I don't think we should frame it like that.  We're not proving ourselves, we're being ourselves.  We're simply doing the same things we've already been doing but doing so under the banner of atheism.  I don't think we're doing it because we've bought into the rumor that atheists are bad people, it's because we feel a portion of society has bought into that rumor.  Polls have shown that atheists are not trusted... and therefore not understood.  

There are several parts at work here.  People distrust us in part because they've been told every imaginable negative thing about us.  But people also distrust us because they have a fear of being atheist themselves.  They don't understand it, they can't see relating to it, as they themselves think they need god.   As with multiple parts at work they should be addressed in multiple manners.

Those who have been told that atheists can do no good and believe it as the bible says... can have their delusions/misunderstandings corrected by seeing atheists doing good things.  

Those that misunderstand atheism and can't connect to it need one of their friends to come out to them as an atheist.  One of their "humanist" or "agnostic" friends needs to step up for "atheism" and say something to them.  Or maybe it's a friend of yours Bahana... well go ahead and "confront" them.  Have a conversation about religion, use the socratic method to get them thinking, even if it's just to understand that atheists actually have their own intelligent reasons for believing what they believe... and don't believe.

If you're referring to something a little more harsh than conversation about god, I don't see how what Sam Harris said a few years ago will ever change, until religion dies, and it will.

Q: What is the most likely way that American society, if not the rest of the world, will eventually abandon irrational faith?

Sam Harris: I think this is a war of ideas that has to be fought on a hundred fronts at once. There’s not one piece that is going to trump all others.

But I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy, almost single-handedly it seems, eroded the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s by joining them and then leaking all of their secret passwords and goofy lingo to the people who were writing “The Adventures of Superman” radio show. Week after week, there were episodes of Superman fighting the Klan, and the real Klan’s mumbo jumbo was put out all over the airwaves for people to laugh at. Kids were playing Superman vs. the Klan on their front lawns. The Klan was humiliated by this, and was made to look foolish; and we went from a world in which the Klan was a legitimate organization with tens of millions of members—many of whom were senators, and even one president—to a world in which there are now something like 5,000 Klansmen. It’s basically a defunct organization.

So public embarrassment is one principle. Once you lift the taboo around criticizing faith and demand that people start talking sense, then the capacity for making religious certitude look stupid will be exploited, and we’ll start laughing at people who believe the things that the Tom DeLays, the Pat Robertsons of the world believe. We’ll laugh at them in a way that will be synonymous with excluding them from our halls of power.

Yep.

Humans share "something" even if they dont know it.

1] It's impossible to do good in the name of atheism.

2] I don't think it's playing into the sterotypes. We need good atheists exposed to quell the steretype. It isn't playing into it. This is known as the contact hypothesis.

It's impossible to do ANYTHING in the name of atheism.  Watch:

P1-The premise that there exists at least one god is likely to be [or is] false

P2-????

C- We should do X.

Anything an atheist does, good, bad, or neutral relies on another premise other than atheism.

Me doing a good deed is not anymore in the name of atheism, then the CPC commiting mass murders in the name of atheism.

the action [good deed or bad deed] does not logically follow from P1. It was caused by something else. My human compassion, or the CPC's bid for power, not out of lack of belief.

If it does, then Furrycatherder is correct in that atheism can be used to justify bad deeds. But she isn't.

That's playing into the stereotype and theist's misconceptions about atheism. What else will they think atheists are doing "in the name of atheism"?

Like I said, we should be trying to show that atheists are as moral as theists, not play into the misconceptions.

                    We are NOt "as moral as theists":  since we have no rival atheist sect to hate and dehumanise we ARE in fact "better" then theists.

                   btw I also do not like "....in the name of atheisim."  I do my charitys in the name of decency.   I don't reguard RRS as a charity, since they are NOT a non-profit {but ARE a non-Prophet} organization [according to the IRS].  I send money to RRS because 1) I'm an atheist  &  2) free speach as never been a free ticket; You got to pay for free speach some how, I do it with money;  others have paid with their lives.  Personally I am far too old and too fat to get into a uniform and head to Afghanistan.

We are as moral as theists. I don`t think not believing in unicorns makes me a better person, just because there isn`t non-unicorn sect to hate and dehumanise.

I think there shouldn`t even be a schema to address in the first place. Those types of projects expose atheists that do good, and that`s a good thing.

Freedom costs a buck o`five

I don't know if there will ever be a day when the majority of our species puts our common needs first and labels secondary. The idea of utopias in the form of short cut labels needs to stop. Labels only describe positions, the do not reflect the evolutionary behaviors all humans are capable of, both good and bad.

I am an "atheist" but that only address my "off" position on the existence of god/s. It does not predict my good or bad behavior. A human is always more complex than multitude of positions they hold on any given topic.

Our species will always set up clubs and use labels. I would suggest we simply put our common humanity as our top priority and skip the attitude that an individual or a group or a political party or a nation or a religion can set up a "one size fits all" utopia.

I do want to rid the world of god belief, but through reason appeal, blasphemy and debate. Like weening a kid off diapers. You don't beat the child into not pooing. You simply show theme the toilet. When they grow up they learn a better way of doing things and scrap the old ways.

We as a species time after time, especially in the past 200 years, through scrutiny and challenge, have grown and if we never gave up on social norms our species never would have left the caves.

It is my hope for more and more people, that the see, that they give up on old ideas and old myths and value the universal things we all know we can observe side by side and to every day outside the issue of god claims.

We all value our tvs, or cell phones and our doctors. We think it is great when our kids get a college education. We simply do not need, nor can we afford now, to wallow in the past, when we have real threats from our own planet as far as disease and pollution, and even the threat of meteor strikes.

We have far too much in common that we value in the form of the things we use every day that are real, to make up and dwell in the answers of tribal kingships of the past rooted in mythology.

We don't need to believe that the sun is a god to know what it is made of. We don't need an ocean god to study hurricanes. And we don't need to believe in virgin births, ESPECIALLY now that we know what DNA is. And we don't need to refrain from eating during the day just because some ancient tradition demands that we do such for an entire month, to know feeding the poor is a good thing.

The future is a fantastic prospect when it is not deluded by the invention of myths. We grow as a species when we shed them and are constantly held back by them.