Writing in NOSHA News fifteen years ago this month, Connie Gordon Schultz marked  the occasion of the first meeting of the “revived and reconstituted” New Orleans Secular Humanist Association after the crushing devastation Hurricane Katrina bore on the city, and perhaps prophetically, but certainly welcomed, the reunification was just in time for the group’s  annual winter solstice celebration December 18, 2005. About 30 members, some of which are shown in the photo, attended and […]

The modern humanist tradition, both secular and religious, appears to have escaped a serious threat to its progress, perhaps even its survival with the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election for President. Trump’s incompetence as a leader and lack of inspiration as a visionary, coupled with his keen but bungling aptitude for authoritarian, anti-democratic, and demagogic persuasion and control, and his divisive rhetoric, mendacity, and self-dealing corruption  would have given him, had he won, free reign to further […]

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis was just a symptom of a problem that America has and was one of many signals of how America has changed and how dangerous the resistance to that change has become. The dangerous part? The American right is showing increasing signs of tolerating authoritarianism with the involvement of police and federal officers to shut down all demonstrations that were the biggest since the Civil Rights Movement in 1964.    The Republican party has […]

Is there a thread of connection between national and world events that have at once threatened the health and life of large swaths of the human population in the form of an extremely contagious viral invasion evolving into a global pandemic, and an uprising of protests in dozens of cities in the United States sparked, ostensibly, by the video of the clumsy yet brutally degrading execution of a black citizen—protests which have become, much as COVID-19, a worldwide phenomenon? If […]

      With a little imagination, it is not hard to visualize Eduardo Morales feat of engineering as acting out in real time a classic thought experiment in the study of ethics and morality.    Morales was shuffling train cars with his engine at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro when he (self-admittedly) “snapped” and engineered (drove?) his locomotive engine off the end of the track and toward the hospital ship USNS Mercy. The ship was tied […]