By TIM SHIPMAN
Added: Sat, 05 May 2007 23:00:00 UTC

Reposted from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/06/wgod06.xml

By day, Joe Zamecki works as a landscaper and valet in Austin, capital of George W Bush's home state of Texas, which is regarded by many natives as God's own country.

In his spare time, however, he is quietly working to undermine the dominance of America's God-fearing majority. He is one among a growing band of "out" atheists, and wants a US that is "one nation under no god".

Atheists observing a Day of Reason, atheists go on the political offensive in God-fearing US

On Thursday, while Christian Americans were celebrating National Prayer Day, Mr Zamecki, the state director of American Atheists, was leading a demonstration against the public display of the words "In God We Trust" in the state legislature.

Atheist groups from Los Angeles to Little Rock observed a National Day of Reason instead.

Groups including Atheists for Human Rights and Atheist Alliance International - "Call 1-866-HERETIC" - are setting up summer camps and an internet recruiting campaign.

Mr Zamecki told The Sunday Telegraph: "We are seeing support for atheist groups grow. Those with no religious affiliation are the fastest-growing group in America, more even than Muslims."

Official figures show the ranks of the non-religious have doubled to 13 per cent, or 30 million people, since 1990.

Now a hard core of five million atheists is seeking the political clout that has made Christian conservatives and the Jewish lobby powerhouses in Washington politics.

They got a boost with the admission in March by the Californian Democrat congressman, Pete Stark, that he "does not believe in a supreme being", 127 years after Charles Bradlaugh became Britain's first openly atheist MP.
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America's first atheist congressman was flushed out by the Secular Coalition for America, the first godless group with a full-time Washington lobbyist.

The US constitution outlaws religious discrimination, but polls show only 45 per cent of Americans would be willing to vote for an atheist candidate for president, even if he or she was the best-qualified.

Yet a succession of books extolling atheism has proved very popular, led by Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

The Oxford University evolutionary biologist's work has been on the best-seller list for several months.

Sam Harris has sold 250,000 copies of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and has a new book out, Letter to a Christian Nation.

The shelves of American bookshops groan under titles like Atheism on the March, The Atheist Manifesto, and The Quotable Atheist.

Mr Dawkins said last week: "On my book tour of America I was agreeably surprised by the positive reception it got. There is a huge undercurrent of non-believing feeling in America which has felt repressed, suppressed, almost persecuted.

"Many people said, 'Thank you for saying what I have always wanted to say but didn't feel I could'."

Mr Dawkins is an advocate of increasing atheist militancy. "The secular, non-religious vote, if properly mobilised, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote," he said.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation, which boasts 10,000 members, has launched a case in the Supreme Court, calling for a ban on President Bush's federal support of faith-based groups as a breach of the constitutional division of church and state.

The group's president, Dan Barker, once an evangelist preacher, said: "There can be a tipping point in any society where people say enough is enough. If enough atheists and agnostics speak out, it can cause quite a sensation."

Joe Zamecki thinks the rise of atheism is in part a response to the overtly religious Mr Bush, whose father once declared: "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots."

Mr Zamecki said: "The war in Iraq, which was partly justified as a religious war, has turned a lot of people off religion. The internet has helped our movement. There is a whole generation of young Americans that is exposed to free and open debate."

Blogger Hemant Mehta, 24, who writes under the pen name "friendlyatheist", regularly debates with Christian fundamentalists online. He wrote: "We are not the bogeymen we have been made out to be for so long."

The atheists still have a mountain to climb. In a Republican presidential debate last week, candidates mentioned their faith 16 times, and three said that they did not believe in evolution.

TAGGED: ATHEISM, RELIGION