The Atheist Blogger

A new atheist blog, The Religion Virus has an interesting article in which the author Craig A. James argues that 70-80% of atheist bloggers remain anonymous, either using a pseudonym (as Mr. James used previously) or a username such as vjack who runs Atheist Revolution. Craig James says that atheists have no reasons to be in the closet, and he issues a challenge for more atheists to get out.

I am one of the atheists he used as an example of a blogger “out of the closet” so to speak. Although I don’t see how he came to this conclusion. “Adrian Hayter” could just be a pseudonym to the casual observer. Unless he had been reading my blog for a few months, or had stumbled on my personal website (now defunct). In any case, I disagree with his argument that atheists have no reasons not to come out of the closet, even thought I admire what he is trying to do.

I am “out of the closet” because I live in the UK, specifically the south which is one of the most secular regions. Although the majority of the population is religious, there is a large number (supposedly 30%) of atheists in the country. I don’t feel threatened at all, and the closest thing we have to fundamentalist Christians are the people who go around protesting abortion and homosexuality, but they don’t post any kind of threat. Most of the time they are laughed at.

In America, it is very different. The religious vastly outnumber the non-religious, and I suspect most atheist bloggers simply do not want to risk the harassment they could get. Many of them have successful careers that could be damaged by coming out. Even though it is against the law to persecute because of religious beliefs, that doesn’t mean it isn’t done.

Why does being out of the closet really matter though? Surely it doesn’t matter who the person is, but what they are writing that really counts. Or is there some kind of competition that I don’t know about? A competition to see who can release the most information about themselves to the point of pure insanity? If there is, then I need to win it. Lets edge further away from the closet shall we?

My full name is Adrian Michael Hayter. I was born on 29th April 1988 in Southampton at around 10pm. My mobile number is 07828 698967 (prefix +44 and get rid of the 0 if you are not in the UK). My current address (for hate mail, fan mail?, etc) is:

49 Cherrywood Avenue
Englefield Green
Egham
Surrey
TW20 0TE

I’m a second year student of Computer Science with Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. I’m not giving out my email address, purely for reasons that I do not want anyone signing me up for spam, although you could probably guess the email address quite easily (think Gmail). To save the effort you could always use my contact form.

So there, my personal details available online for the first time. I am an atheist…harass me if you dare.

Getting others to do the same is going to be hard, but not impossible. I respect atheist bloggers like vjack as much as bloggers like Hemant Mehta. It isn’t about who they are, it is about what they write. If vjack turned out to be a mass murdering psycho it wouldn’t change my opinion of his blog posts, so why does name matter? I know he is a human, logic dictates that, and that is really all I care about.

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