What we’re about
Meet other local Humanists, people who believe in the basic goodness of the human spirit without supernaturalism.
The Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH) was incorporated in 1989 as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational organization in Maryland. Our purpose is to promote scientific literacy and critical thinking, to provide a forum for humanists and others to explore humanist principles and how they relate to all aspects of human experience, and to study the significance of humanism throughout history. Secular humanists are distinguished by an emphasis on scientific methods of knowing, separation of church and state, and a commitment to the pursuit of humanist goals outside religious frameworks.
WASH has several active Chapters from Roanoke, VA to Baltimore, MD.
WASH is a Cooperating Local Group of the Council for Secular Humanism, a Chapter of the American Humanist Association, and an affiliate of American Atheists and an endorsing group of The Secular Coalition of America.
While being a member of the WASH meetup group is free please consider joining as a member of WASH to help support our activities.
http://www.wash.org/join
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Upcoming events (1)
See all- Secular Zoom CommunityLink visible for attendees
I want to express my gratitude to Mike Reid with his excellent presentation on evolution in our meeting last month. Our members very much appreciated the quality he brought to an issue that is still being contested by fundamentalist extremists. Just Friday (March 22) West Virginia legislation was signed into law allowing intelligent design to be taught in public schools. The original version had explicit wording supporting “intelligent design.” That wording was removed, but discussion around the law made it clear that it is designed to protect teachers who support different conceptions of “science.” A WAPO article on this can be found here.
Is Theocracy Causing Millions of Excess Deaths? I have been looking at the explicit propagation of theocratic policies through states having majority control by what many would call Christian nationalists. Those policies include demonizing women who want bodily autonomy and many varieties of racial, national and LGBTQ+ minorities. Hard work is celebrated and “God given” skill is deemed adequate for success with little need for “Marxist and communist” investments in the common good by the state. There was obvious misery associated with those policies. But what is the science required to get a reality based perspective and perhaps create a wider and more informed discussion?
The PNAS/Nexus Journal published an article on Missing Americans: Early death in the United States—1933–2021. Given that I worked at the National Academy of Sciences, I was please to see that they now have a Nexus journal, designed to highlight studies spanning multiple scientific disciplines. This article documented that American mortality is substantially greater than all 21 other wealthy developed countries examined in the study. This study did not specifically prove that the policies causing the excess mortality stemmed from the militant Christians who wished to impose a dogmatic authoritarian regime on our country. However, it did document that recent years had over 600,000 excess American deaths per year after all corrections for differences in ages. This differential expanded after the 1980’s and substantially increased in parallel with the increasing nastiness of our “culture wars.” The Covid 19 pandemic knocked our excess mortality into an even greater differential.
In terms of misery, our country had a substantial decline in measured happiness in the recently released World Happiness Report. We decline from number 15 last year to 23rd this year. There is a stark generational divide for America. We are number 10 in the world in terms of happiness for those 60 and older. We are only 62nd in the world (after Ecuador, Brazil and the Dominican Republic) for those younger than 30. Our youngest generation is seeing a very bleak future for themselves. This study compared the net change in their measures for all 134 countries from 2006-2010 to 2021-2023. Roughly half of all countries improved with half declining between these two periods. Our country was not only among those declining, we were among the the most steeply declining in happiness. That net change in average happiness for the two periods had us 120th out of the 134 countries (see page 38 of the report).
The Christian nationalist right is demanding control of language to reinforce their mentality. That language usage then precludes the medical care or other resources to prevent the deaths and misery cited above. Tuesday, March 19, Alabama signed a sweeping piece of anti-DEI legislation into law. Governor Kate Ivey said, “I refuse to allow a few bad actors on college campuses – or wherever else for that matter – to go under the acronym of DEI, using taxpayer funds, to push their liberal political movement counter to what the majority of Alabamians believe.” People are required to use the bathrooms that corresponded to their birth certificates under this law. Almost all the anti-abortion laws put in place require physicians to read right-wing propaganda that has no medical merit. The book banning and curriculum control are among the many other aspects of this language control agenda.
The link for our meeting is posted now. I will likely send the full zoom info in the 24 hours before our meeting as a reminder to those who RSVP.