Last Day — let’s bring it home!
We’re in the final hours of the Foundation Beyond Belief fund drive. As of 10AM noon 8PM on this the final day, we’ve raised an amazing 81 percent 85 percent 90 percent of the funds we need to see us through to January 1!
It’s getting exciting now. The Board has selected two of the featured causes for the launch and will announcing them (and the rest) beginning in October. Both the website and brand new logo are under construction. And our publicist is feverishly working on a promotional campaign that will swell the ranks of our membership.
Thousands of atheists and humanists coming together to make a positive change in countless lives around the world–THAT’S the vision we’re building here. And it’s working because of your generosity in this fund drive.
If you haven’t chipped in yet, I hope you’ll help us reach the goal. Click on the ChipIn! button in the sidebar to give whatever you can manage. Thanks for your support and encouragement.
Dale
(NOTE: The widget says the drive ends Sept 2 — that means midnight tonight.)
That’s what I’M talkin’ about!
After watching the Founding Fund Drive for Foundation Beyond Belief slow nearly to a stop at 37 percent of the goal, we are now back on track with a bullet. In a single day, the generosity and commitment of our supporters sent us tearing through the halfway point. As of Wednesday morning, we’re 54 percent of the way home.
We’re not finished yet, but we’re now within striking distance of establishing the first-stage web presence for this pioneering effort in humanist philanthropy on October 1. At that point members will begin registering, setting up personal profiles, learning about our first slate of beneficiaries, and planning their monthly donation strategy.
Donations received between October 1 and December 31 go to the Foundation itself to help fund the first year of operations. When the full site launches on January 1, members will begin distributing their monthly donation among ten cause areas, forming groups, debating causes, following a brand new blog — and making a profound positive impact in the world.
The renewed vigor of the Fund Drive has energized everyone working for the Foundation and redoubled our determination to justify your trust and do this thing right.
Look for a normal, non-Foundational post tomorrow soon. In the meantime, many thanks to those who have donated! For those who were waiting for the drama of the final stretch: THE END TIMES ARE UPON US! Help us reach the goal that will put the Foundation on solid ground by donating through the ChipIn widget in the sidebar.
So…are you in?
Foundation Beyond Belief is halfway through its first fund drive—but only 37 percent of the way to the goal.
Over 1600 people expressed their support for this project by signing up for our mailing list and Facebook group—a fantastic show of enthusiasm. But just four percent of those have so far been moved to donate to this crucial fund drive. We are enormously grateful to those few—but we need the rest of you.
Here’s why.
By the end of next year, we hope to empower a new force in philanthropic giving, fuel the great work of over thirty charitable organizations around the world, and begin to transform the popular perception of secular humanism. On the educational side, we will create both a community and a resource center for nonreligious parents.
To accomplish all of this, we need a world-class web center—not just a “brochure” site with a donation button, but a touchpoint and resource center for a vibrant and engaged community of humanists.
The site will include detailed information about featured organizations, a forum and social network for members to debate, investigate, and help select future beneficiaries, an invitational blog on humanism and philanthropy, and profiles to allow members to distribute their monthly donations among the causes as they see fit.
So—IF you support this idea, and IF you can spare the shekels, please take a moment to help create this Foundation by making a donation of any size in the sidebar.
We’ll do our best to make you proud.
Dale McGowan
Executive Director
Foundation Beyond Belief
Fear and Loathing in Chicago
Today’s post was supposed to be the traditional Shaming of the Bystanders to encourage donations to Foundation Beyond Belief. But events have o’ertaken me.
Laurie Higgins, one of an apparent two members of a group called Illinois Family Institute (italics theirs) is doing what so many conservative religious groups do best: working 24/7 to keep people terrified — especially of people who are different from themselves. Ms. Higgins has now interrupted a long screed warning about a carnival of recreational abortion and Logan’s Run-style euthanasia that the Obama adminstration is said to be working on (why doesn’t anyone tell me about these things?) so she could frighten Chicago parents about the presence of a high school math teacher whose religious views do not conform to James Dobson’s.
Worse yet, he’s an atheist. And a non-closeted one.
It’s not that he’s mentioned his views in class, or tried to recruit students, or made use of equations that always come out to 666, or worse yet, zero. The stated concern is that students might look up to him. The IFI suggests that concerned parents request that their children be transferred to another teacher, and furthermore implies that if they aren’t concerned, they bloody well should be.
“It’s all about diversity and choice,” she writes. Using the latter to flee the former, I guess.
The good news in all this is that the teacher in question is the bright, funny, and level-headed Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta. If anyone can handle this kind of nonsense well, it’s Hemant.
Like other sufferers of RFD (Religious Freedom Deafness), Ms. Higgins is making herself an incredible pain, but when there’s someone of Hemant’s caliber in the hotseat, it can all end up rather well. In the end, by simply being normal and allowing Ms. Higgins to be decidedly otherwise, he’ll bring credit to us all. And the non-crazy majority of religious folks will learn something about the non-crazy majority of the nonreligious, which means some genuine good can come out of it.
How he first caught their eye
She attacks
He replies
She issues an “open letter”
(etc)
The FBB Founding Fund Drive
Two big news items for Foundation Beyond Belief, the new humanist charitable and educational foundation scheduled to launch on January 1:
Web designer selected
Our call for web designers brought applications from 19 high-quality professionals. After a process both excruciating and exciting, the Foundation Board has selected From Concept to Completion to create the initial “pre-launch” site by October 1 AND our fully functional online community for humanist philanthropy by January 1. Our sincere thanks to all those who applied.
Founding Fund Drive
The Foundation is ready at last to accept tax-deductible donations! Our Founding Fund Drive, which begins today and runs through Sept. 1, will help create a world-class web presence for the Foundation community and spread the word about the Foundation through a professional publicity campaign.
We’re working hard to make this initiative a powerful expression of humanism at its very best. Many thanks for your support and encouragement, as well as your patience as we find our way forward.
(To contribute, please click on the big blue ChipIn widget at the top of the sidebar.)
I looove me a good correlation
A member of the PBB Forum recently recommended The Kids’ Book of World Religions. Try though I do to keep up with these things, I hadn’t heard of this one, so I clicked over to Amazon for a look.
I scrolled down the page to the “Frequently Bought Together” feature (wherein Amazon tries to convince you to buy another particular book or two because other visitors to the page are doing so) and did a classic doubletake when I saw the two books they were bundling together with this survey of world religions: Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers.
“Huh,” I said, in those exact words.
These things are generated automatically, so it was a pretty reliable indication that people interested in one were often interested in the others. I scrolled down further and discovered that fully 28 percent of the people who view the page for The Kids’ Book of World Religions end up buying one of my books.
Another book linked to that page was Mary Pope Osborne’s One World, Many Religions. I clicked over to that page and found that it too was “Frequently Bought Together” with Parenting Beyond Belief. (This wasn’t completely surprising, since this title — unlike every other title in this post — is recommended in Raising Freethinkers.)
I popped ’round to Many Ways: How Families Practice Their Beliefs and Religions and learned that “Customers Also Bought” PBB. Twelve percent of visitors to The Story of Religion by Betsy Maestro end up buying PBB instead, as do nine percent of visitors to My Friends’ Beliefs: A Young Reader’s Guide to World Religions.
As of yesterday – these things do ebb and flow, of course – every book paired with the above titles by Amazon’s automatic recommendation system was either another comparative religion book for kids or a book for nonreligious parents. And here’s the thing: not a single book devoted to another individual worldview made the lists.
What does this mean?
Correct me since I’m wrong, but it would seem to suggest something I’ve long suspected — that nonreligious parents are more likely than parents of other worldviews to give their kids a broad exposure to a number of beliefs.
I certainly hope that’s what it suggests, because that’s freethought parenting. That’s what I’m always on about — teaching kids to think well, then trusting them to do so. Daddy’s so proud of all y’all. Go get yourself a cookie.
Nice label. What else ya got?
I found myself behind a home repairman’s van the other day. I don’t remember the company name, but I remember what was under it: an ichthys, or Jesus fish, followed by a tagline, like so:
The FISH says it all!
It’s not uncommon to see the Jesus fish on business cards, vehicles, signs and shop windows in the South. But this was the first time I’d seen a tagline that so clearly said, “Nuff said.”
A few months ago, I scanned the merchandise table during the break in a freethought meeting I was speaking to. Suddenly the gent selling books and T-shirts felt the call of nature. “Be right back,” he said and headed toward the restroom. Suddenly he stopped in mid-stride and looked back at the mound of cash sitting open on the table. He thought for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively and said aloud, “That’s OK. We’re all humanists here,” before scuttling off toward relief.
I’ll bet the Christian handyman really is a nice guy who never grabs an unattended wallet or has his way with the cat. And I was pretty sure that no one at the humanist meeting would help himself to the open pile of currency, either. But both have more to do with the demonstrable fact that most people, for a number of reasonable reasons, behave morally in most situations. In neither case would my confidence have anything to do with the waving of a worldview flag.
The assumption goes the other way as well, of course, when a worldview (or race, or nationality, etc) is hissed between the teeth as a self-sufficient epithet.
The fish does NOT say it all, and neither does the Happy Human. It’s possible to call yourself a Christian or a secular humanist and to be a breathtakingly unethical pig. Lots of folks on both sides manage that straddle just fine. Maybe it’s a Fred-Phelps-type Christian who finds his instructions in hateful Leviticus instead of the Sermon on the Mount, or a Joe-Stalin-type nonbeliever who seems to take the absence of divine oversight as an invitation to go homicidally nuts.
I’ve also known both believers and nonbelievers who I’d trust with my life. That trust comes not from hearing what a person calls him or herself, but from seeing what the person does with their worldview. Deed, not creed, and all that.
Worldview labels are handy shortcuts, nothing more. They save us the hard work of holding ourselves and others to a discernable standard, as if claiming the label is the same as living the highest ideals of that label.
So next time somebody flashes their worldview at you as if it means something all by its lonesome, yawn and say, “Nice label. What else ya got?”
“Values and beliefs with which we don’t agree”
I’m spending a lot of time and effort vetting firms to create the website for Foundation Beyond Belief. All in all an aggravating and slow process. Yesterday I filled out a long and detailed form about the Foundation and the site we need for a web design firm in my old home state of Minnesota.
Today I received this reply:
Hi Dale,
I appreciate the time you took to fill out our website questionnaire. Unfortunately, I don’t think we are a good fit for developing your website as we are committed Christians. I think it would be difficult for us to give our all to a website promoting values and beliefs with which we don’t agree.
Thanks again for your time. I hope you understand my reasons for declining your request.
M___
I usually let this kind of thing roll off my back, but this one got under my skin in a way that nothing has for years. For one thing, I doubt they’d have offered the same reason to a Jewish or Muslim foundation. (On second thought, who knows.) I was also struck by the fact that our values are suspect even when we’re involved in an overtly charitable initiative.
I replied:
Hi M___,
Thanks so much for your reply. I must agree, we would be a very poor fit — but not because you are committed Christians.
Our foundation is dedicated primarily to the encouragement of charitable giving among the nonreligious but will be supporting both religious and secular charities. I would only want to work with someone who shares those values of generosity and openness, who sees the importance of reaching across lines of difference. Thanks for letting me know that you don’t agree with such values.
My current website was created by two committed Christians, one of whom is a past administrator for the Campus Crusade for Christ. They noted our differences but recognized that we share the same core values of mutual respect and a desire to make the world a better place.
Here’s to more Christians like them.
Dale
(If you are a professional web designer who would like to be considered for this job — regardless of your worldview — drop me a note with a link to your online portfolio. My contact info is in the sidebar.)
Fighting the fallacies of friends
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I have a guilty pleasure: It’s watching my chest-thumping rationalist friends commit the human errors they can’t forgive in others. I do the same thing myself at times (see image at left). Hoo-hoo-hoo-HAAA!
Since Foundation Beyond Belief went public last week, I’ve received a lot of encouragement and a lot of priceless constructive advice. But there’ve also been a few angry sneers — few, but loud — always from the nonreligious so far, always written in the Snark dialect, and at the moment favoring a single whopping logical error.
In the announcement, I said that religious people in the U.S. give away a greater percentage of their income than those self-identified as nonreligious. I said it because it is both true and well-documented by reliable research.1 I quickly followed by noting that this is NOT a question of character, but a natural result of one group passing a plate 52 times a year and the other not.
Still I knew, even as I wrote it, what snarky fate awaited me.
A few folks told me, with great irritation, that my claim is nonsense because most of the money donated by the religious goes to run religious institutions. Their facts are correct — churches absorb 74-78% of the offerings and donations of their members — but it’s irrelevant to the claim that religious individuals give more.
They go on to say that if the money kept by the churches were removed from the equation, the disparity vanishes. This, I’m afraid, is both irrelevant and false. The very same surveys show churchgoers beating non-churchgoers in levels of giving to secular charities.
But whether true or false, this argument’s irrelevance is what kills me. The original claim is about the personal act of giving, not how the money is used by those who receive it. So my chest-thumping friends have responded to one claim by refuting something entirely else — just the sort of thing they can’t abide in the religious.
In a related fallacy, several point out that this or that source is a conservative, or a Catholic, or an evangelical, and therefore not worth listening to. Since I don’t trust ANY secondary source out of hand, I looked at the primary sources. And in this case, Brooks and Barna, et al. were right.
It happens, you know.
I do think we have an opportunity to be better stewards of individual generosity than churches. We have no buildings, choir robes, or parking lots to pay for, no youth retreats, no missionaries. But while we’re acknowledging that church-based donations don’t go very far out the door, let’s restate and underline the original point: Religious folks give away a (much) greater percentage of their personal income than the nonreligious. We do several things better than they do. This is one of several things they do best. It’s not a question of character, but of the need for a systematic means of giving as an expression of worldview outside of those church doors.
Either way, it’s a problem worth tackling. Church attendance is declining rapidly in the U.S., and if churchgoers give a lot more to charity, this constitutes a genuine concern for philanthropy.
It’s time to acknowledge the facts, set our diversionary tactics aside, and learn from anyone who has something to teach us. That, among other things, is what Foundation Beyond Belief is about.
Join the Foundation Beyond Belief group on Facebook Causes, or click here to join our mailing list.
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1Surveys by Independent Sector, the Giving Institute, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2002 General Social Survey, American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, and more.
