Thursday, May 3, 2007

Virginia and Censorship

It's official, we've signed on a house in Virginia, and will be moving around the 18th of this month -- very quickly! This is all taking place much faster than we had ever expected, but that's a good thing. I'm looking forward to the new house. Here is the view from the end of the driveway (which will be the view from the office as soon as we clear some trees from the end of the driveway).




I've recently speculated about the atheist population in that area, and by coincidence one of the stories I've read about recently is based at a high school around Roanoke, which is in the next county over from our new house.

Reed Braden innocently lends another atheist Dawkins' book The God Delusion. The friend's father, either not aware or not accepting of his son's atheism, finds the book and confiscates it. He calls Reed threateningly at 11PM, and later demanded from his principle that he be punished 'for "handing out literature" and attempting to convert his already-Atheist son to Atheism.'

Gideons were handing out bibles in the school parking lot a week earlier.

I contacted Reed directly about atheism in southwestern virginia. His report was about what I had expected. They're there, just not visible. Sounds like a good opportunity to start organizing!

4 comments:

Reason's Whore said...

Congratulations on your new place. Your country view looks a lot like our country view - on the other side of the country.
I think atheists keep a low profile in the country. I know some people who have turned out to be atheists or agnostics, but you wouldn't think it to meet them. We're waaaaay out-numbered by the fundies.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on the new place. I'm from Virginia originally (up around Staunton) but I haven't been back in years. You might want to try Atheist Meetup (http://atheists.meetup.com/) and see what turns up.

Anonymous said...

I think the picture's a little unfair. The area around Roanoke where I live isn't nearly that hick-ish.

Thank you for linking me. I'm putting up a link to your blog in my sidebar on my blog.

David W. said...

Hi Reed, thanks for the link! It's true -- Roanoke, Christiansburg, Blacksburg... those are all nice urban areas. The nice country setting we're moving to took some effort to locate.

I've lived in small towns, I've lived in big cities, I've lived in suburbs -- and I've discovered that what I really want is the country. When we were looking for houses, anything under two acres, on even a moderately busy road, or too close to any larger city was out. I work from home, so centralization isn't something we have to worry about, and we took advantage of that.