On reading the following article—which was New Orleans’ informal public “introduction” to NOSHA—written by the now-retired Times-Picayune columnist Bruce Nolan one Saturday morning, I remember thinking to myself something like “hmm, very interesting..” followed by a quick rejection of the idea of getting involved, using the standard rationalizations that everyone has for not joining a group—”too busy…not enough spare time…I really wouldn’t like it….too much other stuff I need to do”. Twelve years later all those excuses had somehow disappeared when I rediscovered NOSHA by way of Facebook. I decided the time was right to get active.

Marty B., Ed.

 

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The  Times-Picayune – September 25, 1999                                                            

Odd but true: In the cultural conflicts of the role faith should play in public life, both  the faithful and the faithless think they are losing.

On one side, discourse is filled with Christians’ calls to place—or restore—God firmly in the center of community life because they see traditional virtues being strip-mined out of society to terrible effect. On the other is a new group of New Orleans atheists—some also call themselves secularists, free-thinkers, rationalists—forming a small community of nonbelievers because they, too, feel on the verge of being overwhelmed by other people’s values, especially their religious beliefs.

“If we at least let the world know we don’t have horns, I’d consider it time well spent,” said Harry Greenberger, a retired French Quarter art gallery manager and civic activist near the center of the organizing effort.

But more to the point, Greenberger and others say, they want an organization that can speak out for secular humanists—another self-description—on issues such as prayer in public school classrooms and biblically based opposition to gay and lesbian rights.

The New Orleans Secular Humanist Association has held several meetings during the past few weeks at the Community Church Unitarian Universalist Church, a non-dogmatic community so broad it welcomes a full spectrum of belief and even non-belief by those devoted simply to the pursuit of the common good.

At one level, believers and nonbelievers claim large swaths of common ground, even if they reach it by different paths.

Both groups largely agree on what makes a good community, abide by the same rules for personal conduct and honor the same virtues.

“I practice the golden rule,” said Greenberger, a lifelong nonbeliever. “But I don’t do it out of fear of going to hell. I do it because I think it’s good for civilization.”

But there also are vast differences between the camps, especially around codes of conduct, such as sexual issues, where traditional values are rooted in gender roles thought to be part of a divine design.

Greenberger, for one, said he thinks many people would benefit from exposure to others’ belief that morality is accessible outside religion.

Actually, the formation of the young New Orleans Secular Humanist Association is part of a national effort to bring “rational values” — another term for non-belief — to public discourse.

Weeks ago, solicitations seeking interest in such a group were sent to New Orleans area subscribers of Free Inquiry, a magazine for nonbelievers produced by the Council for Secular Humanism in Amherst, N.Y.

During the past year and a half, the association has tried to cultivate such grassroots organizations, which have nearly doubled to around 80 in communities around the country, said Matt Cherry, a Free Inquiry deputy editor in Marina del Rey, Calif.

In one sense, Cherry said, the groups are an end in themselves, providing a place in an overwhelmingly religious society where nonbelievers can make contact with others with the same worldview.

That can be a novel experience in American society, he said, where fewer than 10 percent of Americans say they do not believe in any deity or spiritual dimension.

But “for myself, I’m not interested in some little conversation group where we sit around and tell each other we’re right,” Greenberger said. “I already know that.”

There are many rationalists who say they want to do something about the sense that they are being overwhelmed by religion in America, where in Greenberger’s view, it is almost a social offense to proclaim oneself an atheist — and certain political suicide.

Many believers find themselves baffled at Greenberger’s assertion of powerlessness.

“I cannot imagine what they’re talking about,” said the Rev. Stanley Klores, a theologian at Notre Dame University. “If they cannot see we live in a secular humanist culture, I really have to question their powers of discernment.”

Movies, TV, major intellectual centers such as universities and journals of news and opinion are in the hands of secular humanists who set a “valueless tolerate-everything tone,” he said.

“What we’ve really got from these sources is a value-free approach, a kind of relativism in which there are no absolutes,” Klores said. “Or if there are, it’s whatever absolute I wish to espouse for myself.”

Still, humanists are alarmed by popular movements to bring organized prayer to public school classrooms and attempts to limit or roll back the gay-rights movement and, as in Kansas, to limit teaching the theory of evolution in public schools.

In many cases, they make traditional separation of church and state arguments because they believe, Cherry said, that keeping the two separate benefits nonbelievers and religious minorities equally.

But they would seek more, Cherry acknowledged, wishing for a public discourse in which religious belief or an interpretation of the Bible or other sacred text cannot be offered as the sole basis for public policy.

Nor even as a mark of the American character, he said, as when the dollar bill or the Pledge of Allegiance invoke the name of God as touchstones of Americanism.

“When (President) Clinton ends a talk saying, ‘God bless America,’ and makes belief an example of patriotism, he’s saying humanists are not patriotic Americans,” Cherry said. “And we don’t feel that’s right.”