Lori Lipman Brown, the nonbelievers' lobbyist in Washington D.C., will appear on The Colbert Report tonight. She works for the
Secular Coalition of America, an organization whose members include the American Humanist Association, the American Ethical Union, Atheist Alliance International, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Institute for Humanist Studies, the Internet Infidels, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, the Secular Students Alliance, and the Society for Humanistic Judaism.
UPDATE: She won't be on tonight--maybe next week?
UPDATE (August 30, 2008): She was on last night's show, which is
online.
Posts
4 comments:
Just looking at the number of secular/non-belief/atheist groups out there makes you wonder why we are so ignored in American politics...
Nah, it's microscopic compared to the number of religious groups. Anybody can start a group (or multiple groups), but what counts is how many people there are supporting them, not how many groups there are.
I guess it depends on your basis for comparison. Lippard called us (Humanists, non-theists, agnostics, whatever) microscopic in number. Well, we outnumber practicing Jews of all stripes, and they seem able to get attention from the government. No, we don't all belong to one organization. Some are Unitarians, some Humanists (and even there we have several groups, sort of like the Protestant churches), and still more of us just don't feel a need to join a group to show what we don't believe in. But our main effort is not to get the government to do things for us; merely to stop doing things to us.
Jerry: I didn't say that humanists/nontheists/etc. are microscopic in number. I said that the number of secular/nonbelief/atheist groups is microscopic in comparison to the number of religious groups. The number of such groups is also small compared to the number of Jewish groups, even though, as you point out, there are more people in the nonbeliever category, broadly construed, than there are Jews in the U.S. That's why I said "what counts is how many people there are supporting them, not how many groups there are."
I agree with the rest of what you say.
Post a Comment