Don't all of the real atheist governments have something to teach us about morality-without-God?

From Reuters:

Humanists, atheists drive for wider global impact

By Robert Evans

GENEVA, Oct 10 (Reuters) - When Switzerland goes to the polls to elect a new parliament later this month, voters in Zurich will for the first time in the country's history have the chance to cast their ballot for a slate of Freethinkers.

"We decided we had to stand up and tell our politicians that it's time they recognised that there are a lot of non-religious people in their electorate," says 42-year-old Andreas Kyriacou, who heads the list.

"We, and probably a lot of Swiss people who have never thought about humanism or atheism, are tired of the influence the churches and religion still exert in this country," he said in an interview with Reuters.

Nearly all organized atheist political activity since 1917 has been to destroy democracy.

But from now on everything's gonna be different.

Kyriacou, a management consultant, was speaking at a "Denkfest", or "Think Festival," that the Swiss Freethinkers Association held in Zurich last month, attracting scientists, philosophers and even comedians from around the world.

Lots of comedians.

The Swiss Freethinkers -- a term that covers atheists, agnostics, secularists, rationalists, sceptics and just plain critics of religion -- argue that the country's political parties and leaders run scared of religious voters.

"Scared of voters" is another name for "democracy".

In atheist governments, voters have traditionally been scared of atheists.

"There is a group for Bible study in our parliament, but no cross-party humanist group, though we know many of the deputies are non-believers," he says. "On right and left, they prefer to keep their heads down."

What could atheists 'study' in a group?  It would all go swimmingly well with Dawkins' God Delusion, but then somebody would foolishly propose reading Gulag Archipelago, and everybody would get testy.

And Kyriacou points to the failure of politicians to take a stand on social issues like assisted suicide and abortion, where the Catholic church in particular has strong views, and on the powerful place of religion in education in parts of the country.

Somebody has to speak up for killing! If not now, when. If not atheists, who?

His stance -- as measured by comments at other conferences around Europe over the summer -- reflects growing determination among humanists and atheists on all five continents to make themselves more visible and their influence felt.

Atheists have been practically invisible in the 20th century.

MOUNTING INTEREST

At the World Humanist Congress in Oslo in August, delegates from India, Uganda, Nigeria, Argentina and Brazil -- all countries where belief in a supreme deity or deities has a strong hold -- reported mounting interest in their philosophy.

Attendees even spilled out of the telephone booth into the street.

Like their counterparts in Europe and North America, they argue that morality is based in human nature and does not need a father-figure god to back it up with punishment in an afterlife, in which they do not believe.

Why didn't they mention their godless counterparts in Central Asia, the Korean peninsula, and Indochina? Don't all of the real atheist governments have something to teach us about morality-without-God, too?

"There are more godless groups in the world than ever before," Sonja Eggerickx, a Belgian schools inspector who is president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, told the Congress.

If you don't count really huge godless groups like Stalin's Supreme Soviet and Mao's Chinese Communist Party and Kim's North Korean secret police.

U.S. delegates, including a serving army major who has just established an organisation for atheists in the military, spoke of a surge of rejection of religion in all its forms among young Americans -- a point some recent opinion surveys back up.

In Manchester in May, British Humanists -- one of the world's oldest groupings -- were told of a sharp rise in humanist birth, marriage and death ceremonies, and strong growth in their association's four-year-old student wing. 

Aren't four-year-old students a little young...

In Ireland, a country where the influence of the Catholic Church was for decades dominant in all areas of life including politics and government decision-making, an optimistic national humanist association met in Carlingford in late August.

Someday the population of "humanists" in the West will reach 5%, or even more! But since they have .003 children each, it will be a brief spike. The only way atheists can keep their numbers growing is to suppress religious expression and indoctrinate religious people's children in schools.

Thank goodness they're not doing that.

With the latest census showing that atheists, agnostics and humanists are the largest group in the country after Catholics,

Ireland is 99.998% Catholic,  0.002% atheist. Atheists are the second-largest group.

One guy in County Cork sometimes believes in god but thinks that he is Richard Dawkins.

association president Brian Whiteside said numbers were growing fast in the wake of the "pedophile priests" scandal.

Every humanist press release has to mention "pedophile priests". It's in their charter. They used to mention "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", but that's been updated.

In Nigeria, where the openly non-religious face Christian preacher-inspired public opprobrium as "immoral reprobates" or "Satanists" and in the Islamic north are treated as apostates, the humanist movement held its Congress in Abuja in September.

Condoms, upside-down pentagram tattoos, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali coffee cups sold like hotcakes.

REASON AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Its founder and chairman Leo Igwe, once a seminarist who set up the group 15 years ago and has helped form groups in Uganda and Malawi , called on delegates to work for "a new age of Reason and Enlightenment" across Africa.

The new age of godless reason and enlightenment worked so well in revolutionary France, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Cuba, in North Korea...

Why shouldn't Africa get a crack at it...

He has been campaigning hard against the persecution and often killing of so-called "child witches" -- children perceived, often with the encouragement of Christian preachers, to be possessed by the devil.

Atheists don't kill children because they are witches. That would be barbaric.

Atheists kill children because their parents are Xian Reactionaries, or spies conspiring against the godless People's State, or because they stubbornly hold onto their family farms when the godless commissar tells them it belongs to the proletariat, or because they are just generally in the way of the godless remaking of humanity.

You say dead kids.

I say state atheism:

This is a mugshot of one of thousands of prisoners processed at the Khmer Rouge's S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Approximately 14,000 prisoners passed through S-21 between 1975-79. Seven survived. This child was most likely murdered in the killing fields at Choeung Ek. He was probably not old enough to speak, much less have a political ideology, but he was still murdered so the Khmer Rouge could protect their regime.

State atheism in a century has killed orders of magnitude more kids than all religions combined.

...In India, where humanists and rationalists fight the influence of popularly revered "miracle-working" gurus as well as Hindu and Muslim fundamentalism, an Atheist University was founded last month in the south-east city of Vijayawada.

Atheist have an aversion to irrational idol worship.

And in Israel this month, secularists who say they suffer from religious coercion despite a conviction that they represent a majority of the population, won a court ruling that they cannot be forced to list Judaism as their religion.

I guess atheists aren't the chosen, after all.

In Muslim countries where renunciation of belief can be punished by death but always ends in social ostracism and persecution, the existence of an organisation of atheists is almost unthinkable, says Roy Brown of the IHEU.

Muslims are actually pretty easy on atheists, compared with other "apostates", unless the atheists get too lippy about Islamic degeneracy. Muslims understand that they share with atheists a common enemy.  'The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Praise Allah and Darwin.'

But in Europe, an association of ex-Muslims is growing, with national chapters in several countries. Some British Asians who have abandoned the faith were in Oslo, and found themselves arguing with Islamists who came to picket the gathering.

The European Association of Present and Future Muslims is growing even faster.

Back in Zurich two weeks before the elections, Kyriacou says there has been a good response to the campaign he and his youthful colleagues have fought. "It is young people who are mainly interested, and that is good for the future," he adds.

What happens, atheists, when you run out of young people?

"We don't think for a minute we will overcome the party machines. But there is an outside chance, if the mathematics are right, that one of us will get elected. That would be a victory indeed for humanists everywhere." (Reported by Robert Evans)

But will it be a victory for the rest of us?