I am in touch with a superbly bilingual Atheist, Indra Zuno, so advice in Spanish or English would certainly be welcome.

“Ateos de habla hispana. Muy bueno!” Si!

Ed Buckner, President
American Atheists

Being from South America I can say that we have deeply cultural roots from catholicism. However, I have seen over the past years a huge increase in made in USA protestant churches, probably because the dirty image that the catholic church carries now. I visited my hometown last summer and I went to book stores and I found that most christian English books from US are translated to Spanish, like Warren, D’souza, etc; and they take a lot of bookshelves. Au contraire, I could only find one Hitchens and one Dawkins. I also found two more non-believers authors Pepe Rodriguez (Spain) and Odifreddi (Italy) but they don’t have much publicity as the american christian writers.

I guess, christian publishers have more money.

Franklin Graham visited Bogotá last summer with his “festival de esperanza”, the place was packed as I can see in youtube.

Fortunately I have also seen an increase in freethinkers; there are more Spanish atheist bloggers now. And we are vocal and proud.

Atheism growing in Spanish is excellent news.

@Sc0tt the old rule was that practicing Catholics could marry non-Catholics in a sort of alternative ceremony. The ceremony (at least for marrying a non-believer) itself was ridiculous and IMHO, humiliating. The Catholic makes all the usual promises of faithfulness and god and all that stuff, and the other spouse sort of just stands there. It’s like marrying a mannequin.

The site you got it from is Spanish (as in from Spain) and here what usually happens is that if they wanted to get married the non-Catholic would go through a ultra-fast “conversion”, where they’d get baptized and communioned shortly before the wedding. The Church knows naturally enough that a large proportion of weddings are merely because of the ceremony and the building, but they make a lot of money off of them so they turn a blind eye.

This will only accelerate the fleeing of younger generations from the church, already well under way, at least in Spain. People are still attached to the ceremonies, but as time goes on and secular ceremonies become more simple and the Church less and less flexible, I hope some day (long after I’m dead) we can turn all our beautiful old churches into museums and schools.

El Vaticano invalida los matrimonios entre bautizados y no bautizados

(Vatican invalidates marriages between baptized people and non-catholic-baptized people)
LINK

Haven’t seen anything about this in the US press. I wonder how many people are affected. One of the comments notes that de-baptism is much cheaper than a divorce!

Merry Christmas!