Religion News Service
USA, November 25, 2011: (RNS) The young man in a typical college dorm room looks into the camera. For Alex Fiorentini, it’s a coming-out moment of sorts. “Is it acceptable to the majority of the population to be an atheist?” he asks the camera. “Nope. Are all of your friends going to accept you as an atheist? Probably not all of them. And yeah, those things are gonna suck. But the real question is, ‘Is it OK to be me?’ That is the real question if you are an atheist.”
Fiorentini and scores of other atheists, young and old, have made similar videos for a new campaign designed to build community andsupport among nontheists around the world. Dubbed “We Are Atheism,” the campaign was launched this fall by three students at the University of Kansas.
One of them was inspired to start the campaign with her husband and a friend when she attended a talk by Jessica Ahlquist, a teenage atheist who was taunted and bullied after she objected to a “school prayer” banner hung in her Rhode Island high school.
“If the polls are correct, there are literally millions of nonbelievers in America,” said Richard Haynes, president of Atheist Nexus. “However, many atheists feel all alone. This is the primary reason we must come out of the closet. Coming out is the only way to change the public perception of nontheism.”