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:
“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)
“...I have never known a movement in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various uplifting activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (18651932)
“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
—Marta Zahaykevich, Ucranian born-U.S. psychitrist. Critical Perspectives on Adult Womens Development, (1980)