Hello again everyone, long time no see...

Anyhow, I was listening to Richard Dawkins and how consciousness raising about atheists must occur and I would think that the whole "atheist movement" is focused on the same thing. But it also made me wonder. What happens if at some point atheists are recognized, the consciousness has been risen so to speak, and things in general are going along harmoniously. Do you think we might "settle down" as a whole being that we might not have a solitary subject to rally behind? What would be the other option?

Simply thinking aloud...

Then us unhappy little souls find the next thing that we think can be improved and work on that :)

Hi again shellwen!

I'm with Dude. But I also think that the vast majority of atheists are not activists and are happily going about their lives, as are the vast majority among any other "group." If you accept this assertion, then Dude's comment is all the more relevant, because if atheist activists decide that all is well (this is hard to imagine in my lifetime) then they will probably move on to some other issue, rather than declaring victory.

Hi Shellwen!
An interesting idea! Though some atheists are activists, I suspect that most of us are basically interested in a variety of things other than religion. So for many of us, if atheists are ever recognized as something other than some sort of evil beings, we'll all just go about our business much as we did before. (I've mentioned in other posts that I recently discovered that one of my closest friends for 20 years is also an atheist; it just never came up. Because of DH I've brought up the issue of religion and found that most of my friends are also atheists. Among my family and friends, people usually only talk about religion if they're believers, which makes sense. There are all sorts of things I don't believe that I don't bother to discuss.)

I've never felt any sort of prejudice against me because I'm an atheist--but I really don't mention it in my "real" life. If I were still a Christian, I wouldn't discuss it either--and certainly wouldn't proselytize, any more than I wish to "convert" anyone to atheism.

Simply stated, I'll say "Finally!!!" and then I'll go back to minding my own business. ;)