Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The New Scarlett Letter

You may have noticed a new little picture in the sidebar, thats the logo that was decided on over at Richard Dawkins.net. There are some who don't like the idea of a few famous atheists thinking that they can just command this and expect us to fall in line. Come on folk we call ourselves free thinkers no one expects everyone to "do as they are told" the fact remains that atheists are hidden. (PZ has a good post and is where I got started on this) We live our lives never knowing who has a similar world view to ourselves. We can be attacked without reproach because we are invisible to the world. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and the rest of the Atheist Justice League are changing that slowly but many of us were yearning for a grassroots movement to be known by. Many but not all wanted to be able to proudly show off the fact that we live without fear of invisible beings. To be honest I was expecting a lot more hostility towards the idea because everyone keeps saying that its been dislike by a good many people, from reading the comments it seems like there are only two major complaints. One is using the term coming out, or coming out of the closet, they are claiming that by using their phrase we are comparing our campaign with their struggle and ours has been far easier, we don't mean to take anything away from the gay rights movement, we just think that they came up with a great analogy. We don't mean any harm, if you feel there is harm, well sorry about that. The second point of derision is the fact that the logo is not in public domain, this is a legitimate complaint but one that should be able to be cleared up easily enough, this is where someone like Dawkins can use his clout (and maybe money) to do some good for the cause, without having to write to much. I think this is a great campaign and when I get a couple spare bucks I'll probably get a shirt because this seems like a good idea to me and in the end thats all that matters, I'm an atheist I don't do things because I'm told to, I do thinks that seem like good ideas to me.

oh and there is a bit of silly bickering going on at Pharyngula, Dawkins comments were the ones I read originally and are generally positive.

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