Ethical Platform

How the National Prayer Breakfast invitation edited Thomas Jefferson:

“In extracting the pure principles which he [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves….We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus…. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

More: Doubting Thomas: Prayer Breakfast Theocrats Try To Baptize Jefferson

We are mentioned in this article in the Post:

Atheists gather for a holiday they can believe in: Independence Day

Glad to get a mention. Our Ethical Society is definitely an atheist-friendly group with many atheists, but we’re not exclusively an atheist group. We’re nontheist in that belief in deities is not required or even important to our identity. Thus, atheists are comfortable, and so are mixed families and others who don’t believe that people must have a deity to ground ethical behavior.

As Memorial Day approaches, I remember that the day was initially created to honor the dead on both sides of a major conflict – the American Civil War – and in that remembering, to re-unite the nation that had nearly split in two. It was not to glorify war, or to justify the rightness of either side, but to mourn those who’d died and honor them as people, and to move forward in unity. (more on that: Memorial Day Origins)

In that same spirit, Bonnie Hurd Smith tipped me off to this video of an Eric Colville song, End of War (on YouTube).  I had tears in my eyes by the end of it.  I hope that it inspires some thought and dreams in others, as it did in me.