If you've ever felt forced or pressured to pray at work, reach out: AmericanHumanist.org/Legal

Your religious beliefs shouldn't affect your job, and public schools have no right to coerce teachers - or anyone else - to participate in prayer.

Ok so it feels like all the warnings so far have been largely falling on deaf ears. This article is another one, and maybe the most comprehensive I've read so far. My question is though: How much worse do things have to get before Americans wake up to the dire situation they're in? The Trump people have told you what they are going to do and they are now actively doing it.

A short and non-comprehensive list of things that you've lost so far:

• The right to have an abortion

• The right to due process as an immigrant or citizen who looks like an immigrant

• States rights to control their own national guard

• The separation of church and state

• Privacy of your personal government records

• Confidence in your federal vaccination system

• Independence of your previously world renowned universities

• Confidence in your federal scientific bodies

Any one of which should be of great significance to anyone interested in humanist values, mods, don't make me explain why, again. This isn't a time of traditional political partisanship, things are bad.

Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

"The battle for democracy will not be staged by the elites or against them, but at the mass level. The lesson of Trump's first term was soon forgotten; overcoming his second regime will be an order of magnitude more difficult."

"What Trump and his gang are perpetrating is a regression from the modern nation-state to personal rule, in which the autocrat effectively owns everything, clientelism runs rampant and ordinary people are subjects rather than citizens."

"An internet search of the most influential American political books of the last half-century will reveal such works as Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” or Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” But however accurate their depictions of politics and society, how influential were they? I submit that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ “Left Behind” series (which apparently traumatized a generation of adolescents), and William Luther Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries” (the Popular Mechanics of race-war incitement) were vastly more impactful, both politically and culturally. One could also mention Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” although what Atwood intended as a warning has been embraced by America’s ayatollahs as a blueprint."

Just to clarify that last quote for the casual reader, they aren't supporting the works by Jenkins or Pierce, they are saying that those works are nefarious and have negatively influenced many people when they shouldn't have, people should have known better.

This is a great basic definition of humanism as a secular worldview – and although the graphic itself is from Humanists UK, it's not "their" definition.

Once you realize.....

Apologies for the double post this week but our video just dropped with some of our Humanist Creator Fund partners: Amanda's Mild Takes, Genetically Modified Skeptic, Shawn Towers, Jesus Unfollower, The Antibot, Alyssa Grenfell, and more.
Please consider sharing this video on your social media and joining us to fight for Empathy on May 2nd.

Most Americans know James Madison as the "Father of the Constitution," but before the Constitution was written, he played a crucial role in defeating a bill in Virginia that would have taxed citizens to support "teachers of the Christian religion." 

In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Madison warned that even small government involvement in religion should be resisted because "it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties." He believed, according to the article below, “that matters of religion belong to the individual conscience and lie beyond the legitimate authority of government; that history demonstrates how the union of religion and political power breeds division, persecution, and violence; and that religion itself is corrupted when it becomes entangled with the ambitions and biases of those who wield political power.”  

With church-state separation increasingly under attack, it's more important than ever to heed Madison’s warning. 

Am I the only one who finds it uncomfortable to see these in hotel rooms? I understand they’re offered as a courtesy, but shouldn’t they be available only on request?

Why impose the Christian Bible on every guest? What about people of other faiths, like Muslims, or secular guests like us?

Has anyone here found effective ways to respond to this practice? I sometimes return them to reception and mention that I’d prefer not to have them in my room, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, I revisited Thomas Jefferson's views on religious liberty in Notes on the State of Virginia. Many of the issues he discussed in the 1780s—including a prescient warning—remain highly relevant today. 

The article examines five of Jefferson's central arguments, including:

1. Why religious liberty protects people of all faiths (and none).

2. Why government should remain neutral in matters of religion.

3. His belief that free inquiry is a better remedy for error than coercion.

4. Why attempts to enforce conformity of opinion are both ineffective and undesirable.

5. His warning that corrupt rulers distract their subjects while systematically stripping away their rights. 

The article places these ideas in their historical context and considers their relevance to contemporary debates over religion and government. 

At the core of capitalism is the employer/employee relationship which drives an uneven power dynamic. That power dynamic skews in favor of the minority employers at the expense of the majority employees of any given capitalist population. The result is minority rule of a profit driven society.

In contrast, worker-owned cooperatives and socialism remove the employer/employee relationship and replace it with a democratic system where the decisions of business operations and surplus allocation are decided by the majority.

Any criticisms of this line of thinking?

Edit: Im signing off. Thanks for being a sounding board. Happy New Year.