The Atheist Blogger

Yesterday’s London atheist meetup event was great fun, and I’ll definitely be attending as many as I can next year. The talk we had yesterday was presented by a member of the Council for Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB), and he focused his talk on what we should do about the growing number of sharia courts in the UK, as well as our ties with Saudi Arabia in foreign policy.

Afterwards, 5 of us (myself included) went for a drink at a nearby pub. One of our party, Mark, spoke of his desire to start a group that was openly atheistic and political. In other words, he saw the current groups like the National Secular Society, the Brights, and the British Humanist Association as being all very well and good for advocating secularism, naturalism, and humanism, but they did little to advocate atheism.

The closest the BHA have come is of course their highly successful bus advert campaign, with the words “There’s probably no god.”. What is quite remarkable though, is that although statistics say that the population of atheists in the UK ranges from 25 to 35%, there are no truly atheist organisations for those people. In America, there are the Atheist Alliance International (of which no group in the UK is a member), and the American Atheists. Both groups advocate atheism directly.

So here is the question I’d like to put to British atheists. Would you like to see an openly atheist organisation in Britain? Something like the American Atheists organisation, but for the UK, acknowledging atheism, and promoting it as well as freethought, secularism, in both society and politics.

I’d like to only ask British atheist readers to vote in the poll. I know it’s not a scientific analysis, but I really would like to know the general feeling so I can give some feedback to Mark.

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I came across the site MeetUp again through random clicking of links earlier this week. I randomly did a search to see if there were any atheist groups near to where I live (Egham), but nothing showed up. However, I did find a few groups operating within London, which is only 30 minutes on the train for me.

One of them, called the “London Atheists Meetup” is having a meeting later today (Saturday) to discuss Britain’s response to Islam. I’ve decided to go along and see what it’s like…if I can find the place of course. I may have to call upon my GPS enabled phone to get me some of the way.

I’ve also signed up to the showing of the film “The God Who Wasn’t There” with the Humanist Group of Central London on the 17th December. Whether I can actually attend that one will be a toss up on the day, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it down.

So I’ll be writing about how the discussion goes later today, and hopefully I’ll meet some nice people whilst doing it. If any of you can make it down to the 17th December showing, I’m sure it’ll be a great event.