An Open Letter From an Old School Liberal...

...to the New Militant Atheists.

      Greetings,

     I understand what it is like to be in the minority. Really I do. You want to lash out at the people who refuse to acknowledge you. It is so very easy to over-generalize. I've been there.

     Here's the problem: It's OK to mock hypocrisy. It is even laudable. Likewise, I have no issue at all with you mocking people who want to make their dogma into the law for everyone. Go to it with my blessing. I do take issue however, with mocking other people's beliefs in general, in the mocking of all Christians, or Moslems or Buddhists. 

    The history of the Progressive movement in America is not the history of politically active atheists. There have been a lot of atheists and agnostics in the leadership I am sure, but without the thousands of Baptists and Methodists and Quakers who faced tear gas and nightsticks and dogs and sometimes guns there never would have been a civil rights movement or an anti-war movement in the 50s and 60s. I first learned of the anti-war group that I joined in 1968 from a flyer I found at the local Council of Churches building. If you want to find out where the action is with the Liberal causes in your city, the best place to go is still the Unitarian Universalist Church or the American Friends Service Committee (the service arm of the Quakers).

     If you alienate these people you are insuring that the fundamentalist and Dominionists faction of Christianity will get its way.

      You will be just another part of the problem, not the solution.

      Be seeing you.