Atheist bookshelves growing

I went to a Border's bookstore in a Northwest Indiana town with my mother a couple days ago near where she lives (she lives in Illinois near the Illinois/Indiana border). Indiana, for the most part is pretty well-populated with Southern Baptists and other evangelical Christians, so I was happily surprised to find a sign in the Border's store that said "ATHEISM" to label a section of books and freethought materials! While Border's has always offered a small selection of atheist books, this is the first time I have actually seen the collection labeled with a permanently affixed sign. AND a display set up which featured books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others.

I've also been pleased by the progress being made in the town I live in. Our town's slogan (here in Chicago's far southwest suburbs) is "Home of Proud Americans" and was for many years a very conservative, right-wing community. Not an atheist or freethought book could be found amongst the stacks of the local library. There were a couple of old Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" hidden in the bottom of the religious book section, and there were some books on Hinduism, Buddhism and other world religions, but none could be found concerning atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism, or freethought.

But, times are a-changing and when I was recently at our new two-story library that was built a couple years ago, I decided to look to see if they had become more open to including books on atheism. I did a quick search in their database for Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and others, they were all in there, and some were on the shelves but many were checked out...meaning people are actually reading them. When I went to the shelves to find these authors, what I found was about a dozen shelves full of books about atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism and freethought. Oh happy day! Everything cometh to he who waits! Freedom of speech and acceptance of secularism have finally reached our growing village.