Announcing the “Openly Secular” Coalition

“Our mission is to is to eliminate discrimination and increase acceptance by getting atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists and all nonreligious people to be open about their beliefs,” said Todd Stiefel, Chair for the Openly Secular coalition and founder of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation. “By being open about our beliefs and values, we can show that we, like all people, are worthy of love and kindness undeterred by religious differences.”

“After I spoke openly about being an atheist, I lost many friends and was threatened with rape and death. My own representative publicly called me an ‘evil little thing.’ All of this, simply because I did not believe in God,” said student activist Jessica Ahlquist, who successfully sued her public high school in 2012 to remove a religious prayer banner from the auditorium. “But this experience has not discouraged me. Today, I hold my head high as a proud, secular American.”

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Their mission is to increase acceptance   maybe accepting that others have a right to their beliefs is good first step (on all sides).

Live and let live I say.

I agree with live and let live, but it's not always easy to be all nice and even-handed with the type of people who threaten to kill or rape a high school girl for being honest about her beliefs. We don't have the opposite scenario here in the U.S., where a kid speaks about about their faith and someone says they're going to die or get raped for that.

Frankly, it's the religious community that needs to do a better job about accepting that atheists and agnostics have the right to their beliefs. You'll find very few atheists who will actually argue that believers should not have the right to their beliefs.