Tom Flynn (author) - Principal Contentions

Principal Contentions

Secularist movement should emulate the strategies employed successfully by GLBT activists in recent decades, especially publicizing our numbers and encouraging nonbelievers to "out" themselves.

Secular humanists should stress that they are explicitly nonspriritual and should avoid using the word "spirit" and its cognates whenever possible.

Since long-term social trends are causing nonreligious institutions, public and private, to displace religious organizations as providers of social and community services, there is no reason for humanist and atheist organizations to launch sectarian charitable initiatives of their own patterned on those conducted by churches. Instead, nonbelievers who take secularization seriously should welcome the gradual disappearance of providers who discriminate according to worldview from the ranks of service providers.

The rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage is in one sense regrettable as it has co-opted the powerful GLBT movement to become a supporter of traditional matrimony. Prior to the emergence of same-sex marriage as an attainable reform goal, GLBT activism seemed more likely to compel the creation of a wholly secular civil union system that would have provided an alternative to traditional matrimony and would probably have seriously undercut it; in the long term this is a more desirable goal than simply expanding traditional marriage to include same-sex couples.

Overpopulation remains an existential threat to human welfare, and has been so since the late 1950s. Human numbers have become so excessive that over several generations they will need to be reduced several-fold in order to achieve long-term sustainability for the human community. It remains to be seen whether the environment has already been so degraded that long-term human survival will be possible at all.

Flynn has also written for Free Inquiry arguing that euthanasia in the form of mercy killing is acceptable. In the article, Flynn cast doubt on the usefulness of the doctrine of double effect which is used to justify a distinction between passive and active euthanasia.