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As they watch religion increasingly dominate American political discourse, nonbelievers will gather in San Francisco today for their first "All Atheist Weekend" -- in an effort to put a friendlier face on godlessness.
"We're trying to do what church people call outreach," said Jim Heldberg, a Pacifica software salesman and onetime Methodist who coordinates the group San Francisco Atheists.
"We feel very threatened by what's going on in this country, but we realize that we can't just sit here in a corner by ourselves," Heldberg said. "If we do, the religious right is just going to run us over."
So Heldberg and other leaders of the Bay Area's five chapters of atheists -- from the "Godless Geeks" club of the Silicon Valley to the crew at the Rossmoor retirement community in Walnut Creek -- have put together a weekend designed to bring together the God-unfearing and "have some fun," Heldberg said. They will chat about their favorite mainstream film, "Contact," the 1997 flick in which Jodie Foster plays an alien-seeking astronomer with a lot of atheistic questions.
The president of a national atheist organization will speak this evening in a room at the Commonwealth Club, which is not sponsoring the event. A Michael Moore-styled atheist "opinion documentary" will have its world premiere Saturday at a small theater in South of Market, and atheists will be treated to a one-man multimedia presentation and a fund-raising dinner (to pay for the Commonwealth Club rental).
The goal is to do what organizers commonly call "herding butterflies" -- turning atheists into activists.
The challenge in that?
"Atheists are not joiners," said Ellen Johnson, national president of American Atheists, which the country's most famous modern atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founded in 1963.
"You hear people complain, 'Look what they (religious people) are trying to do now,' " Johnson said. "Well, yeah, sure. They're better funded. Better organized. That's why atheists get pushed around. I say if you don't like it, get involved and do something about it."
Her talk tonight will attempt to reclaim the image of O'Hair, whom detractors called "the most hated woman in America" for her role at the vanguard of church-state legal battles. O'Hair disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1995, and her remains were found in Texas six years later.
Johnson's real challenge, however, will be attracting new members at a time when religion is playing an increasing role in the national public discourse, from the White House's involvement in Terri Schiavo's final days to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's appearance at an evangelical-orchestrated conference crusading against activist judges.
Several studies have shown that a growing number of people don't consider themselves affiliated with any religion, including 19 percent of Californians in a 2001 survey. But the number joining atheist groups hasn't increased much over the years.
That makes Johnson's "We need to be activists for atheism!" mantra daunting, especially for an organization run largely by volunteers. Johnson has been unpacking boxes herself following the recent renovation of the group's New Jersey headquarters. With annual revenue of $520,191, according to 2003 tax records, atheist bank accounts pale next to the millions raised by Christian-oriented organizations.
American atheists "depend a lot on wills," Johnson said. "People donate to us in their wills, but with all due respect, we don't need dead atheists."
American Atheists, one of several national organizations for similar- minded folks, counts 2,200 members. In San Francisco, meetings regularly attract 50 to 100 people, and the mailing list tops 1,000.
"I was in Minnesota, and they told me that there were 500 people on their mailing list," Johnson said. "And I'm wondering why these people aren't joining the national organization." She just began offering free one-year memberships to American Atheists to members of local groups.
Even the nation's most visible atheist is reluctant to carry the activist mantle. Sacramento's Michael Newdow, whose lawsuit challenging the Pledge of Allegiance got him tagged as "America's Least Favorite Atheist" in Time magazine, said he "felt a little uncomfortable" when asked to appear in a "Godless Americans March" in Washington.
"To me, that's divisive in some way," Newdow said. "You're separating yourselves out in some way instead of saying what you're for."
Ultimately, Newdow attended the march, and he plans to be at Johnson's speech tonight in San Francisco. But he avoids other atheist events. "There is a sense of camaraderie at these meetings," he said, "but there can also be a lot of bashing of Christians, which I'm not into."
One point of All Atheist Weekend is to expand a base that the 64-year-old Heldberg describes as "a bunch of old white guys who sit around and bitch."
"If you come to one of our meetings in San Francisco, you'll see that's changing," he said.
Toward that end, there will be two showings of "The God Who Wasn't There, " a 62-minute movie by Los Angeles filmmaker Brian Flemming, at the Off- Market Theater at 965 Mission St.
Inspired by the first-person work of Moore and Morgan "Super Size Me" Spurlock, the 38-year-old Flemming mashes up old movie clips, interviews, unauthorized clips from Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and an interview with the director of the Christian school he attended as a child. The school director walks out in the middle of the interview.
"There's an urgency now to getting to address these issues that are happening nationally and get organized," Flemming said.
It's common to find atheists in such causes as abortion rights and the environmental movements, but they're not used to advocating for godlessness, said David Fitzgerald, a San Franciscan who will present his multimedia "The 10,000 Christs and the Evaporating Jesus" after the movie.
"Still, it's a great time to be an atheist," said Fitzgerald, who was raised a Baptist in Fresno. "Five hundred years ago, we'd be burned for what we were thinking. Fifty years ago, we'd lose our jobs. But today, we're free to be atheists.
"Our thing is that we're just not that organized," he said. "It's our strength and our weakness."
eter, aka 
usty 
halk
