I imagine most of my readers are already familiar with the bigger atheist bloggers, but in case anyone here doesn't read Blag Hag, or Greta Christina's Blog, or...well I think most everyone on FTB has made a post about this. But just in case anyone has missed it, I thought I would point out that Jen McCreight has recently made a few posts about this new branding on her blogging, Atheism+. Basically it is atheism plus a bunch of social justice topics, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
The whole thing makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Equality always makes a lot of sense to me, whether the oppressed minority group is atheists, women, african americans, trans-folk, if their rights are getting taken away we should fight for it. I don't blog about these topics very much at all, being a straight, white guy, I am in the privileged position on most of these topics and I don't often have much to add to the conversation. I do thoroughly support these causes though, and I really like this A+ branding effort (the astute reader will notice the new A+ badge in my sidebar). If you haven't heard about this yet, I recommend reading about it in more detail from Greta, her writing is always great.
I'm for equality, but equality shouldn't be an atheism thing, it should be a people thing. I realize that it's not, but identifying as socially liberal already covers most of this. I don't like bundling causes, it has caused problems in the past.
ReplyDeleteI haven't been paying attention for long enough to know what kind of problems it could cause, I guess splintering of people? What issues have come up from stuff like this?
DeleteI guess it also depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to try to force other atheists to take on the symbol and take up your issues that could be a bad thing. But I more see it as just a quick nod to the fact that I support those other issues while I am probably just going to be talking about atheism. And I suppose I could just call myself liberal, or a humanist or something (I do consider myself those things), but the A+ is a nice succinct way to do it.
Yeah, splintering is part of it. Christianity used to mean one thing and now I don't know what it means until I know what specific variety of Christianity we're talking about.
DeleteIn politics, the vast majority of people who are fiscally conservative support a slew of other causes just to fit in to the party. If you want to get into politics, you'd need to pander to those other causes whether you believe in them or not.
I suppose that makes some sense. It will be interesting to watch this and see how things go.
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