Richard Wade is a retired licensed Marriage and Family Therapist living in southern California. At Hemant’s suggestion, in 2009 he began writing an advice column called “Ask Richard.” He publishes his responses to email letters from people of all viewpoints, not just atheists. These usually deal with challenges or conflicts stemming from believers and nonbelievers living or working together. He tries to reduce unnecessary conflict and suffering on all sides.
He has spoken as a “guest atheist” at several churches to dispel the misconceptions and false stereotypes about atheism and atheists. His goal is to prevent the same unnecessary strife and hardship in families and friendships that he has dealt with in hundreds of “Ask Richard” letters. With accurate information, loving and respectful relationships do not have to be ruined by this difference in beliefs.
He is the President of the Santa Clarita Atheists and Freethinkers, who provide a safe haven and support for non-believers in the area as well as participate in several community outreach activities, charity work, interfaith events, and political activism.
Dateline: Anaheim, CA. Your Roving Reporter, Richard Wade One of Islam’s top clerics, Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan has issued a salvo of fatwas, not only calling for the death of executives of television broadcasting companies in the Middle East but also a much more disturbing and potentially disastrous threat. Western-style programming often in the form of soap operas have increasingly been portraying open sexuality in their dramas viewed in several Middle Eastern countries, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia. al-Luhaidan has already… Read more
Richard Wade here, back to stir up more trouble. Hemant’s recent post about his Christian friend who said he’d rather die than defile his Bible suggested for me that the larger issue there is about idolatry, and how even atheists can slip into it. People create objects to symbolize concepts. Over time they can become emotionally attached to the object itself as well as the concept it symbolizes. In extreme cases the object takes on magical qualities in their minds,… Read more
Hi everyone, Richard Wade here. “The silent majority” was a phrase first made popular by Richard Nixon in 1969 in part from his wishful thinking that a majority of Americans silently approved of his disastrous conduct of the Vietnam War. By applying this phrase to atheism I’m not saying that a majority of Americans are secretly atheists, I’m saying that I think the majority of atheists in the U.S. and in the world are silent, unseen, unknown and not typified… Read more
I want to offer an explanation for my last post a few days ago, “In God’s Name.” It was an experiment to see if an implicit message can be more powerful than an explicit one, if it works at all. Clearly it didn’t and it was completely misunderstood. Oh well, that’s how experiments often go. Most of the atheist readers missed the point. That’s not their fault because the story was not intended for them. The target audience was those… Read more
At the end of their lives two Christians and an atheist came before God. To the first Christian God asked, “What did you do in your life, my child?” The first Christian said, “I praised your name by driving out sinners from our society. I reviled and shunned and beat and imprisoned and even killed those who did not believe in you as I did, and those who did not live by your word exactly as I did. I made… Read more
