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Our Road to Reason
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With so much reliance on superstition and magic in the world, with millions of atheists suffering discrimination and criminalization and with widespread abuse of religious power around the planet, it’s tempting to give up and conclude that nothing can be done. But at AAI, we’re not the giving up kind of people. So we have to find a way to leverage the modest resources we have to achieve the biggest impact.
We have several strategies to optimize our efforts; at the highest level, we have the AAI Strategic Framework. This recognizes that countries typically go through stages to migrate from highly religious, often with little or no religious freedom (as commonly found in Africa and the Middle East) to secular and free.
We see four stages:
STAGE 1: Safety and Community: We need to build a community for atheists where they can develop their understanding and socialize in safety.
STAGE 2: Awareness and Understanding: Ensure the public understands that atheists exist, what atheism entails and that atheists pose no threat to civil society. Cultivate atheist public figures.
STAGE 3: Campaigning and Involvement: Become identified with more general human rights and fairness issues and move beyond the atheism single issue.
STAGE 4: Participation and Equality: Obtain equal treatment of atheists vs the religious under the law, and the freedom for atheists to openly and freely participate in public life.
Understanding how to identify these helps us, and our affiliates, to focus on the activities that will drive the country to the next stage.
Perhaps the biggest question is how Islamic countries will fit into our framework? Many people will assume these countries will be stuck as Stage 1 for generations. Well, they might be, but the world is changing in our direction. We are seeing Islamic countries becoming increasingly concerned about the number of atheists in their midst. The growth of atheism among Muslims looks like a continuing trend.
For more details and a description of the activities we use to achieve our goals, click here.
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