Reply #222: I think, to be fair, such questions better left for the RT forum [View All]

What concerns me is that DU members who are atheists (practitioners of reason and critical and independent thinking) are eager to banish posts related to Christianity to the RT forum (even when atheism is not mentioned), but want posts related to atheism to remain on GD. This is a double standard. This right off the bat makes me question the notion that atheism, as an "ism", has any special proclivity for progressiveness, any more than any other "ism" tangentially related to politics. Some atheists happen to be rational and fair minded, some are dogmatic in their opinions and some are vocal about various beliefs which happen to include atheism. (This latter phenomenon is a variant of the Anthropic Principle, btw -- known as self-sampling. Non-vocal activists are not as often polled about their politics, and vocal activists are vocal for often unrelated reasons that skew the sample when it comes to determining if their "ism" is inherently fair minded, etc.) The same is true for other religious persuasions (or lack thereof) so statistically, atheists are not more likely to be progressive or fair-minded even if they are more likely to vote Democratic. There are plenty of right-wing, upper middle class atheists who vote their pocketbook (which often, as in the case of Hillary, means voting Democratic, or voting Libertarian, etc). I know people who do this.