Nebraska is a pretty red state (meaning Republican and conservative, not lefty as it did in my youth). All the statewide office holders are Republicans except for junior Senator Ben Nelson who might as well be a Republican. The state went two to one for Bush in 2004. Two to one. This is God's country. Well, not quite. At least not in the religion section of the Lincoln Journal Star this weekend which carried a long story about freethinker and Lincoln, Nebraska citizen Rob McEntarffer, 38 years old, and working in the Lincoln Public Schools District Office. He describes the first time, in college, he heard someone say they didn't believe in God:
He kept quiet."If I had been more intellectually honest, I would have said that myself."
He's fine saying it now.
[snip]
He still has questions.
But he knows what he believes.
He believes in reason.
He believes in free will and responsibility and the power of relationships, of friends and families.
He believes in ideas and in science and in the intellect and in ethics. (Cindy Lange-Kubick, Lincoln Journal Star)
This is only a bit of a long 1200 word story. In Red State LincolnNebraska, NebraskaLincoln's only newspaper. Lincoln, the state capital and second largest city in Nebraska. I wouldn't even expect it from the allegedly liberal New York Times, which, by the way, had a remarkably positive review of Christopher Hitchens's new book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything . Last week we had the powers behind The Blasphemer Challenge debating two empty heads on atheism on Nightline (reviewed here by Jason at EvolutionBlog, and Joe Scarborough the conservative host on MSNBC, Bill Maher on HBO and Bill Moyers on PBS have all had good segments on atheism and atheists in the last two weeks. Recently I noted how a surprising amount of table space was taken up by atheist books in my university bookstore.
Does this mean the country is undergoing a sudden secularization? I don't think so. One is that the country is already much more secular than most people give it credit for. Many people who identify with a church or religion are functional atheists. Despite this, however, it has been rare to hear atheism discussed so openly. Not in my lifetime has atheism been so prominent in the public sphere. It is quite remarkable.
And I think that's the real meaning of all this. Atheism is finally becoming mainstream.
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"And I think that's the real meaning of all this. Atheism is finally becoming mainstream."
Thank god.
The press has been monolithic in its century-long insistence that the US is a very religious country, with the vast majority of Americans being regular churchgoers. The press serves their customers, who are their big advertisers, and this is the image the big corporations want pitched.
This is Sunday morning. Go outside and count the homes in your neighborhood, those families who leave for church and those who don't. You already know which is the vast majority.
The big newspapers pitch their Sunday edition as the one you want delivered in the morning so you can spend the whole morning reading it -- and not reading it before church. They never mention religion because they don't want their newspaper to be associated with the small, and diminishing, minority who go to church Sundays.
God gets a lot of press. What he doesn't get is a lot of feet. The US is one of the least friendly to the poor and the sick of any indstrialized nations.
Did you mean to say "Nebraska's only newspaper"? Omaha World Herald, read statewide, unlike the Journal Star read mainly around Lincoln. rb
arby: No. I meant Lincoln's only newspaper. Will correct. Thanks.
Once I finish school and have some free time on my hands again, I'm planning on starting a science club in my little town. I figure I'll have special sessions on Sunday mornings, to get kids out and do something, especially if they are not being dragged into Church. I figure kids should have an alternative to religious dogma and PlayStation.
Atheism has a long way to go before it can be considered mainstream, but there have been many encouraging developments lately. The true test (and I suspect it is coming soon) will be to see what happens when the media tires of "the new atheism" and stops covering it. Will we be content to retreat underground at that point, or will more and more of us come out to celebrate our secular nation?
vjack: I don't know it has so far to go. There are more atheists than Mormons in this country. All we need is for it to be "OK" to talk about atheists the same way they talk about Mormons, who are mainstream. This has probably been going on for quite some time and we are just seeing it poke its head above water. It isn't moving fast, but it is moving. Getting this kind of mention in the press and TV is a symptom of what's going on underneath, not a cause of it, so whether they tire of it or not I think isn't so important.
Mormons mainstream? Maybe in one state. Not the others.
traumatized: Mainstream in the sense it is OK to say you are a Mormon, write about Mormons, have Mormon churches, etc. Not "mainstream" in the sense that everyone agrees about Mormonism or likes Mormons. Not invisible, unmentionable, unthinkable. Mainstream in that sense.
I, too, have seen the writing on the wall. Its getting pretty obvious now, atheism is the snowball rolling down the hill, increasing in both speed and mass as it does so.
All the statewide office holders are Republicans except for junior Senator Ben Nelson who might as well be a Republican.
Guess he's a Dino, then. (Democrat in Name Only)
I do think secular lifestyles are being more promoted, going more mainstream, but that doesn't mean the most vocal and persistent a-hats will still proclaim loudly against it.
I have the same problem with atheism as I do with the true believers in God. The certainty that both express in their faith that God exists or does not is not based on any scientific evidence.
Of course religions like Christianity go one step farther than atheists and believe they not only know God exists, but they dare to pretend they know what God wants and what he will do, so not only do the masses need to have faith in God, they also need to believe in Gods interpretors, men who also happen to profit or make their living off the religion of their choice. And then there are those who claim they know what they know because the Bible is the literal word of God, despite the fact no one really knows who wrote them. It went from oral stories being told generation by generation, tribe by tribe, translations from one language to the next, to writings as long as centuries following the events, and then there were the copying errors (no copy machines then) from book to book, written translation errors, not to mention the intentional revisions that may have taken place over the years for religous/political purposes.
My tendecy is to go with the atheists, yet my mind still can not grasp that this universe is the result of random events, nor can it grasp the concept of a "beginning". How does something begin from nothing and if there was never nothing, how then can there have been no beginning. Until I can answer that, and I have no expectation of ever being able to do so, my mind is open, even though the idea of there being a creator is subject to similar questions I can not answer.