This letter is in response to Cliff Perez. I’d like to point out a few things about your article that maybe you should take the time to look back over before you make such rash assumptions.

I’m an officer in the Atheist Agenda, and helped plan and organize the Smut for Smut campaign. And while yes, the campaign is meant to catch attention, we don’t do it solely for the attention. The pornography part of it is meant to grab the attention, but the underlying meaning of the event is to make people actually question their beliefs and be able to defend them.

Some religious folk go around bible thumping, when they really don’t even know anything about their holy book. They conveniently look over the bad parts of their holy texts, and only preach about how wonderful their God is and how it’s all about love. The truth is, all holy texts contain things worse than what is found in pornography.

Secondly a fight to the death so maybe we can all die, really? Being compared to the Westborough Church is quite the offense to me as an openly gay man. The WBC is in no way like us. They only promote hate. We promote thought and questions. To say that a group that promotes the death and execution of gays resembles us completely irrational. We don’t hate anyone, we aren’t preaching to anyone and we aren’t shoving our beliefs in peoples faces.

We encourage people to come to us, not go door to door selling our ideas. People will willingly come to us to discuss their thoughts and question our thoughts. We promote intellectual debate, while WBC promotes burning people, like me, at the stake.

Thirdly, we didn’t ask for the camera crew. They are a group of students who approached us and asked us if they could film stuff about the campaign and about the group for a project they are doing. We don’t starve for attention. Granted, we bring a lot of attention, but we aren’t starving for it. Grabbing someone’s attention is the only way you’re going to get them to ask questions.

Much like a business strategy in advertising, you have to grab people’s attention to make them want something. We use our means of “marketing” to make people want to come ask us, “Why?” We invoke people to question themselves and look within themselves to look at their beliefs and analyze things they have never thought of before.

Lastly, we aren’t against living in harmony. Obviously religion and lack-thereof is always going to exist within our universe. Some of our members may be a little more prone to say that they personally are anti-religion, but that’s not the group’s mind as a whole.

Much like the UTSA community regarding religion, within the Atheist Agenda we all have different views on religion. We don’t generalize an entire group, because everyone is diverse. Hence why I said earlier some bible thumpers don’t know about their own holy texts.

I hope you read this Cliff and reanalyze what you wrote. I am all about free speech however, so say what you want to say, but you have to expect criticism from any end. Much like we continue to conduct our event, but we openly expect to receive criticism like yours. Oh, and next time, give the pun advisory before you give the pun.