Category: Does Secular Humanism Have a Political Agenda?

On Saturday, March 3, 2012, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry presented one of the feature events of their cosponsored conference, “Moving Secularism Forward,” held at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida. Four distinguished speakers from across the political spectrum addressed the question, “Does Secular Humanism Have a …

Happy Women’s History Month to all of us. Let me just give you one historical fact: we all know about Paul Revere, but I bet you don’t know about the Ludington sisters. Paul Revere rode his horse through Boston, but the Ludington sisters covered the entire damn state of Connecticut, and no one wrote a …

Politics is a dirty affair. Of course the men and women aspiring to become politicians don’t dress like ditchdiggers. On the contrary, aspiring politicos invariably wrap themselves in the finest formal business attire of our culture. This is plainly to impart to us the seriousness of their intentions but also perhaps to cloak the squalid …

I am a secular humanist. I am also a libertarian. The fact that one finds very few libertarians as members of official secular humanist organizations should be a tip-off that official secular humanism does have a political agenda. First, what is “official” secular humanism? Lots of the groups participating in the Orlando, Florida, “Moving Secular …

The question at hand is, “Does secular humanism have a political agenda?” To address this question, I’d first like to characterize relevant features of what might be called the “secular humanist community”—as distinct from any philosophy of secular humanism—and in so doing reframe the question slightly to focus on secularism and the secular movement. Then, …