In any case, over most of that time, the clergy have not exactly been bra-burning feminists. It must be said that the most feminist religious groups at present are various New Agers and neopagans and Unitarians and the like -- not the more traditionalist Xians.

And although atheism and freethought in general have no necessary connection with feminism, atheists/freethinkers have tended to be relatively feminist. This goes back to the 19th cy., where Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written the feminist classic on Biblical sexism, The Woman's Bible.

Speaking only for myself, I tend to go in waves. This summer, I was all over a board about building trailers. Six months before that, I was really into a bbs for GMRS radio systems. I'm in a Daylight Atheism phase right now.

I considered your words. I even started feeling a little silly. Then, as I was driving to work it hit me -- a real "duh" moment. The reason I care is that I personaly face real prejudice and discrimination as an Atheist. The causes you mention might be worthy, but so is being able to be open about who you are without worrying about organized counter-attacks.

A Barna study showed there were extraordinarily few atheist physicians that dedicate their practices to third world volunteer medical work.

Yes, well, Barna is an evangelical Christian group whose surveys are explicitly done to support their particular religious viewpoint. I'd recommend taking them with a grain of salt, particularly since that opinion is contradicted by other studies which found that atheist physicians were just as likely to provide free care for the poor as religious ones.

Even in the secular organization "Dr's without Borders" there is not a single atheist physician on their roster...

What on earth is your evidence for this? I'm not even aware that Doctors Without Borders publishes a comprehensive public list of every physician member, much less that it publishes such a list which includes its members' religious affiliations.

We could really use your help atheists.I am sincere in this.

What makes you think that atheists aren't already helping? It's just that, unlike many religious organizations, we don't feel the need to explicitly play up the link between nonbelief and charitable activity. In addition, unlike religious groups, we don't couple the help we provide with misleading superstitious advice that worsens the very problems we're trying to treat. For example, the Catholic church and many Protestant denominations still strongly oppose comprehensive sex education and the distribution of contraception, thus worsening the very problems of overpopulation and STDs we're trying to alleviate.

Why is it then, Ipetrich, that the Christian West is the far and away progressive leader in woman's suffrage...

Because the Enlightenment forced Christian religious leaders to accept a more equal role for women against their will. That position certainly cannot be justified by the Bible, which repeatedly styles women the inferior of men in every respect. Do you realize how many Christian denominations there are that still deny women leadership roles and teach that they are to be obedient and submissive to men?

Like women's rights and feminism in general. Where have your beloved churches been in that one, theistscientist? The Bible is blatantly sexist from beginning to end, the only Xian churches with lots of female pastors are relatively liberal ones, and those ones got lots of female pastors only in recent decades. As Susan Jacoby has noted in her book "Freethinkers", feminism has mostly been a secular movement.

And science and technology and medical stuff like evolution and stem-cell research and abortion and birth control -- which churches support all these?

theistscientist, I suggest that you clean up your own house first and look at such blatant pseudoscience as your beloved God of the gaps.

I perfer to think of what I go against more a fight against faith, that is the acceptance of things in lack of or in spite of evidence. Faith doesn't just happen in religions, it happens in all sorts of aspects of life, from the personal and up. It's this irrational thinking that is the cause of large parts of the world's problems, and what needs to be dealt with, pipe dream as it may be.