Most atheists are not very well organized, seeing little point in organizing based upon a common lack of belief in contrast to groups which organize due to common beliefs and goals. The attempts of the religious right to impose their fundamentalist Christian beliefs on others is now giving atheists a reason to organize. The Sun-Sentinal reports on increased organizing by atheists:
Horrified by escalating religious violence and alarmed by the Bush administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” which make government money available to religious organizations, atheists are coming out of the closet — and organizing.
“Local groups are springing up all over the place,” said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists. Active groups have grown by about 90 percent over the past six years, she said.
In the past few years, groups affiliated with American Atheists have taken root in Berkeley, San Francisco, Davis, Calif., and Silicon Valley.
National membership in the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group of atheists and agnostics that monitors the separation of church and state, grew from 5,000 in 2004 to 6,400 members by the beginning of 2006, said co-founder Annie Laurie Gaylor.
This organization may represent both a reaction to the religious right and an increased interest in atheism:
…atheism appears to be gaining ground also as a belief, not just a wave of political activism by those who fear the wall between church and state is being disassembled. Books challenging religion like Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins have been best-sellers on Amazon.com.
“Our primary conviction is that there is no supernatural world — there is only one world, the world that is the subject of scientific investigation,” Johnson said.
Two University of California at Berkeley sociology professors found that the proportion of Americans with no religion doubled from 1990 to 1998, but has leveled out at 14 percent.
The study “reflects a growing backlash against the role of organized religion,” said Claude S. Fischer, one of the authors. “People on the political left have reacted against the organization of churches on the right. Their statement is a reaction: `If that’s what religion means, then I’m not religious.'”
While the religious right gets the bulk of the attention, anti-scientific viewpoints which in their own way are as superstitious as those of the religious right expressed by new age advocates such as Deepak Chopra have also been the subject of criticism among many liberals.