Activities
The council acts as an umbrella organization for a number of other groups, such as the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, African Americans for Humanism, and provides support for Center for Inquiry - On Campus. It also publishes several magazines and newsletters, including Free Inquiry. The council was founded by Dr. Paul Kurtz, who also founded CSICOP (now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and the Center for Inquiry.
The council is a member organisation of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and endorses both the IHEU minimum statement of Humanism (ref bylaw 5.1 ) and the Amsterdam Declaration 2002).
The Council for Secular Humanism with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and The Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health are all headquartered at the Center for Inquiry, adjacent to the State University of New York.
The council made news in 2006 when Borders Group refused to carry the April–May issue of Free Inquiry in their Borders and Waldenbooks stores because of the magazine's publication of 4 cartoons that originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and sparked violent worldwide Muslim protests. (The reason given by Borders for their decision was not sensitivity to religion but fear of illegal violence.) The Free Inquiry affair was reminiscent of a 1989 withdrawal of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses by Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the aftermath of a death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against the British author.
Read more about this topic: Council For Secular Humanism
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)