Utah atheists aren't seeing eye to eye these days about the things they don't believe in.
"Evangelical atheists," one side says dismissively about the other. "Pseudo-intellectual," the other group sniffs.
The tension between the state's two premiere atheist organizations — Atheists of Utah and Salt Lake Valley Atheists — came to a head recently over a protest rally against a National Day of Prayer observance at the Capitol.
The rally was organized by the Salt Lake Valley Atheists, which saw the governor's prayer proclamation, and a nondenominational observance in the Capitol rotunda, as a violation of the Constitution. However, another atheist group, Atheists of Utah, viewed the protest as meaningless.
"My view is that it is kind of silly," wrote Atheists of Utah member Marilyn Welles on a private Web posting prior to the rally. "National Prayer Day — National Saukerkraut Day — whatever. . . . This kind of time-wasting and strident activity does NOT come from within Utah — it is generated elsewhere by people who would really rather be lobbying for the canonization" of Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
O'Hair was the founder of American Atheists and was the catalyst for the Supreme Court ruling in 1963 against school prayer. The Salt Lake Valley Atheists is a chapter of American Atheists.
There used to be just one local atheist group — Utah Atheists— which for 22 years doggedly went about its vigilance about church-state separation. But last summer, when longtime leader Chris Allen stepped down, dissension surfaced. Welles and another member were annoyed over the naming of Julia Rivers as leader of the group. Julia and Michael Rivers had moved to Utah in April 2001 from California.
What followed is not exactly clear (there are allegations on both sides), but the upshot was that Welles helped start a new organization that secured the Web domain name Atheists-of-Utah.org, leaving Utah Atheists to change its name to Salt Lake Valley Atheists to avoid confusion.
Some of the tension between the two groups appears to be personality differences. Welles refers to the Riverses as being from "blue-collar Simi Valley." Michael Rivers recently sent off an e-mail to Welles calling her "a dinosaur long overdue for extinction."
Both Atheists of Utah and Salt Lake Valley Atheists lobbied last winter against a bill requiring that "In God we trust" be prominently displayed in public schools. Both groups say they are not against religion, only against religion being forced on others. Their differences, says Welles, are about emphasis — perhaps best summed up by Atheists of Utah's desire to set up an "atheist reading room," and Salt Lake Valley Atheists' current boycott against Payless Shoesource because its spokeswoman, Star Jones, has called atheists immoral.
Julia Rivers says she's thrilled that there are now two atheist groups in the Salt Lake Valley, adding that the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey found that 18 percent of Utah's population calls itself either atheist, agnostic or not a member of any particular religion. "We're the second-largest group in Utah, after the Mormons."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com