I’m not suggesting that the abuse crisis demonstrates that women are incapable of serving alongside men. Far from it. No, I’m wondering whether this crisis reveals that military men (or at least a significant fraction among them) are unfit to serve alongside women. Consider what military training does for a young man. Now consider what military training does to him. It hones a young man to a very high level of physical fitness, imparts a chilling mastery of ways to impose his will by force (including the sort of hand-to-hand combat training that thirty years ago was shared only with commandos), and applies sophisticated psychological techniques to help ensure that when the time for the use of force presents itself, the service member will use that force instantly and with little compunction.

Today’s American service members, male and female, are arguably the best-trained and most broadly skilled fighters any regime has fielded since the days of Sparta. Still, states have been training military personnel along roughly similar lines for millennia, and until the twentieth century it had occurred to scarcely anyone to let military men at the peak of their training mix continuously with members of the opposite sex. Maybe—just maybe—the current sex abuse scandal offers evidence that all those commanders of centuries past actually knew what they were doing. Maybe young males elevated to high levels of physical readiness and deeply conditioned to use ruthless force just aren’t safe to carry on their potentially deadly work side-by-side with service members who are natural objects of their sexual desire. It isn’t necessary that all military men display this defect—only that it be likely that enough young military males will display the defect to make a truly co-ed armed force impractical. (In this connection it doesn’t matter whether abusive sexual behavior is understood to be motivated by sexual desire or by a desire for forcible mastery; the military milieu provides a setting equally reinforcing for either.)

Today the U. S. military is on the cusp of integrating women fully into combat positions. But I wonder whether the current sex abuse scandal is not equivalent to an experimental result indicating that our reigning hypothesis that the military should be gender-neutral is fatally flawed. Until recently, militaries sought almost unanimously to ensure that most fighting men discharged most of their duties in environments from which persons who might stimulate their libidos were excluded. Was this because the presence of objects of desire would distract them? Or was it because when large numbers of young men are assembled and trained mentally and physically in the way the military does, it’s just not safe for women to be around some of them?

To reduce it to a sound bite, is gender neutrality a bad idea for the military—not because women can’t hack it, but because so many men are such pigs, and military training just makes them worse?

Commenting on the controversy, blogger J. T. Eberhard wrote: “Today there will be an interfaith event to mourn the victims of the Boston bombing.  The President himself will be in attendance.  But when they say interfaith, they really mean interfaith.” Really, though, who should find this surprising? Sometimes words mean what they say. Dictionary.com defines interfaith as “relating to, between, or involving different religions.” Why should non-religious people want, much less expect, to be included in an event whose stated scope is only to bring together representatives of different religions? Why should atheists and hard secularists who actively disdain religion want to play any part in something like that?

Full disclosure: I used to take part in interfaith events in the Buffalo, New York area. Ironically, it was after reading Epstein’s provocative book God Without God, in which he argues for unbelievers to take part in interfaith work, that I fully grasped the contradictions implicit in doing so. I don’t appear on interfaith panels anymore. When invited, my stock reply is “Sorry, this is an event for representatives of various religions, and I do not represent a religion. When you plan an event that’s not narrowly restricted to persons of faith, be sure to call me.”

To some degree, this reflects my particular situation as executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism. For more than forty years, religious Right ideologues have been accusing humanism generally—and secular humanism specifically—of being just another religion, one more rival to Christianity in the game whose other players are Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and so on. The purpose of much of this argumentation was that if it became generally accepted that humanism was a religion, then evangelicals could seek to have ideas associated with humanism (such as the theory of evolution, the idea that Earth is billions of years old, or the notion that moral decision-making ought to be individual and autonomous rather than based on rules handed down by authority figures) excluded from public schools as violations of the separation of church and state. (To this day, about the only way you can catch some religious Right spokespeople admitting that there is such as thing as church-state separation is if you get them going on the “religion of humanism.”) For decades, one of the Council’s recurring imperatives has been to make clear at every opportunity that secular humanism is not a religion. For much of this time, we had to do this in a setting in which avowedly religious humanists were quite visible in the Unitarian Universalist Association and elsewhere, and in which the other principal humanist organization, the American Humanist Association, was a religious organization for tax purposes. (Fortunately, that ended in the early 2000s.) So we at the Council had to expend a lot of energy in maintaining that secular humanism, at least, was in no way a religion. When you come out of a background like that, the perils of taking part in interfaith events should be obvious—so much so that I personally regret not having recognized the need to boycott such events much sooner.

But there’s a larger issue here. In my view, it’s the real message of inclusiveness that most of us in the movement should be emphasizing—a message we cannot credibly send while some of us are begging to be included onstage alongside the priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams. There’s a popular impression that “interfaith” is the acme of inclusiveness, that when you want to stage an event that’s designed to encompass an entire community, an interfaith observance is the way to go. That impression is decades out of date, and more of us ought to be saying so. Because an interfaith event embraces only members of religions, and does so frankly and openly, in a nation where twenty percent of adults don’t belong to any religion, “interfaith” is not the last word in inclusivity. Interfaith events, by definition, exclude twenty percent of American adults. They exclude a third of the young.

If, after some traumatic event such as the Boston bombings, officials want to hold an event that includes everyone, from now on they need to do better than interfaith. They need to develop events that do not draw most of their architecture from religious services that no longer speak to the identities and aspirations of one adult American in five. Except in situations where representatives of different churches legitimately do want to just talk to one another—wrangling out differences in how they interpret the Bible, or some such—“interfaith” is an idea whose time has passed.

Of course, it’s difficult to maintain that principled position when you’re begging for grudging admission to what amounts to the back seat on the church bus.

To my mind, leaders of atheist and secular humanist and other strong-freethinker groups shouldn’t complain that they are being excluded from interfaith events. They shouldn’t campaign to get in. No, we should stay out even when asked, and use whatever spotlight that casts our way to press the argument that in a nation that is home to growing numbers of post-religious men and women, real inclusion demands something way better than an interfaith event ... something that is radically more inclusive than a church service with the points of doctrinal disagreement sanded down.

Finally, there’s another issue that must be confronted when the interfaith observance in question is a memorial. Seeking to place religionists and nonreligionists on the same stage at a memorial event presumes that there is anything that representatives of these diverse perspectives can validly do together when the focus is on helping attendees to come to terms with the loss of fellow citizens, friends, or loved ones. The problem here should be obvious. For traditional believers, the focus of a memorial event is altogether different than it is for unbelievers. Traditional believers acknowledge the pain of loss, but cover it over with the ointment of beliefs in the afterlife. Unbelievers are confronting a starker reality: the deceased is truly, achingly gone and will never, ever be seen again. To put it more flippantly than I probably should, when believers and unbelievers sit side by side at a memorial event, they are two discrete groups doing two very different things. The unbelievers are there to say “Good-bye forever”; the believers are there to say “See you later.” I don’t know if it will ever make sense to try to achieve two such disparate objectives at a single event. (A tip of the hat to Jason Torpy, with whom I co-developed some of the ideas in this final paragraph in the course of another online debate.)

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Making the rounds on Facebook is an announcement that yet another humanist/atheist charity has started a fund drive for victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s a fine cause, but I wonder whether its organizers have considered the implications when nonbelievers—normally quick to revile sectarianism when religious people indulge in it— conduct a blatantly sectarian appeal for aid. Perhaps it’s overdue to review the full meaning of the word “secular.”

The appeal I saw came from Atheists Giving Aid, which apparently is not to be confused with Nonbelievers Giving Aid, and surely should not be confused with Dale McGowan’s Foundation Beyond Belief. CFI itself has its Skeptics and Humanists Aid and Relief Effort (SHARE). And I’m sure I’m inadvertently omitting a few other worthy groups. Such groups have a seductive appeal—what better way to rebut religious claims that faith alone makes people charitable than to have conspicuous atheist and humanist charities out there? But unbeliever charities inevitably pose a nasty do-the-ends-justify-the-means problem. Secular folks are usually, and quite properly, disdainful of sectarianism. But the very idea of an atheist or humanist charity—that is, one that solicits funds principally from unbelievers and presents the funds raised to the public as the product of atheist/humanist generosity—is inherently sectarian.

We seculars are also usually quick to argue that religions and non-religious lifestances should be treated alike. We suggest that an atheist pacifist’s objection to military service should be honored just as a religious conscientious objector’s is. We contend that if people have a freedom-of-religion right to embrace any faith they choose, then there should be a corresponding freedom-of-conscience right to reject religion altogether, or to embrace any chosen lifestance whether religious or not. Okay, so if sectarianism is regrettable when religious people engage in it, why is it OK when atheists do it?

Let’s consider how a truly, thoroughly secular charity would operate. In general, charities a) raise money from donors, b) target particular beneficiaries, and c) mobilize volunteers and/or employees to deliver services to the beneficiaries. A truly secular charity should be not only religion-blind, but lifestance-blind, all the way down that chain. That’s why few seculars are taken in by, say, Catholic Charities’ frequent claim to be nonsectarian. OK, Catholic Charities does not restrict its services to Catholics; it does not discriminate according to the lifestance of the beneficiary. Bully for them. Catholic Charities does not (usually) discriminate according to lifestance in volunteer recruitment or hiring. Bully again. But it openly, proudly discriminates according to the lifestance of its donors! Leaving aside the money it receives from government contracts, where does Catholic Charities raise its voluntary public support? In Catholic churches and throughout the Catholic community. And who do you find in the Catholic community? Catholics, right? Now, non-Catholics can give to Catholic Charities—it won’t send an Episcopalian’s check back, nor an atheist’s—but when the organization takes that money out into the community to do its admittedly good works, what banner does it go under? (Hint: what is the first word in its name?)

So, case closed. Catholic Charities is a nonsecular charity because it seeks funding principally among Catholics ... and then implies through its branding that 100% of its voluntary funding comes from Catholics whether or not that is completely true.

Now, I don’t know a lot about Atheists Giving Aid. I will assume that they do not restrict their support to victims of the Boston bombing who are atheists. I will assume that they do not discriminate in volunteer recruitment and hiring, if they even do such things instead of just conveying the money they raise to some other charity. (If I am wrong on either of those scores, please let me know—and then I’ll have further grounds for objecting on grounds of sectarianism.) But the organization’s name says it all—Atheists Giving Aid discriminates by definition in the sources of funding it pursues. It seeks donations principally among atheists, and even if a few non-atheists manage to sneak some money in there, Atheists Giving Aid is going to go out in the world representing by implication that the money it has raised came entirely from atheists. That’s just how people who speak English will interpret its name.

Whether you call yourself an atheist, an agnostic, a humanist, a freethinker, or a None, if you also call yourself secular you should feel at least a little strange about this. If you’re secular enough to find, say, Catholic Charities inappropriate and archaic—if you’re secular enough to look forward to a future when outfits like Lutheran Social Services and the United Jewish Appeal no longer exist, simply because supporters have lost interest in them—then you ought to get a strong sense of “one step forward, two steps back” when the atheist community imitates the religious community at its most regressive and creates new charities that are, sigh, sectarian about unbelief.

What should we be doing instead? On my view, truly secular people should be channeling their charity dollars through channels that are 100% lifestance-blind. Yes, that means giving up some cool opportunities to wave the freethought flag and crow “Look, we’re generous too!” But it doesn’t help to build the more secular society of the future for our community to launch new charities that model the same sectarianism we rightly object to among the religious.

After all, if lifestances and religions deserve to be treated alike—if freedom of religion is merely a subset of freedom of conscience—then sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If we want to work toward a society without sectarianism, we must start by modeling the virtues of nonsectarianism—ALL of those virtues—ourselves.

For myself, I may send some money in for Boston bombing relief. But I won’t send it through a humanist or atheist charity—that’s unsecular. I’ll write a check not as a freethinker, but as a proud member of what is (aspirationally, at least) a secular society. I’ll give as an individual. Anyone know a good Boston-based charity that’s lifestance-blind all the way down?

Under the headline “NPS Does Lent, 2013,” NPS panelist Vlad Chituc revealed that last year he became a vegan for Lent. This year he’s doing it again—and also, um, swearing off reading online comments during the Christian period of self-flagellation (link at bottom of this post). Further, he’s invited others who seek a “nice religious practice that could be easily translated into secular life” to join him, making the 40-day sacrifice of their choice. So far a few movement folks outside of NPS’s own blogging stable have signed on, including (perhaps curiously) CFI’s Paul Fidalgo.

Color me dubmfounded. I was alterted to this initiative by a secular humanist who emailed me complaining about “atheists ... going out of their way to bring back religious backwardness” (italics in original), and I can’t help but agree. For starters, Lent is one of the most profoundly anti-humanistic features of Christianity (and yes, that is saying something). It’s all about reminding ourselves of how depraved and sinful we are, and taking on added sacrifices so we can purify ourselves to be worthy of contemplating the wonder of the resurrection forty days hence. As a secular humanist, I don’t believe in sin. I don’t believe that people are inherently depraved—we are capable of both good and evil, surely, but not “depraved” in a way that only makes sense in comparison to a perfect god who, by the way, doesn’t exist. Finally, I don’t believe there are any external moral balance scales out there in the cosmos which adjust themselves when human beings make arbitrary sacrifices.

That spotlights another deep moral problem with Lent, one shared with the whole Christian idea of vicarious atonement, which I find frankly repellent. If I’ve been a bad person, if I’ve harmed others, then it is ludicrous to imagine that the best way for me to try to make things right is to take on some arbitrary, unrelated privation. “I’ve harmed others, so I’m going to spend forty days not eating meat” makes zero sense—unless, of course, one believes in a celestial lawgiver that is impressed by such a stunt. If I’ve been a bad person and harmed others, I need to go to the people I’ve hurt and apologize and take actions that might actually do something toward making my victims whole. Giving up meat, or going vegan, or giving up alcohol, or whatever—those are just cop-outs, feel-good strategies that might make oneself feel better about having been hurtful, but do nothing to help the people one hurt.

Vlad Chituc doesn’t seem to buy into the moral value of arbitrary sacrifice either. He claims he has a good, prudential reason to go vegan for a while: the supposed health benefits. So he’s not really sacrificing for the sake of sacrifice. It’s more like he’s borrowing the Lenten meme of self-denial as a handy framing device to make it easier for him to try a bit of therapeutic self-deprivation that he’s wanted to tackle all along.

Which brings me to the other problem with Lent. It’s an arbitrary stretch of time distinguished primarily by its centuries-long tradition within Christianity—a religion we don’t believe in— its dates yoked to the annual observation of an event we don’t think ever happened. (Lots of secular folks may accept that a man named Jesus was crucified, but I doubt very many of us take seriously the part about his rising from the dead.) I won’t even go into the absurd way Christianity sets the date of Easter each year, which has more to do with pagan moon worship than anything alleged to occur in the Gospels.

One of the great advantages of being secular is that no one needs to be bound by traditional calendars to tell us when to celebrate, or sacrifice, or do anything else. As secular people we’re free to, say, go vegan for our health any time we want to—in March, or August, or December, for that matter—and for any length of time we choose. The fact that forty was considered a magic number by the ancient Hebrews is no reason why people today ought to go around choosing forty-day intervals in preference to any other length of time. If forty days a vegan is good, wouldn’t fifty days be better? Or how about sixty-three?

I guess what we’re seeing here is the difference between secular and religious humanism (admitting that “religious humanism” is a vexed term with multiple overlapping meanings). But surely one of the meanings of “religious humanism” encompasses a desire among some naturalists to import chosen observances or traditions from congregational life and splice them into their humanist practice. As a secular humanist I view most such efforts with distaste—consider the source, and all that. As a secular humanist I find the concept of Lent particularly objectionable, and I see no reason why any non-Christian should consult the Christian liturgical calendar when planning his or her life.

This secular humanist doesn’t give anything up for Lent. I gave Lent up for reason.

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Way back in a Summer 2003 FREE INQUIRY editorial, “No Passing: Time to Leave the Closet Behind” (not available online), I recounted the success of what was then called the gay and lesbian movement in forcing one of the most remarkable attitudinal shifts since Americans north of the Mason-Dixon Line decided they really, really disliked slavery in the South.

“Circa 1950, homosexuality was universally reviled,” I wrote. “Today, people expressing a broad variety of sexual orientations are embraced by many Americans and accepted by most, excepting staunch conservatives. Gay interests are reflected in literature, political discourse, and popular entertainment. What made this happen? The gay community achieved irresistible visibility. ... The Stonewall riots, pride marches, and equal-rights legislation all helped to shift attitudes. But the gay movement’s most powerful strategy was also the simplest — its relentless call for gays and lesbians to ‘out’ themselves. Each person out of the closet made self-disclosure that much easier for the next. After millions came out, most Americans discovered that yes, they did know gays and lesbians firsthand as valued neighbors, coworkers, fellow students, fellow citizens. America’s gay minority delivered on its slogan, ‘We are everywhere’; that’s the real reason attitudes changed.”

I closed by calling for secular humanists and other nonbelievers to learn from this example and do likewise: “As individuals, we must seize every opportunity to out ourselves. As a group, we need to become a more effective minority, willing to plead for our privileges, willing to inflict legal and emotional costs when opponents violate our rights. We need to make ourselves more obvious, occasionally even at the price of making ourselves obnoxious. If we unbelievers were merely as vocal, as sensitive, as any other recognized minority in this culture, more Americans would know that we exist. More Americans would be aware of knowing people who live without religion. And attitudes would change.”

I repeated that call in a February/March op-ed, “Why the ‘A’ Word Won’t Go Away” (Feb/Mar 2008; this one is available online, at http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_28_2 ).

Of course, that position was never based on more than my common-sense observation. And no end of critics warned that too much assertiveness would make conditions worse, not better, for secular Americans.

If only the social sciences could weigh in and offer a judgment one way or the other.

Ah, they have.

In a January 29 piece on Examiner.com (http://www.examiner.com/article/science-says-atheists-should-come-out-of-the-closet-for-their-own-good), journalist William Hamby reports on a 2011 study by University of Kentucky social psychologist Will M. Gervais published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Spoiler alert: Hamby’s piece was headlined “Science Says Atheists Should Come Out of the Closet for Their Own Good.” According to Hamby, reserarch by Gervais spectacularly confirmed the hypothesis that “If Christians were to realize just how many atheists there really are, their conceptions of atheists would be challenged, since so many of their neighbors—and often dear friends—are secretly atheist.”

You know, exactly what I’ve been arguing for a decade.

Among the findings, as summarized by Hamby: “When prejudiced religious people come to believe that atheists are very common, their opinion of atheists shifts away from distrust towards more acceptance ... the message for individual ‘closet atheists’ is remarkably clear. By doing nothing other than publicly identifying as atheists, they can play a valuable part in reducing anti-atheist prejudice nationwide.”

In all mock humbleness, it’s nice to have one of my pet talking points receive such unequivocal support. Now I think  I’ll sit back and wait for conclusive proof that the Santa Claus myth damages children.

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In a harrowing article titled “The Myth of Human Progress,” (http://www.alternet.org/environment/myth-human-progress?paging=off), Pulitzer-winning reporter Hedges samples the opinions of a stable of experts convinced that by our failure to heed the Malthusian warnings of half a century ago, we have already doomed our grandchildren to a worldscape far less inviting than the one we’re accustomed to. Is it already too late to stave off a future collapse? Does human nature doom us to play out the scenario of Easter Island, the Maya, and the Roman Empire one last time on a planetary scale? My own longstanding suspicions that this might be the case is one of the reasons I opted never to have children. Those of you who do “have a dog in this fight,” what do you think? Will Paul R. Ehrlich et. al. have the last laugh? Have we pushed the agenda of unsustainability too far? Comments encouraged!

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Prager feels compelled to tip his hat to Jacoby, whom he describes (accurately) as a “well-regarded writer” before he accuses her of illustrating “the intellectual and emotional emptiness at the heart of atheism.” He dismisses the consolation Jacoby suggested—that if there is no afterlife, then bereaved parents can take at least some comfort from the knowledge that their children are not suffering.

Where to begin? First off, Prager gives no thought to the possibility that atheism might be true. If atheism is true, then Jacoby’s consolation—thin gruel as it is, admittedly, compared to the hope of eternal felicity in heaven—is the best anyone can do. If there are no souls, no eternal life, and no heaven, then the false conviction that these things exist is a cruel and empty consolation indeed. But Prager pays that no heed, simply asserting in passing that “I am intellectually convinced that only an Intelligence (i. e., God) could have created intelligence.” Sorry, Mr. Prager, if you want to engage this issue authentically you’ll need to do better than that.

Prager denies that “the dead do not suffer” offers any true consoling power. “Were these children suffering before their lives were taken?” he asks. “Would they have suffered if they had lived on?” If you live in  the real world, you know the answer is yes. Everyone suffers! Children get taunted on the playground, they fall and skin their knees. Their dogs bite them. When they get older, they’ll probably have their hearts broken a few times. Maybe they’ll lose a valued job, maybe they’ll go through a bitter divorce. Some of them will die too young of terrible diseases, whether in childhood, young adulthood, or middle age. And some will know truly terrible suffering from chronic disease, injury, or violence. That’s just life. Fortunately life also has times of happiness, and if we are fortunate we can look forward to lives with more happiness than suffering. But some suffering awaits us all; it’s a lottery of pain we have no choice but to play. The children who died at Sandy Hook were playing it too, and it’s outrageous for Prager to suggest that saying so is in any way insulting to their parents. So yes, there is some consolation in knowing that the dead are no longer taking their chances with agony.

Amazingly, Prager admits it: “This sentiment can provide some consolation — though still nothing comparable to the affirmation of an afterlife.” No argument. What Prager leaves unspoken is that the Christian vision of the afterlife is truly consoling only if it is true.

We should probably devote some attention to another inconvenient fact. As many Christians still view the afterlife, it isn’t all bliss. There’s supposedly that place that isn’t heaven, and more conservative believers think it’s very real. Some still believe that even young children can wind up in hell, or perhaps in some celestial holding area that spares their souls the pains of hell but denies them also the joys of heaven. (The Catholic Church no longer teaches that the souls of children younger than seven are warehoused in Limbo, but millions of Catholics around the world still believe that. And some evangelicals who set great store by adult baptism still teach that young children’s souls can wind up in that lake of fire.) So the atheist view offers an additional consolation. Not only are the dead not suffering the inescapable pains of living, they are exempt from any threat of eternal hellfire. Hmm, the atheist view is looking better!

Now Prager fires his big gun, rolling out what he considers a truly honest atheist response to the parents of Sandy Hook. “‘As atheists, we truly feel awful for you.” he writes. “‘And we promise to work for more gun control. But the truth is we don’t have a single consoling thing to say to you because we atheists recognize that the human being is nothing more than matter, no different from all other matter in the universe except for having self-consciousness. Therefore, when we die, that’s it. Moreover, within a tiny speck of time in terms of the universe’s history, nearly every one of us, including your child, will be completely forgotten, as if we never even existed. Life is a random crapshoot. Our birth and existence are flukes. And you will never see your child again.’”

There is much in this statement that cannot be argued with. On the naturalistic view of life, when we die, that is it. Ours is a tiny speck of time in terms of the universe’s history, and on the long view every one of us—even human civilization itself—probably will vanish without a trace. I’ve written often that secular humanists and other atheists need to be far more forthright about admitting that we view reality this way. Yes, it is a colder, less satisfying view of eternity than those advanced by various religions. Yes, it is less congruent with the way we thinking, feeling mammals are wired to wish the universe was. In many ways, it is undeniable: the best thing you can say for this flinty view of life is that it is almost certainly true.

Of course, if it is true—and if all the more satisfying, glittering afterlives promised by the world’s religions are false—little more needs to be said.

What can atheists and other freethinkers say in the face of death? Yes, life is short and nowhere near as meaningful as many Americans are raised to believe. Yes, death is forever. No, the bereaved will never see their loved ones again. I wouldn’t recommend shouting these truths in anyone’s face at a funeral, but they provide the unspoken backdrop for the fact that Susan Jacoby got exactly right. If we view life and the world the way it really is—as best we can determine at our current level of knowledge—then it is the greatest consolation we can offer to observe that the dead do not suffer. It is in fact the only consolation we can offer sincerely.

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To the editors,

Samuel G. Freedman (“In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent,” Dec. 29) is to be commended for his fairness in recognizing that humanists were as much shut out of the supportive response to the Newtown killings as they were “absent.” All of the victims’ families chose religious observances, and the religious community’s embrace of “interfaith” activities effectively shut out those who live without faith. Still, both Mr. Freedman and the individuals he quoted miss the larger point: it is both unfair and foolish to expect highly secularized, nonreligious people to respond to traumatic events in a way that closely mirrors the response of churchgoers’ congregations. _Secular_ humanists, insofar as they are truly secular, have emancipated themselves from the very notion of sequestering themselves into local parochial communities segregated by lifestance. Religious believers often seek emotional support by gathering with others who see the world largely as they do, through their local congregations; secular humanists are different precisely in that they do not. Secular humanists are more likely to plug directly into the larger culture and to seek to meet their emotional needs in ways that do not require first that the person next to them shares their worldview. When pain becomes unbearable, churchgoers may turn to a pastor or similar local leader whose qualifications as a de facto therapist may vary widely. Secular humanists are more likely to make an individual decision to seek a professional therapist, without relying on any intermediary community. That is not  a shortcoming on the part of secular humanists; it is simply a difference in the way that members of that group engage with life. What is sadder, perhaps, is the spectacle of non-secular humanists trying so hard to imitate the way the churches respond to trauma and tragedy.

Thomas Flynn
Executive Director, the Council for Secular Humanism
Editor, FREE INQUIRY magazine

 We’ve all beheld the dialogue-stopping power of appeals to righteous indignation or sanctity. By their use, defenders of dogma and repression have sought to insulate their ideologies—even their whole communities—from comment, criticism, or public scrutiny. Don’t publish cartoons that mock Muhammad, because Muslims will be overcome by righteous indignation. In their rage they will wreak terrible destruction ... and it will all be your fault. Don’t be critical of female genital mutiliation in countries where it is encouraged or demanded by the ascendant religion; it is sacred to that faith’s adherents and we have no right to traduce their creed. Arguments of this sort are central to the pushback against initiatives like the Center for Inquiry’s Campaign for Free Expression (http://www.centerforinquiry.net/cfe/); they set the air abuzz when proposals to prohibit criticism of religion are considered in venues like the United Nations. When it’s a confrontation between Western privilege and Third World piety—between guilt-prone liberals and Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”—it can be tempting to give these arguments far more credit than they deserve.

“Indignation Is Not Righteous,” by writer Gary Longsine and philosopher Peter Boghossian, sets the record straight. This brief but hugely thought-provoking article examines the appeals to righteous indignation and sanctity from historical, philosophical, and moral perspectives, and shows exactly why they are blatant fallacies capable of wreaking great harm.

Every campaigner for the right to discuss or criticize on any subject, even a “sacred” one—anyone who has ever face the well-meant but absurd argument that for us to judge authentic peoples of other cultures by own blundering standards is arrogant and unfair—needs to read Longsine and Boghossian’s article. For the next month and a half (give or take), you’ll need to lay your hands on a hardcopy issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER in order to see it.

 Here’s the background. My longtime lifepartner and more recent wife Sue has her birthday on December 27. (I sometimes think she loves me because I’m the only person she ever met who really pays attention to her birthday, being undistracted by adjacent events on the calendar.) Every year we do a little resort getaway centered on her birthday, taking advantage of the cutthroat discounts often available for stays at a destination venue between the holiday I shall not name and New Year’s.

This year, as it happened, an obscenely good discount was available, but only for a stay including the 25th. (Did I mention that this resort is owned by non-Christians?) Obviously, when you’re the Anti-Claus this poses a conundrum. I go to work on Xmas because to me, it’s just another day. But if I’m serious about treating Xmas as just another day ... well, if a deal this good came along in June or July for someplace my wife and I go in the summer, I’d jump on it and put in for those days off. If Xmas is really “just another day,” then I shouldn’t be obdurate about sitting behind my desk. If it’s a day I’d take as vacation under other circumstances, then I should take that day as vacation, without regard for whether it’s also Jesus’s birthday observed.

So that’s the deal. Don’t call me at work on the 25th, I won’t be there. But fear not, I won’t be celebrating Xmas. I’ll be starting my birthday getaway with my wife a little early. Happy humbug to all and to all an ordinary day!