Principles

This is the recap by Frank Robinson, of a presentation by August Brunsman, at the April 8th, 2007 CDHS monthly meeting.

Our speaker was August E. Brunsman IV, a member of our own CDHS, and Executive Director of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA), a national organization founded in 2000. August is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Ohio State University with a degree in Psychology, and recently relocated to Albany, which is the new headquarters of the SSA, housed in the Institute for Humanist Studies. His talk was introduced with a $500 donation check from our organization to his.

August's lively presentation aimed to put us in the picture concerning the SSA's doings. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization, whose main activity is to support and unite about 80 affiliated campus groups throughout the nation (and even in some exotic foreign countries such as Cameroon and Nepal), while trying to nurture the development of more such groups, promoting ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human-based ethics.

To highlight the importance of getting young people involved, August explained that they are the best positioned to reach out and communicate with other people in their own age bracket, which is moreover the cohort most apt to question their beliefs and consider new ideas. Today's students, he said, are tomorrow's leaders. A further point was that the university environment makes available a lot of resources, including cold hard cash, to promote campus organizations, and there is certainly every reason why atheists should take advantage of such opportunities for promoting our message and participating in the marketplace of ideas.

After all, as we know too well, the broader culture has some "issues" about its attitude toward atheists. August deemed it important to make the public aware that atheists don't eat babies. (Well, most us don't, he said; this is a problem we are working on.)

A number of specific initiatives were discussed. One was a particularly active group at the University of Minnesota, Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists (CASH), whose slogan is "the best damned group on campus since 1991" (making a little pun on a concept from religion. Actually, of course, we atheists know that we are the ones headed for Heaven, and it's all the religious believers who are going to Hell.) CASH has hosted three humanist conferences and has glommed over $8,000 of university program funding.

Also mentioned was Hemant Mehta's book, I Sold My Soul on eBay. It fetched $504. Actually, what he sold was his attending various churches at $10 per hour, and his book was about the resulting peregrination, while promoting atheism as a wholesome American way of life. This project gained quite a bit of attention, including front page coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

August also talked about a big conference in Boston on "The New Humanism" featuring such luminaries as Salman Rushdie, Steven Pinker, and E.O. Wilson. Unfortunately, it will be past by the time you're reading this, which demonstrates the value of actually attending our meetings as opposed to just reading about them in this newsletter. And if you missed this meeting, you also missed the exceptionally scrumptious refreshments provided by the Sagers, in honor of the Easter holiday, which we secularists of course don't actually celebrate. (The Sagers assure us that the food items were entirely baby-free, this time.)

August Brunsman / The Secular Student Alliance