Berlinerblau, the Georgetown professor, worries that liberal secular America has no counterpart to right-wing legal thinking and activism that advances the goals of the religious right. “I wonder who the liberal jurists are that work together that meet for a retreat once a year in Verona or Lake Tahoe? This stuff happens all the time in conservative circles,” Berlinerblau said. “It's these all-expenses-paid things in beautiful places where people just network for two weeks, and they have workshops on the free exercise clause [of the First Amendment] and free speech. I know of nothing comparable, in liberal, secular America."

Brights.com has already attempted to put such an org together (I'm a Bright) but Atheists, by and large, aren't joiners. They like to tell people how they feel about the subject, the logic and/or illogic of it, but don't seem to care about social change. They seem to think it happens by individual mode because, I think, they don't like to join groups.

I think this gets to the main shortcoming of atheism and why it'll never be a mass movement. Like the color black it cannot reflect/emit light but only absorb it, cause it to disappear. Likewise, atheism represents the LACK of belief. There is nothing else atheists have in common

“This kind of enterprise is not only for atheists.”

Well if it’s not, it shouldn’t brand itself as such.

This fellow apparently fancies himself a cat-herder. If five years on AgDotCom has taught me anything it’s that there is no common thread in atheism. And no inclination to find common ground with fellow atheists should the rest of their worldview be one iota different from one’s own. And it is always different.

If there’s anything “common” among atheists it may be their hatred for anything resembling religion. It isn’t God that they lack a belief in - it is, I will argue, community itself.

Community requires compromise, and compromise ain’t in atheists.

I see no need for such a contrived ideological system. I simply do not believe in any deity -- and never will.