I’m sure a third party like the Green Party could be persuaded to court secularists and Atheists if enough people got on board.

America really needs to break the two party duopoly. It needs a system where your vote for a candidate could be transferred to your second choice candidate, if your first choice is not viable. I feel this is the only way to get some sanity into American politics.

This is by far one of the most irresponsible things I’ve heard her say though. I hope that a lot of people write to American Atheists and denounce her.

I’m all the more upset about this since I am in the process of forming the Coalition of Secular Voters and trying to get atheists and like minded people involved in politics, yet here she is denouncing politics. One thing is for sure, even if Ellen Johnson was running for president or any other political office, even as an atheist I would never vote for her.

I do think you have a good point, but I have to state that atheists, in general, feel that, as someone who speaks for atheist, Ellen screwed up big time.

I can see at least the possibility of some of your points, but I think this argument will from this point just go back and forth forever. We have to put it to a test. If seculars want to get the Democrats’ attention as a solid group, how do we do that? We’re not a solid group. Who speaks for us? We’re so damn independent and suspicious of groups that the “herding cats” joke doesn’t get old. What atheist/secular/non-believer/unchurched organization has the credibility to gather up the authorization of other smaller such groups to speak for all or most or even many of us? Also, the statistics about how many “seculars” there are may be correct, but many of them may not really think of themselves strongly that way. It may be true that they don’t do churchy things, but being “secular” or “atheist” or any of the other terms aren’t necessarily the adjectives they readily apply to themselves. It may be part of their lifestyle but not part of their self identity.

I don’t think the religious are a solid group, they lean the same way on issues, but from where I’m sitting so do secular people. Religious people are persuaded by church leaders, who have a variety of positions even within the same church organisations, and secular people are the same, we look towards good thinkers, we likely respect the same people. Religious people may have suspended critical thinking on certain beliefs, but most of them actually do think about other aspects of their life. Both the religious and secular are diverse groups.

Secular people aren’t in isolation, there’s some great thinkers that we look to, some great blogs, we don’t need to centralize power, good ideas will spread. We’re reading the same books, we’re listening to the same podcasts, and visiting the same websites. Secular people aren’t above collective action, they say there are no atheists in fox holes, so I’m not going to accept “herding cats” when I see the same problems on the other side. Many secular, atheist, humanist groups are part of the Secular Coalition of America, and I think they’re doing a good job, Lori Lipman Brown is doing a fine job.

This is about being independent, continuing to unconditionally vote Democrat seems like the type of herd activity that we apparently don’t do.

On the other hand if candidates suddenly decide they want to court us, where the heck will they find us in large numbers? It’s easy to find large numbers of religious folks; they already congregate regularly. A candidate need only make one phone call to a local megachurch and he or she has a ready-made audience of thousands. The only place I can imagine you’d find more than fifty self-identified seculars within shouting distance of each other would be in a university, and that is still diluted with plenty of religious people. Do you have any suggestions for how and where candidates can get us as an audience?

In the future it would be great if secular groups could organise events of thousands. There’s no need for a live audience to reach secular people though. Candidates have many outlets where they can reach voters, secular people watch tv and listen to the radio the same as anybody else. From the blogs, podcasts, and sites that monitor for relevant news to secular, and they seem quite popular, I don’t think they’d have a problem reaching secular voters at all.

I didn’t know O’Bama was Irish??