Assumptions

I came across this article posted to a Facebook group I belong to:  http://www.salon.com/2014/06/05/forget_christopher_hitchens_atheism_in_america_is_undergoing_a_radical_change_partner/.  My thoughts on it is the author has mixed up secular humanism with atheism.  Although in some ways I can understand why.  Secular humanists are rapidly trying to be the voice of atheism in America.  Yet they don't speak for me as well as many other if not most atheists.   Many atheists will say they are secular humanists without really knowing much about it.  I consider myself a humanist in a general sense and I am secular, but the problems with organized secular humanism is that it is dominated by leftists who are pushing a social justice agenda.  They have little tolerance for dissenting viewpoints.  I am friends with some who identify themselves as secular humanists.  The problem is that social justice as a term doesn't really mean anything or it means a lot of things that I disagree with.  They tend to embrace every naive liberal idea out there like we should do more to help the poor and by more I generally mean through governmental policy, they don't like capitalism, and they tend to be tree hugging environmentalists. 

The atheists the author refers to in the article I mentioned above, I tend to disagree with on many subjects.  I know many other atheists who disagree with them as well.  I've tended as a result of these people imposing themselves on the atheist community to largely avoid organized atheism as a result.  Atheism is simply lack of a belief in a deity.  There are conservative, libertarian, and liberal atheists.  There are also Laveyan Satanists and Objectivists who are both atheistic and yet they don't try to say that their beliefs define what it means to be an atheist.  That is what I find most insulting about the above article in that it uses what some atheists believe and insists that that is what atheists in general believe.  Nothing could be further from the truth.