The Most Inspirational Image from SSA Con: Water

At the 2012 Secular Student Alliance Conference this past weekend, Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism told us that we don’t win every battle. Not every church and state issue goes our way. Not every debate or argument ends in someone changing his or her mind. And superstition, irrationality, bigotry, and religious dogma often run over our lives. For some of us, there are moments in time when it seems like every street corner is filled with nothing but church steeples and people praying.

But the secular movement is not magic. We can’t transfigure things instantly. Things will be broken for a long time, and we have to understand that.

The secular movement is like water. It may feel soft and gentle when you look at it under a microscope, but it’s water, and it can form a raging river.

And that raging river, if you let it run, can do this:

This why you should be inspired.

Every progressive movement–including the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the gay rights movement–pushed back against mountains and mountains of established, entrenched dogma (and most often religious dogma).

But guess what? The activists in those movements won, or are currently winning.

And the secular movement is going to win too.

We’re not just going to change minds. We’re going to change society.

We’re going to win full legislative equality. We’re going to win a popular majority. We’re going to make society more liberal and tolerant. We’re going to establish social justice. We’re going to make this century the century of science and rationality. We’re going to make atheism and humanism normal and accepted.

As Dave Silverman says, the only thing stopping us now is apathy.

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