Unfortunately, and as far as I can tell, the closest we’ve come to raising our voice has been through litigation and Supreme Court cases, particularly bringing the nation’s attention to religious representation at the Capital this previous holiday season.

The need for a “New Enlightenment” is ever increasing; Christopher Hitchens touches on this subject as his closing chapter in “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” (A great read!)

The key factor in what I would deem as an “Intellectual Revolution” would be, according to Marxist-Leninist Theory, a vanguard party; that is, a group with the “passion” you speak of, willing to spearhead the movement with a deluge of demonstrations.

Secondly, a comprehensible information campaign that even the most Fundamentalist religious zealot cannot turn a blind eye to; rather than having created a sign at the Capital Building that was degrading to all other faiths (in saying “Religion hardens the heart and enslaves the mind”), it would have been infinitely more potent and penetrating if Atheists simply made a list of the God’s born on Winter Solstice before Christianity hijacked it.

In my humility, I must finish my education before I join the vanguard. But I assure you, you will see your demonstrations.

I’ll see you on the front lines.

The Civil Rights protests of the 60s wasn’t (to my knowledge) viewed as an attack against white people.

Wow. You must have never read an account of them that was actually written in the 1960s.
No, they were viewed as an attack on white people, and portraying them as such helped politicians like Nixon and Reagan win elections. (See for example Perlstein’s NixonLand).

That’s a self-answering question. If someone doesn’t accept that 2+2=4, getting swept up in a wave of emotion isn’t going to convince them. And seriously, of all the things worth protesting right now, those related to atheist relations don’t usually make it into the top billion (with some exceptions, of course).

I like to pick battles. For me, a primary battle is to keep their mitts off of science and science education! That has real consequences that can be felt right away. The other stuff is a bit more long term.

I’m with you on that one. That’s why I like to see Pastafarian protests, which there certainly are from time to time. We can get our point across, yet do it with humor, and in a way that can attract non-atheists to that cause as well.

The Stop the War march in particular. In London, the got close to 1million people to protest. It was the largest demonstration in British Political History and it achieved precisely nothing.

Protests and marches can be safely ignored by our politicians these days, they are no threat. We’ve become so isolated from our government that they ignore us and we mostly ignore them as they slowly strip or rights and butcher in our name. Truly sickening.

Other than that i don’t think atheism is a cause to be followed so much as a rejection of other peoples causes. Atheists get behind a lot of issues together, science teaching, fighting creationism, public prayer, etc, but these are governance issues that touch on atheism rather than atheism itself.

Finally, in the states, i wonder how easy it would be to get a bunch of atheists together in sufficient numbers to make a good public protest. You could always go for the smaller groups chained to stuff approach but it seems illogical to chain yourself to railings for better science education, when you could be writing, talking, etc instead.

I’m a very vocal proponent of rationality and skepticism and can get quite heated in arguments when those subjects arise but when it comes to my lack of belief in fairy tales I find it hard to get riled any more. I guess it could be out of sympathy or pity for the other party but it’s not something I’ll scream and shout about.

The one area I could see potential for protests would be against the situation in the US where certain states still have rules on the books preventing non-believers from holding certain official positions. However this would come down to a protest against inequality and I’d be equally vocal if they were barring blacks, women, homosexuals or whatever from holding office.

I don’t see atheism as a ’cause’. It’s just common sense.

However, when it comes to church and state issues, I will gladly voice my opinion.

The danger is, once someone finds out I anm an atheist, are gay, are Liberal, are from Massachusetts, all of which I am, I am immediately disregarded, because I am a lost cause in their mind.

So I always place my focus on Secularism, where those with and those without faith, can come together, to assure he separation of church and state.