Everything you've always wanted to know about Humanism but were not sure who to ask, and everything answered in just under 6 minutes! Yes, it is that simple!
Do you wonder:
"What is Humanism?"
"Isn't it sad to think there's no afterlife?"
"Why might a humanist hold science in particularly high regard?"
"What is the humanist view on human nature?"
And of course, that moldy oldie question:
"How can humanists live ethical lives without religion?"
Check out this video and have everything explained in six easy minutes!
QFT:
"We can be decent human beings, and love and care and support each other - and not expect a fantasy to fulfill our hopes and our dreams when we can actually live them in this lifetime." Zoe Margolis
Col. Timothy Wagoner : "He embodies the best of the chaplain corps."
Slowly, but surely, decent Christians everywhere are beginning to step back and take a good hard look at what has been happening to their religion. Slowly, but surely, decent people are gathering the strength to brave the inevitable backlash in order to speak out against the evil that is being said and done in the name of their religion.
A long-serving military chaplain, Col. Timothy Wagoner, has parted ways with the Southern Baptist Convention after being publicly admonished over his attendance at the first gay marriage in the military. He will remain as a chaplain in the military, affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship which holds more moderate views than the SBC.
“I find very little that is more important and nothing that is more exhilarating than providing for the religious freedoms and spiritual care of all service members and their families — and will joyfully continue to do so,” Wagoner said Friday in an e-mail to The Associated Press. (Military Times story here).
Col. Wagoner joins a whisper-thin but steady drizzle of believers who are trickling out of the fold of the most extreme conservative churches, as they realize that the political agendas of these churches have little to do with the teachings of Jesus and everything to do with political power and social control. They join a steadier, but still thin, stream of moderate Christians from putatively moderate churches whose individual congregations claim to be more tolerant and accepting than the parent denomination, but who nevertheless contribute to the continued rightward lurch of Christianity through financial support of conservative parent hierarchies.
This is the ugly underbelly of religion. The silent support of the moderate majority has allowed it to flourish but finally, good people of faith are finding the courage within themselves to speak out.
Maybe it is only a trickle now, but I am hopeful that it will soon become a torrent.
More and more religious people are realizing that their beloved faith has been hijacked by the extreme right wing and more and more of them are taking the incredibly courageous step of walking away - not from their belief in God, but from the pernicious influence of the destructive conservative religious juggernaut and its powerful religious institutions.
And it does take courage to walk away from one's church.
The term "social animals" does not mean that we merely enjoy spending time with kith and kin. Being social animals means that our connection to, and reliance upon, our social groups is vital to our physical and psychological health. People rarely rebel against social norms - we rarely challenge the will of the dominant social group (often a large powerful religion) - because we know on a deeply visceral level that to do so could have dangerous consequences.
Society threatens apostates with total ostracism. We know what can happen if we criticize our social/religious group. Friends turn away, families are torn apart, careers are destroyed and lives are even threatened or lost in the vicious backlash that an outspoken member of a religious identity group experiences. We all know this is true. The fear of losing everything we know and love - especially our sense of belonging within the security of a large, powerful, familiar group identity - is what keeps people silent. It is what keeps people uneasily trying to perform a balancing act between what we know is morally right and what our churches say we must say and do.
I am inspired this Sunday morning by Col. Timothy Wagoner. He is both courageous and righteous. I hope this story goes viral. I hope it will encourage others to follow his example.
Update: Ed Brayton (Dispatches From the Culture Wars) added to the hopeful news out of the military last night by posting a young soldier's re-enlistment speech. Honest, unpolished and sincere, a chaplain's assistant named Nick spoke movingly and courageously about bigotry and homophobia both within the military and out in civilian society. I could not find a YouTube link for the speech, but I hope this speech also goes viral. You'll find it in Ed's blog at this link.
The look of love: Tech. Sgt. Erwynn Umali wed civilian Will Behrens on June 23, 2012 in New Jersey.
(Carl Sagan's lyrics written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter)
[David Attenborough]
All life is related
And it enables us to construct with confidence
The complex tree that represents the history of life
Our planet, the Earth, is as far as we know
Unique in the universe; it contains life
Here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers
That we still have not even named all the different species
Darwin's great insight revolutionized the way in which we see the world
We now understand why there are so many different species
[Carl Sagan]
Every cell is a triumph of natural selection
And we're made of trillions of cells (Within us is a little universe)
Those are some of the things that molecules do
Given four billions years of evolution (We are, each of us, a multitude)
Now how did the molecules of life arise?
[Attenborough]
It began in the sea
Some 3 thousand million years ago
Complex chemical molecules began to clump together
These were the "seeds"
From which the tree of life developed
They were able to split, replicating themselves
As bacteria do
[Sagan]
The secrets of evolution
Are time and death
There's an unbroken thread that stretches
From those first cells to us
(refrain)
[Jane Goodall]
There isn't a sharp line dividing humans
from the rest of the animal kingdom
It's a very wuzzie line
It's a very wuzzie line,
and it's getting wuzzier
All the time
We find animals doing things that we,
In our arrogance,
Used to think was "just human"
(refrain)
[Attenborough]
Its continued survival now rests in our hands
I have a message for Bishop Giminez and her eager co-conspirators:
No. America is not mired in moral depravity. America is a land of diverse people - hardworking, industrious, innovative, tolerant, forward-thinking people. We are red, brown, white, black, and every beautiful shade of human skin. We are all American. We are atheist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and every religious and political stripe. We are all American. We are female and male, gay and lesbian, bisexual and transsexual and every gender identity on the wide, wonderful spectrum of human sexuality. And we are all American. No. America is not mired in moral depravity. We coexist in relative peace, as imperfectly as current human limitations might predict and as transcendently as human aspiration can occasionally soar. We have succeeded as a country because America is founded on principles which limit the power of religions to divide, conquer and destroy us. As messy and imperfect and unjust as much of our history has been, it has still stood out as a beacon of hope in a world of messy, imperfect and unjust systems of government which - nearly always using religion - continued to oppress and abuse their people long after the American journey toward 'liberty and justice for all' was haltingly begun. For more than 200 years, we have struggled and fought and inched our way toward realizing the dream - toward living the ideals - that those founding documents point us toward. We are a people evolving, with a roadmap to liberty in the Declaration of Independence and a blueprint for achieving it in the Bill of Rights. We will continue to negotiate and argue and push and pull toward a more perfect union of equal citizens because this country is a work in progress. And we are all American.
America is not mired in moral depravity. WTF is the matter with you, theocrats?
No. America is not mired in moral depravity. It is you, Bishop Giminez, and power-hungry religious elites like you who are mired in moral depravity. It is you and the power-hungry religious elites who call injustice "justice", who fight relentlessly against equality and human rights and who seek to enshrine bigotry and misogyny into our laws without a shred of remorse or compassion for the human suffering you have caused. It is the conservative religious right which seeks to overturn the natural order of things - calling myth "science", calling oppression "justice", calling evil "good", calling what is immoral "moral". Those who call themselves "righteous" - who pretend to speak forGod! - are the ones who are mired in moral depravity. They have lost their moral compass, but their fellow citizens can help them find their way again. Because, we are all Americans. No. America is not mired in moral depravity. America does not need theocratic "saving". It needs protection from dangerous, ambitious, vicious religious power-mongers like you, Bishop Giminez, and the wealthy Christian elites that you represent. America needs saving from the approaching train wreck of Christian totalitarianism which you and your cohort wish to force upon us. America does not need "saving" by ambitious men claiming to represent their silent, invisible God. America needs saving from them. This nation has the tools to fend off this attack from the religious right. We have the diversity and the strength in numbers to resist a takeover attempt by one hardline fundamentalist faction among us. We can weather this storm. We are all Americans! No. America is not mired in moral depravity. America is mired in political and social turmoil which was deliberately created by the conservative Christian right-wing for their own political gain. It is you, Bishop Giminez, and the powerful, wealthy elites who seek to drag this entire country to the brink of disaster, just as religious extremists elsewhere in the world have done to their countries. It is you and the power-hungry religious elites you speak for who hope to precipitate a cultural crisis in this country out of which you hope to wrest ultimate control over everyone and everything that is American. You hope to destroy the America that is and build an America that you can control. But you underestimate the passion for liberty and justice in this country. You underestimate the American spirit. We are not all Christians. But we are all Americans.
Whether or not one believes there is a god - or any higher power that cares about the welfare of humanity - constant historical evidence has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it does not reside within the ruthlessly implacable ambition of religious elites. The success of the great American experiment in nationhood has only been possible - painfully, lurchingly, imperfectly and minimally - not thanks to religious belief, but in spite of it. Before the ink had even dried on the founding documents, religious groups launched their efforts to subvert the American dream of a more just and democratic Republic to their own theocratic agenda. And they have never ceased in their efforts since.
We are red, brown, white, black... every beautiful shade of human skin. We are all American.
There is a seat at the national table for conservative Christians just as there are seats for every other kind of American. The difference is that conservative Christians want to banish everyone else except conservative Christians from the American table and in that sense, they are profoundly unAmerican. I only hope the basic goodness and common sense of the American people has been awakened to this looming crisis at last and that we can come together for the good of the country before it is too late.
America can only be saved by Americans. By performing our civic duty: educating ourselves on the crisis before us, registering and voting in every election and holding our elected representatives to their Constitutional responsibilities, the American people can save America. Let's not allow one religious sect to hijack the ship of state and sink the hopes and dreams of freedom-loving people everywhere. It is not the silent, invisible God, nor the men who claim to represent ultimate godly authority who speak for America. Only Americans speak for America. Educate yourself. Register. Vote. Let no one speak for you. Speak up for yourself. We are all in this together and the future of this country depends on all of us. We are all Americans.
