity in the public square, but where are the atheist groups on helping tackle the single biggest tear in the fabric of our society — wealth disparity?

They are nowhere. Its absence on the most pressing moral issue of our time makes it difficult for the movement to establish meaningful partnerships with other moral communities. To remain white, middle class, intellectually smug and mostly apolitical will not only serve to alienate atheism from minorities and the poor, but will also ensure it remains a politically impotent movement that is incapable of building a better America. Growing up means less time and money spent on self-righteous billboard campaigns, and, instead, more resources allocated to fighting the political conditions that have caused this nation’s middle class and infrastructure to resemble that of a hyper-religious Third World nation.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that the intellectual advantage of atheism is its ability to reject unprovable assertions on face value. It’s why we don’t believe in the supernatural. Equally, it’s why we shouldn’t believe in a myth that is causing greater harm than creationism — the myth of trickle-down economics, which remains the economic blueprint for today’s Republican Party, despite the world’s leading economists lampooning it as an abject failure. In the four decades that followed FDR’s New Deal, our middle class became the envy of the world. In an op-ed titled “Abject Failure of Reaganomics,” Robert Parry writes, “It was the federal government that essentially created the Great American Middle Class — from the New Deal policies of the 1930s through other reforms of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, from Social Security to Wall Street regulation to labor rights to the GI Bill to the Interstate Highway System to the space program’s technological advances to Medicare and Medicaid to the minimum wage to civil rights.” But then came the period of Reagan’s holy trinity — privatization, deregulation, and free trade. Now here we are today — facing the largest economic crisis since the 1930s. Atheists are secularists, and a secularist cannot be a member of today’s Republican Party. You’re either one or the other.

You cannot be both. Now, I am acutely aware that a great number of atheists identify with the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but this is comical. A lack of evidence is why atheists don’t believe in God. But to believe in libertarianism is in itself an act of faith, because libertarianism has not only never been tried anywhere, but an overwhelming number of economists reject the philosophy as little more than “capitalism with the gloves off” — a condition that would only exacerbate the winner-takes-all society we have today. If an atheist is looking for political evidence, the evidence we have is that not only is today’s Republican Party a theocratic sponsor, it’s also a party that has been proven wrong on just about everything in the past three decades or more: from evolution to climate change, trickle-down economics, that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators, that the Bush tax cuts would lead to jobs. It didn’t. It added $3 trillion to the debt.

They were wrong that the stimulus would trigger inflation, that austerity stimulates an economy and that universal healthcare is worse than slavery. It’s time for the atheist movement to get off the political sidelines. It’s time to truly help this country become a better place to live for all its citizens. The recent Values Voter Summit demonstrated that the likely 2016 GOP frontrunners and its base wish to transform America’s secular state into a tyrannical theocracy — a nirvana absent gays, liberals, immigrants, Muslims and science books. If the atheist movement doesn’t evolve into a politically agitated, unified and mobilized Secular Left, then the Christian Right might just get its way. In fighting for truly meaningful social justice, such as income equality and the rights of minorities, the movement can form partnerships with communities that share common causes. For instance, building a bridge with certain religious communities that are equally concerned with fighting against class inequality and social injustice.

This would broaden the appeal of the atheism movement, and might just get people to like us a little more. Walter Bristol, an atheist interfaith activist, wrote, “Economic inequality is one of the most imminent issues facing Western society today. Any progressive movement that chooses to dismiss it is and will be rightfully dismissed themselves.” Atheists are the fastest growing minority in the country. We now have the critical mass to shape elections and policy. Either we seize our potential political power, thus acting like the grown up in the room, or we can continue to focus on the ‘pettier’ or issues, thus continuing to act like a petulant child.
CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, and God Hates You. Hate Him Back. You can follow him on Twitter:  @cjwerleman

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