The birthright citizenship controversy

Donald Trump has raised the stakes in the Republican party’s discussion about immigration by calling for the end of so-called ‘birthright citizenship’ that automatically confers US citizenship to anyone born within US jurisdiction irrespective of the status of their families. This move by him, coupled with his idea of forcible removal of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, has raised the nativist stance of the party to a whole new level.
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The big tent of the atheists

Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently fall prey to the temptation to classify things in groups. I would have been in my element as a 19th century biologist implementing the Linnaean classification scheme of all living things. Recently I have been thinking that the term ‘atheist’ is associated with too narrow a meaning. In fact, I think that there are six different types of atheist.

The most common type of atheist is the explicit atheist. These are the people who say openly that they do not believe that god exists, and this is the group to whom the label is commonly believed to apply.

Then we have the covert atheists. These are people who no longer believe that god exists but do not feel that they can openly say so. The climate for atheists can be quite hostile in some parts of the world, enough to be socially ostracized or even lose one’s job, requiring such people to keep mum about their lack of belief. Others may keep quiet because they belong to religious families and may not want to upset loved ones by speaking about their lack of belief. I suspect that the ranks of elected officials in the US or those seeking such office have a large number of covert atheists.
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