Televangelism has been around nearly as long as television itself, so it’s surprising that it took this long for an atheist channel (televatheism?) to show up. But it is showing up, thanks to American Atheists president David Silverman, who announced his new venture during a lecture at Stanford this week. “Why are we going to television?” Religion News Service quotes him as asking the audience. “It’s part of our strategy of going where we are not.”
And they’re going in a big way: a free channel, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, jammed with nontheist content. It will join the approximately 100 Christian channels and four Jewish channels in targeting people of a specific religious (or non-religious) belief system. There’s no shortage of content, with early programming expected to come from footage of atheist conventions, video bloggers and YouTube channels. “We are envisioning a lot of different content from many different atheist content creators,” said Dave Muscato, American Atheists’ director of communications. “We are hoping to sign on many other atheists who create videos currently on YouTube and other places” …