New on AlterNet: Teaming Up with Liberal Theists
My latest article has just been published on AlterNet, Why Is America’s Most Progressive Voting Block Often Overlooked? In it, I discuss the strong progressive leanings of American nonbelievers, what we could accomplish if we worked together with liberal religious believers on causes we held in common, and what the obstacles to that alliance are. (It’s also been reprinted on Salon, if you’d rather comment there.)
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the rest:
In America, atheists, agnostics and the nonreligious are pro-choice by a 49-percentage-point margin, an overwhelming majority. To put this in perspective, the nonreligious are substantially more pro-choice than women; they’re even more pro-choice than registered Democrats (who, by contrast, support reproductive rights by a mere 30-point margin).
This is a strong argument for the fundamentally religious and faith-based nature of anti-abortion arguments. As people lose their religious beliefs, their anti-choice views drop away as well. If anti-abortion views were based on evidence and reason, then we’d have every right to expect that the atheist community would be more evenly divided, and that there wouldn’t be such a chasm between the religious and the nonreligious on the issue of choice. This is the same unobjectionable logic we use to conclude that rejection of evolution is driven mostly by religious belief…
