Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Thursday May 3rd is the National Day of Reason in the United States. The day is a secular celebration for humanists, atheists, and other secularists and freethinkers in response to the National Day of Prayer, that is unfortunately a legal holiday in the United States. This country has many issues from high unemployment to religious conservatives attacks on women’s rights. The government shouldn’t be holding national days of prayer, we need reason to help solve human problems.
Humanism is a strange collection of individuals in a stew of rationality, all of us looking for the truth for our world view. We, as Humanists, know we must work with believers and other theists to find common ground with the goal of bettering the human condition. Andy Norman, writing for the Humanist Network News, an e-zine of the American Humanist Association, tries to offer tips for dialogue on Humanism to non-humanists but does so by giving up honesty in the process.
Norman, in his essay “Framing Humanism, or How to Win the Culture War”, starts out great by explaining how we as Humanists could do a better job of bringing in new people or at least getting our message out by the use of Framing (where we control the meaning of our message), but then my alarm bells start going off when I read this:
Read an article on the Washington Post about a new political party called the National Atheist Party. While I applaud the effort to get atheists more involved in the political process, trying to include a broad progressive platform into such a narrow religious belief label is the wrong way to go.
The National Atheist Party is a non-profit, 527 political organization devoted to issue advocacy. As a 527 they can’t endorse candidates. In their mission statement the NAP says: