Mpromptu

Hi, Charlie -- Love your show! When are you going to make it available as a video or audio podcast? Because it would make long drives much more bearable.

I sure hope so. Just about all the ways LGBTQ people are discriminated against are rooted in religion, especially conservative denominations. So as the demographics shift away from religion as a whole, I'm hopeful that we'll see a similar shift away from anti-gay discrimination as there will be less support for it.

Even young evangelicals are much more supportive of LGBTQ rights, even if they lag behind the rest of us.

This is a great question, because it's one of the main obstacles to convincing people to stop believing in God. We're essentially asking them to abandon their social network, and a lot of people won't do that (for good reason) no matter where the evidence points.

I don't know that there's anything nearly as powerful... but it's interesting to watch Meetup groups form around a common bond or even Resistance groups form around a political ideology. Those aren't analogous to churches, but they're not entirely different, either.

As I've said to atheist groups before, though, unless we can offer people the social benefits of church without the religious nonsense, it's going to be very hard to convince them to leave. (There have been many attempts at forming "atheist churches," with varying degrees of success.)

So glad to help!

It's always infuriating to see politicians and otherwise decent people taking anti-LGBTQ positions. It's rage-inducing when I hear it from someone I know personally. But losing my cool probably won't solve anything. I try to limit confrontation to people whose minds might actually be open to change. Even if I engage with a conservative online, I'm thinking about what I could say to help people who are reading the comments, not necessarily the person I'm talking to (who may not change).

There never any guarantee, but I think we're already seeing a broader acceptance of people who don't belong to any organized religion (and to a lesser extent, atheists).

The stigma is still there -- good luck getting elected as an open atheist -- but in most parts of the country, it not as much of a problem as it used to be. That's in many ways thanks to all the atheists who dare to speak up! All the more reason to keep encouraging those who can to come out. The more people who do it, the easier it becomes for everyone else.