What Does Religious Freedom Day Really Mean?

January 10, 2012 by Doug

image of the logo for Religious Freedom Day January 16th is National Religious Freedom Day. The day commemorates the Virginia General Assembly’s adoption of Thomas Jefferson’s landmark Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom on January 16, 1786. The Virginia Statute was the basis of the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution and also can be used to support Jefferson’s idea of the separation of church and state. The Religious Right have of course co-opted the day by mass marketing misleading information about what real religious freedom means in this country. Luckily, Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) has some help available to tell the truth.
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Not All Opinions Are Created Equal

October 16, 2011 by Doug

image of people arguing Read an interesting post on the American Atheist website. The topic was about people who say “I have the right to my own opinion” when their beliefs are challenged. The author, Justin Vacula, made some good points as to why such a statement is the wrong one to use is discussions.
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Humanism is a Hollywood default

September 28, 2011 by Doug

image of the poster for the 1st season of Terra Nova on FOX The Humanist philosophy isn’t just expressed in academic journals or talked about in monthly meetings. There is a creative expression we can see in various films and TV shows. To be “Humanism”, religion is either nonexistent or not important to the overall story; people subscribe to and work within the social contract and those that don’t, don’t profit from non-participation; human problems are solved by humans using reason and logic and not magical thinking; and humanist movies and shows are optimistic about humanity even if the settings and plots don’t start out as optimistic.
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September 11th – A Humanist Response 10 Years On

September 11, 2011 by Doug

Image of NY Times front page Those images from that dark day pop into my head from time to time. That 2nd plane plows into the south tower of the World Trade Center over and over and over again. The images don’t come as much as they did in the weeks after the attack but my feelings have stayed the same. I wrote the following essay five days after the attacks and on the fifth anniversary I wrote the prolog before the essay. The ideas and feelings in both stay with me on this 10th anniversary.
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Humanists have fun too

June 18, 2011 by Doug

Last Saturday June 11th, the Humanist Community of Central Ohio held its summer picnic at the Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park near Columbus. Here is a short video I took showing the good time we had. This is typical of our group. We’ve been a group since 1980.

The food was good and we had WAY too many desserts. Along with a strong number of Columbus people we also had visitors from Dayton and Mansfield. Activities included walking on stilts, hiking to see the new Bison, and making S’mores.

Humanist Community of Central Ohio 2011 Summer Picnic

For more info on the group check out the Humanist Community of Central Ohio’s website.

Refresh of iHumanism theme and other bits

June 17, 2011 by Doug

I had been wanting to update the theme I use for iHumanism ever since WordPress was updated to version 3. My previous theme was almost 3 years old and I wanted to be able to take advantage of some of the new features of the software. Today I debut a working draft of my new iHumanism theme.

But Doug it doesn’t look different than before?

That’s right. While I was building it, I tried different looks but came back to the format of the current blog. The difference is I modified the basic Toolbox theme created by the people at Automattic and worked hard on the CSS styling.

What you, the reader gets, is a blog that will be able to take advantage of the newer features of WordPress – like for example the menu bar with links to the About page etc… In the previous theme I had to code it by hand.

Some new things included is the central “Follow iHumanism” in the sidebar with links to the RSS feed, Facebook fan page, and a Twitter Follow button.

On the individual post pages a new floating share box, like seen on sites like Mashable, will have a fixed location to share the post to Facebook, Twitter, and the new Google +1 for example.

I also moved the previous Secular Humanist News links to the sidebar and renamed them iHumanism News Links. Didn’t care to see “Secular Humanist News links” one after the other in the previous posts list.

As I said above this is a working draft so more tweaks will come as some information will be removed or changed and if people let me know if something is broken.

Feel free to give me feedback either in the comments of this post or use the contact page.