The Reason Freethought Groups Work
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/13
I’m going to meander a bit.
Even though they work on shoestring budgets, they tend to work more than fail. That’s baffling at face value. We can reflect on why, though.
The fundamental practical reason for the success of the freethought movements, personalities, and organizations is this: We live in unjust societies. Justice and truth tend to speak for themselves.
So, the cost to speak to them and actualize them is low. The cost to repress and suppress them is high. That is an intriguing point. It simply sucks to know the truth about one’s society because all societies have their crimes. The current mistake is to take the crimes for the society today.
They have them hidden. They have their elites and educated classes, many of whom have devoted careers to suppressing society’s truisms. These crimes are rooted in a deep aspect of human psychology: We’re deeply violent — to the environment, to one another, and to ourselves.
The late Lee Maracle spoke to these truths, in fact, about the — if taking a single example — parallel in violence against women of culture and violence to the environment, or rather disregard for the health of the ecosystems sustaining us. That is a subtle and essential point.
Canada has a wide range of humanist groups explicitly or humanistic organizations implicitly. North America, too, as is the case with most advanced industrial economies.
In societies where the necessities of life are more met than in other societies and where there are no concerted coercion efforts to delude the public, humanistic values pervade the societies as the air and humanist organizations emerge in these pockets more likely than not.
The nature of the movements is based on parts of history, modernity, and even pre-history, where affluence is present to fully develop the brain and body.
Cognition and physical ailments are minimized. Time for education and resources are available for that education with fewer socioeconomic barriers, e.g., class or caste.
That’s why primarily majoritarian societies or sectors of society with majoritarian rule tend to have human subtypes pop up. On the flip side, it’s also why demagogues crop up, too, like weeds.
Freethought societies form in these contexts, milieus. They aren’t accidents. They’re organic growths, like a froth of fertile roses in proper soil. There are many elements, which is also the reason for the historical fragility in formal organization.
They have been wiped out, too. The discarded remnants and disparate elements are not eliminated, though, as these elements permit them to flourish in other parts of the culture — even the most oppressive.
That’s why I think the addition to the newest Amsterdam Declaration was important in framing this as a historical and global emergence — so many different periods and cultures — as well as a contemporary Western structure. In historical terms, no one gets to own it because there is no governor anywhere for it; at the same time, everyone gets to own it, likewise, in modernist terms.
The functionality of human groups and individuals in societies is a pursuit of truth in an empiricist, rational, and compassionate mind. Anything less would be less than humanist.
The reason religious groups become so powerful is the financial backing and life commitment of that financial support of religious believers. If you remove the tithes or zakat, for example, if you take away the tax-exempt status on land and buildings, if you remove public donations, if you remove grant money from the municipalities, provinces/states/territories, and federal monied help, religious groups tend to collapse.
Freethought groups, not so much. They run on low budgets far often — look at the global South groups. They should get most of the funding because of the great value of their contribution and the currency exchange rate valuation. Your currency makes a more significant difference in a poorer country than yours.
Donations to global South freethought organizations matter more in that regard. Freethought organizations pursuing honest education in science and the humanities are gems.
If we are committed to the pursuit of justice, truth, and a sense of grounded fairness, we should acknowledge and support freethought organizations and champion our public figures as much as justifiably possible, except in rare cases of crimes.
That’s my hope for us. I am not simply making this request of others; I have done so myself.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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