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The following list and articles are from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 2007).
Amherst, NY—Seventy student group leaders from across North America converged at CFI/Transnational June 15–17 for the third annual “Convocation of Centers and Communities for Inquiry,” which featured concurrent sessions on campus free thought activism. It was a busy weekend packed with workshops, presentations, lectures, and social and networking opportunities.
Over fifty institutions were represented at the conference. This included students and faculty from the following schools, among others: Belmont University, Broward Community College, Capella University, Case Western Reserve University, Columbia University, DePaul University College of Law, Fanshawe College, Flagler College, Florida International University, Grand Valley State University, Indiana University/ Purdue University–Indiana, James Madison University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pellissippi State, Portland State University, Ryerson University, Santa Ana College, Southeast Missouri State University, Southeastern Louisiana University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Tennessee Tech, Truman State University, UCLA, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of Guelph, University of Missouri–Columbia, University of Montreal, University of Nebraska– Lincoln, University of North Dakota, University of North Texas, University of Oklahoma, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Texas–Arlington, University of Texas–Austin, University of Toronto, University of Victoria, University of Waterloo, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, Wilfrid Laurier University, and York University.
Attendees left the conference enthusiastic and excited to continue the forward momentum, with many volunteering to work on student committees to advance reason and freedom of inquiry at the national and international level.
–Debbie Goddard
Religious intolerance cost me my job the summer before last. After the camp where I was on staff received an anonymous e-mail from an outraged parent about my views on religion, I was forced to resign. So, as I entered the final phase of my studies the following fall, I was increasingly aware of the religious groups on my campus and in my community and the impact they can have. Between the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Interfaith Chapel, it had become painfully obvious to me that there were no alternatives for those of us who were questioning the rationality, beliefs, and thinking of these groups. Then I heard of the Center for Inquiry’s Student Leadership Conference in Amherst, New York, and I quickly reserved a spot.
There, dozens of like-minded questioning students gathered from across North America. I went expecting to network with other campus leaders and to learn how to create a successful group on my campus. I was not disappointed. The resources offered by the Center for Inquiry and the atmosphere of the conference were ideal for encouraging activism. We came together, and our minds began to flourish and fill with ideas to take back to our secular campus groups.
A sense of friendship and trust came almost automatically with each person I met throughout the weekend, as we knew we understood each other’s motives for being there. This was refreshing after coming from communities where we are rarely understood. Here was a group of people who comprehended the true meaning of a university—a place where people are encouraged to question and to think rather than to simply defend their predetermined sense of knowledge. There was a plethora of different labels we gave ourselves—from “atheists” to “brights” or “secular humanists”—but our purpose was similar: to create a louder voice for our cause of rationality and freethought, hanging onto the idea that maybe one day religious intolerance won’t cost us our jobs.
The first day of the conference was spent getting to know people, relaxing after traveling, and settling in. Saturday was filled with a smooth stream of engaging speakers directing us on how to generate and sustain functioning groups on campus. These talks were extremely useful and covered topics from using the Web for outreach and running meetings to attracting media attention.
In the afternoon, Barbara Forrest spoke about the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, giving us a well-presented rundown of the events concerning the case. (You can view the presentation online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/digitalmedia/video/barbara_forrest_inside_creationisms_trojan_horse/.) She was followed in the evening by constitutional lawyer Eddie Tabash, who scared us all with frightening yet true words about the fundamentalist religious Right in Amer ica. It was an eye-opener for everyone on just how much work there really is to do and how significant our goals are for freethought in all areas of life.
Saturday night ended with some exceptional entertainment by world-renowned skeptic and illusionist Jamy Ian Swiss. The skeptical frolics all ended on Sunday afternoon after we participated in a round table discussion where we all shared ideas, then heard from one last speaker, Nica Lalli, author of Nothing: Something to Believe In.
It was hard to return home. On the one hand, I have come back with a brain overflowing with ambition, inspiration, and ideas to implement in my own campus setting. On the other hand, I left a serene setting and a group swarming with insurmountable intelligence and vigor. Being with these people created a sense that we have already accomplished something great. We have established a meaningful and powerful secular group of leaders that will have overwhelming successes in the continued struggle for freedom of thought, life, and reason.
–Katie Kish
Katie Kish is majoring in geography at the University of Guelph and the University of Victoria, Canada. She is a member of the University of Guelph Secular Group and a volunteer for CFI/Ontario.
Center for Inquiry/On Campus is happy to welcome thirteen new campus groups that have formed, or are in the process of forming, since May 2007:
If you attend one of these schools and would like to get involved or would like to work with us to support these groups, please e-mail Debbie Goddard at dgoddard [at] centerforinquiry.net.
Dominant religious morality is based on the concept of sin. For the Abrahamic religions, it’s sin against God; for Eastern ones, it’s sin against one’s social role or public order. Scriptures do not stipulate that people have rights, they only tell people not to do certain things, such as steal or murder.
In contrast, the liberal morality developed during the Enlightenment turns this idea around: individuals have certain rights, and actions are moral or immoral based on whether they further or violate them. This model is fairly minimalist in that it does not offer very many constraints and rarely demands positive action. Classically, all it asks is that its adherents not violate a small set of laws. In modern times, it also requires actions such as treating people with respect; but again, in most cases, it does not issue any commandments. At the same time, the concept of rights, or equal rights, is extremely abstract, precisely because it is not very prescriptive, which makes it unworkable outside of philosophy departments.
This is where the Left comes in. Leftist morality takes the concept of equal rights and sets oppression as its nemesis; however, it also develops oppression into a more comprehensive concept. Oppression can come from action as well as inaction. Martin Luther King’s writings implicated not only whites who actively participated in segregation but also those who contributed to it by doing nothing to fight it.
Oppression involves systematic action. An employer who discriminates against women or minorities is engaging in oppression, because this discrimination is systematic, widespread, and involves historical or social humiliation of some sort. In contrast, an employer who discriminates against people who wear shirts of a color he or she doesn’t like is engaging in an essentially random act of shallowness.
The leftist moralist’s call for action sometimes mirrors that of the religionist, leading to a strong religious Left. The civil rights movement was a seminal example, but Latin America’s liberation theology, Gandhi’s independence movement, and the United Church of Christ’s fight for environmental justice in the United States are all examples of equal rights activism based in religion.
Such amalgams occur from time to time, but it is not a coincidence that all involve fights against poverty or racism rather than sexism. Latin American feminism owes a lot to liberation theology, but liberation theology was always about poverty first, and the antipatriarchal tradition has not stopped Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, who have greatly benefited from liberation theology activism, from banning abortion completely. Abortions are occurring less frequently now than they used to in the United States, but only because of the rise of prosperity theology.
However, worries about who holds power are usually solely the domain of the Left. Leftist arguments for equality often stress not only the well-being of those at the bottom but also the excessive power of those at the top. Power corrupts. Power is a prerequisite for oppression. In the most extreme cases, this causes disavowal of anyone with power, even those who use it to promote equal rights. In any case, suspicion about abuse of power is as crucial to leftist morality as the concept of systematic inequality.
While leftist morality is not inherently political, politics has always figured very prominently in leftist thought as a mode of negative as well as positive change. Since struggles for equal rights almost always involve getting the government to recognize an oppressed group or to enforce existing laws for its protection, the Left tends to talk in political terms much more than in moral terms, despite having essentially moral judgments.
Leftist morality has no supernatural component, even in the attenuated forms of “sins against nature” or the “Mandate of Heaven.” New Age spirituality has always been on the fringe, and, although the Left tends to be more accepting of spirituality and religion than it used to be, it still views them as matters of personal preference rather than moral obligations. This remains true for amalgamations within religion: Martin Luther King talked about God as an abstract source of moral law rather than a supernatural guardian, and Gandhi marched with Muslims and secular Hindus.
As a corollary to that, such morality is very interpersonal. This is not exclusive to the Left: Jesus underemphasized the concept of sins against God in favor of sins against man, only to have Christianity resurrect the former. It is the emphasis on interpersonal morality by the Left that makes many conservatives, for whom codes of personal behavior are very important, call liberals “immoral”; in fact, that the Left makes no judgment about homosexuality is as relevant as the fact that Christianity makes no judgment about eating pork. Although right now this emphasis is very powerful, it used to be more muddled: to the old Left, nontraditional sexuality was often a bourgeois indulgence, and, until very recently, a significant contingent of feminists held that watching porn was immoral.
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis asserts a deep link between civilizations and their religions, pointing to the emotional connection religious nationalism can elicit. In fact, the Left’s ideology can serve as the basis of nationalism as well. It never did in the communist bloc, which is why it is easy to miss this fact, but elsewhere it did.
Indian independence is an obvious example of Left-based nationalism. (It has coexisted with more right-wing and religious nationalism, but the Left dominated the Quit India movement.) Post-apartheid South Africa is another example. Post-colonial Asia, most importantly Vietnam, is more shaky, because there people have sometimes responded to the failure of leftist governments by adopting more religious attitudes, just like they had responded to the failure of imperialism to increase their living standards by supporting left-wing anti-imperialism.
Zionism is just as Left-based, and it is easier to understand Israel as a state formed by an oppressed minority than as a Jewish state. Like India, Israel was founded by leftists. Unlike the narratives of anti-Christian oppression common in Dominionism, Zionism’s narrative of anti-Semitism is mostly genuine. It is precisely this status of an oppressed minority that has made Israel tone deaf to the grievances of Palestinians—whose own nationalism is as reliably leftist, Hamas’s support being more about political corruption than about Islamism—but this only shows that left-wing morality is not perfect.
Leftist morality has succeeded more than any other alternative to religious or otherwise conservative morality. It has made racism and imperialism globally unfashionable, even among people who secretly support them. Almost every advance in women’s rights in the world is due to the Left. Conversely, everyone knows its failings and excesses: political correctness, the endless search for oppressed groups where none exist, and the zeal to dictate people’s lives and attitudes.
It seems that to be successful a morality has to address certain universal concerns—condemn murderers and thieves, sustain the needy, and empower the marginalized—without seeming too empirical or a posteriori. Nobody votes for a politician who openly proclaims to only support what the polls say the majority supports. Instead, the successful politician must have his or her own values and agenda, which must be in line with what the people think on most of the issues. Morality is the same. This is why libertarianism, legal-rationalism, and classical liberalism have never succeeded.
There are many issues on which leftist morality and religious morality are similar and are therefore not improvable by secularism. People need a morality that calls for action; more passive secular humanist morality will never leave academia.
In particular, the Left seems to offer little to no improvement on the issue of violence. It does not erase sectarian boundaries, even when it extinguishes religious practice. In Bosnia, a Serb was a Bosnian who did not go to Orthodox church, a Croatian was a Bosnian who did not go to Catholic church, and a Muslim was a Bosnian who did not go to mosque.
In addition, secularism does not reduce crime; if there are fewer criminals among the secular, it is only because secularism is strongest among the classes that are least prone to crime. It alleviates poverty somewhat but does not eliminate it, and, when crime is reduced, it is not at all clear that secularism is responsible. The same can be said about public health and education.
On the other hand, it does improve science, due to its lack of supernaturalism. As usual, though, there are caveats. Scientific investigations that may conclude that people are not equal are considered verboten, and, with its emphasis on nature over nurture, Darwinian evolution is almost as hostile to the Left as it is to religion (the more naturally progressive theory is Lamarckism). However, leaving aside the question of whether evolutionary psychologists are correct, the field of evolutionary psychology is far smaller than the extent to which most religions limit academic freedom.
Oppression-based morality has achieved the feat of offering people everything religion can offer without requiring them to believe in the supernatural or to worry about sinning against God or nature. However, it has also adopted enough characteristics of religion, especially in those countries where it is mainstream, that it is likely those common characteristics are unavoidable. Successful secularism can reduce belief in God and somewhat increase support for science; what it cannot do is take society apart and rebuild it in a utopian humanist image.
–Alon Levy
Alon Levy is a mathematics graduate student at Columbia University who grew up in Israel and went to college in Singapore. He writes a biweekly column at the blog 3 Quarks Daily. You can reach him at al2495 [at] columbia.edu.
This summer, several interns supported CFI staff at various Centers for Inquiry. Patrick Kuhl, recent graduate and founder of Students for Freethought at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, sacrificed sleep and sanity to help make the Convocation of Students and Community Leaders at CFI/Transnational a success; Mark Smith, rising sophomore at Arizona State University, helped CFI/NYC find new office space and plan a series of student organizing meetings at Manhattan-area colleges; Michelle Abrego of the University of Florida assisted with statewide marketing and publicity at CFI/Tampa; John Kotcher, a grad student at American University, attended congressional briefings and learned much about the legislative process while at the Office of Public Policy at CFI/DC; and interns at CFI/West regularly assisted the Steve Allen Theatre.
CFI is looking for student interns to work at these and other Centers across North America. If you are interested in applying for an internship, contact D.J. Grothe at djgrothe [at] centerforinquiry.net. Please include a brief statement of your academic and other interests, your activities with the skeptic or humanist movements, and why interning at CFI is something you want to do.
–Debbie Goddard
I have probably been a scientific naturalist for most of my life without realizing it. It was not until I saw videos of the Beyond Belief conference at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, that I realized the true importance of spreading and reinforcing the ideas of scientific naturalism and a rationalist approach to public policy. Upon watching lectures from such esteemed thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Lawrence Krauss, I decided to look for an organization that embodies and is working in defense of the same principles of evidence-based debate. Without much difficulty, I found the Center for Inquiry at the forefront of this endeavor, and I knew immediately that it was with CFI that I wanted to do my student internship. Luckily, CFI and its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, had recently opened an Office of Public Policy (OPP) right in my backyard here in Washington, D.C.
Interning at the Office of Public Policy was a tremendous learning experience for me both professionally and personally. Coming from a background primarily based in biology and environmental science, I had little experience in or knowledge of how the policy-making process takes place and how advocacy from nonprofit organizations informs public policy. Not only has my internship with CFI taught me more about the legislative process, but, given the wide variety of issues that the Center and its affiliates are concerned with, I was also able to learn a great deal about social and political problems that I was previously unaware of or knew little about. For instance, I attended a military religious freedom luncheon where I heard author Chris Hedges discuss problems of religious influence and proselytization within the military and their greater implications for American democracy.
The interdisciplinary nature of the work also allowed me to work on issues such as reproductive rights and women’s health, sexual education, and bullying in schools. I attended congressional briefings and coalition meetings with other lobbyist organizations where I learned about legislation and advocacy campaigns designed to protect women’s access to contraceptives from religious efforts seeking to undermine that right. I attended a congressional briefing on the failure of abstinence-only education to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancies and learned about the overwhelming need to implement comprehensive sexual education in our schools. Last, I learned that, despite the major push to protect young students in public schools from bullying, there are still problems concerning the bullying of GLBT students in private and religious schools that do not fall under the jurisdiction of current legislation designed to better protect such students from harassment.
In addition to attending congressional briefings and meetings with OPP’s legislative director Toni Van Pelt, I had the opportunity to help plan the CFI Civic Days at the Capitol. Civic Days at the Capitol is an event that the Office of Public Policy is organizing in conjunction with the Ten Amendments Day event that will occur in the spring of 2008. The event will bring in CFI Community leaders from around the United States to spend several days in Washington learning how to engage their senators and representatives on issues relevant to the mission of CFI and its affiliates. The event will culminate in the Community leaders meeting with their legislators to discuss current legislation.
Given that the Office of Public Policy is new in Washington, D.C., much of my work also involved establishing CFI’s presence and influence in the nation’s capital. Along with Toni, I met with various legislators and congressional staffers to build relationships among people who are sympathetic to the Center’s mission and are in a position to help CFI and its affiliates, including the Council for Secular Humanism, achieve their goals. I also helped draft talking points for use in policy debates that are consistent with CFI’s position papers on particular issues, such as interpretation of the Establish ment Clause of the First Amendment and freedom of religious belief and nonbelief.
Before I began my internship with the Office of Public Policy, I had the privilege of attending a briefing held at CFI/DC about protecting and restoring scientific integrity. The briefing featured speakers such as author Chris Mooney and addressed many of the ways the Bush administration has politicized science when formulating public policy. I knew immediately that this was one of the topics I wanted to work on with CFI when I began my internship. During the course of my internship, it just so happened that, on June 27, The Washington Post ran an article detailing the role that Vice President Dick Cheney played in altering water management plans in Oregon, which resulted in one of the biggest fish kills in history. In response to this fiasco and other instances of political manipulations of science within the Department of the Interior, Representative Nick Rahall launched an oversight investigation in the House Committee on Natural Resources. Along with Toni Van Pelt and CFI volunteer Ruth Mitchell, I had the pleasure of working with staff members from the House Natural Resources Committee on researching instances in which government science had been trumped by politics. Our research aided staff in building their argument for a committee hearing on July 31 to investigate and clean up the culture of corruption within the Department of Interior. This experience taught me more about the Endangered Species Act and many of the current problems surrounding species conservation in the United States.
I would say that part of what truly made this internship unique compared to others I might have undertaken was the opportunity to see current events through a secular humanist lens. In addition to working on a plethora of issues, I developed great relationships with the Office of Public Policy staff and found the office to be more than just a place to work. It provided a forum to discuss the most pressing issues of today from what is often perceived to be a controversial or taboo standpoint. Meeting and working with others who share similar views was an invaluable experience for me. Many thanks to Toni, Elizabeth Daerr, and Ron Lindsay for providing that environment.
Clearly, there are many different issues and campaigns to be addressed by the Office of Public Policy. From climate change and stem-cell research to sexual education and reproductive health, the work that the Office of Public Policy carries out is relevant to students from a variety of backgrounds. Although my time as an intern has expired, I would implore others to consider an internship with the Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., because there remains a lot of work to be done!
–John Kotcher
John Kotcher is a graduate student in environmental science at American University in Washington, D.C. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, he obtained his B.S. in zoology from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
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OCTOBER 24-27 2013
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