Atheists and Agnostics Should Vote More

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Christopher Ingraham takes a look at a recent survey of atheists and agnostics and asks, “Why don’t the unaffiliated vote?”

As Pew Research Center’s Greg Smith told me earlier this year, “It could be the ‘nones’ are not connected, almost by definition, to religious institutions, which can play an important role in spurring turnout and interest in politics.” It’s also the case that the unaffiliated tend to be younger than the population as a whole. And younger people in general are less likely to vote than their older peers.

As President Obama likes to say, “Don’t boo, vote.” If you’re unhappy with the influence that conservative Christians have on American politics, go out and vote for someone who’s more likely to favor evidence-based policy than faith-based policy. If you’re not willing to do that, then don’t gripe the next time some yahoo manages to get evolution expunged from your local textbooks.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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