Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
This week the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) is celebrating the work the student affiliate groups do during the year with the “SSA Week 2013”. During the week some bloggers and other online voices will be posting special content to ask people to donate to the group. The SSA does special work and needs your support to keep the quality up and to reach more students.
It was a rough week for a lot people last week. Two bombs were set off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. A fertilizer plant blew up in Texas on Wednesday. The manhunt for the Boston bombing suspects heated up early Friday morning then concluded with the final suspect captured Friday evening. It is still early in these events and we don’t have all the information but I wanted to share some thoughts on the week where the known facts don’t match what is being said by other people.
Camp Quest Oklahoma set up a fundraiser at a BBQ restaurant in Broken Arrow. Ten percent of food and beverage proceeds would be donated to Camp Quest. The restaurant even signed off on the flyer people would use to initiate the donation. Just as the event was to take place, the owner pulled the plug because Camp Quest’s “beliefs” did not align with the Christian philosophy of his business. It didn’t matter the group didn’t hide its “beliefs”, the owner just didn’t like the fact that Camp Quest caters to atheist, agnostic, and freethinking families.
Text of the notice posted at the time the fundraiser was to take place:
April 8th 2013 is Holocaust Remembrance Day (aka Yom HaShoah) and begins the ‘The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust’ here in the United States. This year’s theme is Never Again: Heeding The Warning Signs which is a good idea no matter the reasons. Just as humans are capable of great kindness, we are also capable of great evil. We all need to heed the warning signs to try to prevent an immense evil like the Holocaust from happening again.
On Tuesday, leaders of most of the secular groups in the United States issued an open letter addressing the ongoing internal firestorm over social justice, sexism, and diversity in the freethought community taking place mainly in online forums and comment sections. I applaud the leaders wanting to take on this serious issue in the community and while it doesn’t go far enough in addressing the real issue in the dispute, I hope the letter does open the door to further progress.
You can read the letter at the end of this post then come back here for my comments.