Freedom From Religion Foundation's 34th Annual Convention

Weekend of October 7-9, 2011
Marriott Hartford Downtown
200 Columbus Blvd
Hartford, Connecticut

The convention will open formally on Friday night with speeches and a celebratory des­­­­­­­­sert reception, continue through Saturday and conclude by noon Sunday morning after membership and Board of Director meetings. To tour the Twain house, plan your itinerary to make time on Friday afternoon.

Newest announced speakers:

Harvard's evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker, who will speak on Friday night. Pinker will be on hand to sign his newest book, out in time for the convention, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Declined. Pinker has previously won an Emperor Has No Clothes Award and is an honorary director of FFRF. Also just announced, Dylan Galos, a graduate student whose "I can be good without God" offering in FFRF's Out of the Closet billboard campaign in Columbus was censored twice before finding a safe home! Dylan will receive a $1,000 student activist award in the Saturday morning program.
Broadway composer Charles Strouse!! The man who wrote the music to the musicals Annie and Bye Bye Birdie and many other beloved songs will accept FFRF's "Emperor Has No Clothes" award. He is a life-long atheist who has not hesitated to "tell it like it is" regarding religion.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments For the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, will be named Freethought Heroine 2011. Her speech is titled “36 (Bad) Arguments For the Existence of God.”
Professor Jerry Coyne will accept FFRF’s Emperor Has No Clothes Award at the convention. Coyne, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, is author of the 2009 book, Why Evolution is True. His plain-spoken column, “Science and religion aren’t friends,” appeared in USA Today in October 2010.
Joseph Taylor, (known as "Ojo" Taylor is a songwriter, pianist and producer for the top-of-the-charts Christian rock group Undercover. He is the founder and general manager of Brainstorm Artists International / Innocent Media, a production company and record label distributed by Sony Music and Word Records and distributed all over the world. Joe has produced albums for Grammy and Dove award-winning groups. Now a professor of music at James Madison University, Joe will talk about his deconversion from Christian entertainer to nonbelieving educator.
Also receiving awards will be two FFRF activists. Steve Trunk, an FFRF Board and Lifetime Member, will receive the Atheist in Foxhole Award as plaintiff in a lawsuit in which the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in January declared the Mount Soledad cross in San Diego unconstitutional.
Mitch Kahle, founder of Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church, will be named Freethinker of the Year for persuading the Hawaii Senate in January to drop prayers to open legislative sessions. Kahle, a longtime FFRF supporter, was roughed up by Senate security for protesting prayers.

To register: http://www.ffrf.org/outreach/convention/convention-registration/ .

Shomrim's Cover-up?

Recently I read an interesting article in the Village Voice (it can be found online here), which tells about the apparently selective protection the Shomrim, Hasidic volunteer neighborhood patrol, afford their constituents.  While helping the police keep violent crime down (not a huge problem in a Hasidic neighborhood, I would imagine), they seem to be very reluctant to report child abuse and similar crimes to the police, instead reporting them (if at all) to a rabbi.  The article comes very close to accusing the Shomrim of a complicity in Leiby Kletzky's death (they took a long time to notify the police).

The Shmorim is publicly funded (they have received more than $100,000 from New York City for equipment and such), which makes it even more important to demand a reckoning.

Humanistic Jews Were Here First

The other day I got a call from a woman who wanted to know more about my congregation’s Rosh Hashana services (she correctly heard that they are free).  She was taken aback, though, when I explained what Humanistic Judaism is.  Unfortunately, the absence of prayers (we have no one to pray to) was too much for her.  Like many American Jews, she finds the idea that one can be a Jew and yet not pray to god incomprehensible (since I grew up in the Soviet Union, the idea has been very familiar to me—I didn’t know a single Jew who prayed).

It is particularly sad that most American Jews still view belief in the biblical god an essential requirement for being counted as one of the chosen people in view of recent research that seems to show that many of the first Jews to live in the new world were freethinkers, at best (or, perhaps, at worst) believing in the god of Spinoza. In fact, this is how Inquisition advised the faithful to determine who was Jewish in the New World:

If a person claims that there is no more to life than being born and dying, he is a Jew; if he says that there is no Heaven for those who are good, or Hell for those who are evil, he is a Jew; and one who declares that fornication is not a mortal sin is a Jew.

For more insight, please visit this web site.

SHJ Joins Supreme Court Amicus Brief Opposing Religious Employers' Right to Discriminatory Hiring Practices

The Society for Humanistic Judaism has joined with the American Humanist Association and other non-theistic organizations in filing an amicus brief in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, which will be heard by the US Supreme Court during its fall term. This case raises the issue of whether religious employers should have a special right, a right that non-religious employers do not have, to ignore federal anti-discrimination laws and discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age, or disability if done in connection with an employee deemed "ministerial." The lower federal courts have created this "ministerial" exception to the anti-discrimination laws on the grounds that the First Amendment's Religion Clauses prevent the courts from intervening. The SHJ sided with the EEOC in arguing that religious employers should NOT be allowed to discriminate on these non-religious grounds.

The case concerns core humanist values regarding the equal, fair, and just application of our anti-discrimination laws to all employers, both secular and religious. As amici, we wish "to bolster the principle of religious neutrality: that government may not prefer religion over nonreligion" by asking that the lower court reject the ministerial exception and rule on the merits of the plaintiff's discrimination claim. The brief argues: "A decision of this Court recognizing the ministerial exception would have the constitutionally impermissible effect of denying equal protection of the laws to the employees of religious organizations and of advancing religion by creating special rights for religious defendants, and in so doing undermine the rule of law."