Fort Wayne Atheists Featured in Newspaper

There’s a nice article about atheists in the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal Gazette by Rosa Salter Rodriguez.

Not surprisingly, it features FreeThought Fort Wayne:

For several months, [Joel] Klinepeter says, he thought he was alone in the universe, let alone Fort Wayne. Raised in an evangelical Christian home headed by a father who was an ordained minister, Klinepeter knew well what a prominent role religion played in Fort Wayne life.

But then he found FreeThought Fort Wayne, a group that bills itself as “a community of people who want to live without religious belief.”

One nice touch to the piece is that it tells the stories of group members — stories other non-theists may share — who have to put up with a lot in that religious environment:

Katie Ward, 28, of Fort Wayne remembers the reaction at a play group when she declared not only that she didn’t go to church but she had not had her daughter baptized.

Another mother looked at her, aghast, she recalls. “She said, ‘Well, are you going to get her baptized? Because if you’re not, she’s going to hell.’ That was the last time we went to that play group,” Ward says.

That’s how I make friends: I tell strangers that their children will suffer for eternity. It’s fun. You should all try it sometime.

By the way, the story appeared on the front page of the Living section of the paper. I’m sure it was a nice wake up call to subscribers in the “City of Churches” 🙂

(Thanks to Danny for the link!)