David Koepsell, executive director,
Council for Secular HumanismHe was a friend of Paul Kurtz, a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism (sponsored by the
Council for Secular Humanism), and an honorary associate of Britain's Rationalist Press Association.
Elsewhere, Paul Geisert has said that the final decision to launch the Brights initiative was catalyzed by last spring's Godless Americans March on Washington, which was conceived by American Atheists and cosponsored by the
Council for Secular Humanism. Geisert thought words like godless and atheist too negative.
The following public statement was issued September 8, 2000, by the Coalition for the Community of Reason on behalf of its member organizations: the American Ethical Union, the American Humanist Association, the Atheist Alliance International, the Campus Freethought Alliance, the
Council for Secular Humanism, and the Secular Student Alliance.
Atheists are a cognitive minority (or as Christopher Hitchens more proudly put it in his keynote address at a
Council for Secular Humanism conference on April 12, 2003, a "cognitive elite").
Organizationally, humanism is largely identified with the American Humanist Association, the American Ethical Union, the
Council for Secular Humanism, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, and smaller groups.
Jan Loeb Eisler is on the board of the
Council for Secular Humanism and also served on the executive committee of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, as did Nettie Klein of the Netherlands and Robbi Robson and Jane Wynne Wilson of England.
On its founding board were humanist leaders affiliated with the American Ethical Union; the American Humanist Association; the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (now the
Council for Secular Humanism); the Fellowship of Religious Humanists (now Friends of Religious Humanism), an affiliate of the Unitarian Universalist Association; the Humanist Association of Canada; and the Society for Humanistic Judaism.
Among the highlights of the
Council for Secular Humanism's "One Nation Without God" conference in Washington, D.C., was the plenary session on the question, "Will Islam Come into the Twenty-first Century?" Each speaker had extensive experience in the Muslim world, either teaching there (as does Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan) or having fled persecution (as have Ibn Warraq, Fatemolla, Irfan Khawaja, and Azam Kamguian).
So the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, a
Council for Secular Humanism affiliate, chose a different approach.
But should secular humanist organizations such as the
Council for Secular Humanism take positions on the burning political issues of the day?
Thus, before I share my own views about possible military action against Iraq, let me strongly emphasize that no person's standing with regard to the
Council for Secular Humanism is affected in any way by his or her position on this question.