Dangerous Talk » Atheists as a Political Force

This post by Staks Rosch looks like an excellent idea:

Dangerous Talk » Atheists as a Political Force

It really bothers me that we can’t come together to form a strong voter block. I keep hearing excuses why we can’t do it and that just seems silly and lazy to me.

Atheists are a very diverse group and we are fiercely independent. Yeah, I get that and yes, the only thing we have in common is our lack of belief. I get that too. But I think those within the greater community of reason have other things in common too. We tend to be humanistic, we support reason over faith, education, critical thinking, science, and surprise, surprise most of us are pretty liberal and even down right progressive.

While we are independent thinkers and organizing atheists is comparable to herding cats, I think most of us are smart enough to realize the advantages of electing reasonable atheists to public office. This alone should be incentive enough to work together and get reasonable atheists elected to public office.

I am tired of the excuses. I know that many atheists groups can’t endorse candidates, but as the religious people have shown, there are ways around that. There really is no excuse for the inaction of the greater community of reason.

I am calling for all atheist bloggers, facebook uses, twitter uses, reddit uses, etc. to join together and help to get Cecil Bothwell elected. Leaders of atheist organizations can help too just by using their e-mail list to let people know an atheist is running. They don’t have to endorse a candidate. In fact, they can even talk about the other candidate and let their members choose for themselves who the reasonable candidate is.

In politics, money matters. If we all can donate a little bit to his campaign and that of other reasonable atheists running for office, we can show that we are a political force. Other politicians will start to think twice about invoking religion and some politicians might even come out of the closet and try to get our support.

What we can’t have is this negativity. No more excuses! No more of this “atheists can’t win” nonsense. We have to spread the meme that we can win and that we will do it together. So if you really want to change the overly religious politics in this country, then you have to put in some effort. Not praying is not enough.