 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(April 2019) |
Fred Edwords, born July 19, 1948, in San Diego, California, is an agnostic [1] or ignostic [2] humanist leader in Washington DC. [3]
| A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(April 2019) |
Fred Edwords, born July 19, 1948, in San Diego, California, is an agnostic [1] or ignostic [2] humanist leader in Washington DC. [3]
Edwords has worked with the American Humanist Association in several capacities. From 1980 to 1984 he was national administrator, then executive director from 1984 to 1999 and editor of the American Humanist Association's magazine, the Humanist, from 1995 to 2006. Edwords was also editor of the association's membership newsletter Free Mind from 2002 to 2006 and the Creation/Evolution journal from 1980 to 1991. He later worked as director of planned giving for their endowment fund, the Humanist Foundation. [4]
Edwords was national director of the United Coalition of Reason from 2009 to 2015, [5] [6] president of Camp Quest, Inc., from 2002 to 2005, [7] and on the staff of the Ohio camp from 1998 to 2008. He was also vice president of the North American Committee for Humanism from 1990 to 1992 and president of the Humanist Association of San Diego in 1978. He has served on the boards of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (1986–1999), the New York Council for Evolution Education (1982–1994), and the National Center for Science Education (1982–1992). He was chair of the American Humanist Association's Humanist Manifesto III Drafting Committee from 2002 to 2003. [8] On August 7, 1985, he became a co-plaintiff in the successful U.S. District Court lawsuit, Asimov v. United States, against the U.S. Department of Education, brought by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. As of 2019, Edwords was one of the plaintiffs in a case that started in 2014 as American Humanist Association et al v. Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a federal lawsuit on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court that is aimed at removing a 40 foot tall Latin cross on public property in Bladensburg, Maryland. [9] [10] [11]
Edwords was named Rationalist of the Year by the American Rationalist Federation in 1984, received the Humanist Pioneer Award of the American Humanist Association in 1986, was named a HumCon Pioneer by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County in 1992., [12] and received the Humanist Heritage Award of the Humanist Foundation in 2014. [13]
Edwords has also served on the adjunct faculty of the Humanist Institute, is a Humanist Celebrant Emeritus with the Humanist Society, and served from 2010 through 2018 on the Human Origins Initiative's Broader Social Impacts Committee at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
He has been married to Mary Carroll Murchison-Edwords since June 1980. The couple has two children, both now adults.
Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system or life stance that embraces human reason, logic, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision making.
The American Humanist Association (AHA) is a non-profit organization in the United States that advances secular humanism.
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs" in the United Kingdom by campaigning on issues relating to humanism, secularism, and human rights. It seeks to act as a representative body for non-religious people in the UK.
The Happy Human is an icon that has been adopted as an international symbol of secular humanism. Created by Dennis Barrington, the figure was the winning design in a competition arranged by Humanists UK in 1965. Various forms of it are now used across the world by humanist organisations of all sizes including Humanists UK, Humanists International and The American Humanist Association (AHA).
The Secular Coalition for America is an advocacy group located in Washington D.C. It describes itself as "protecting the equal rights of nonreligious Americans."
The Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA) is an umbrella body of 83 rationalist, atheist, skeptic, secularist and scientist organisations in India.
The Godless Americans March on Washington (GAMOW) occurred on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2002, with the participation of many atheists, freethinkers, agnostics and humanists. The public cable network C-SPAN documented the event on video.
Edwin Frederick Kagin was an attorney at law in Union, Kentucky, and a founder of Camp Quest, the first secular summer camp in the United States for the children of secularists, atheists, agnostics, brights, skeptics, naturalists and freethinkers. He served as the National Legal Director of American Atheists from 2006 until his death in 2014.
The Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) promotes the interests of rationalists nationally in Australia. Originally formed as the Victorian Rationalist Association, the society originated in a meeting of freethinkers in the University of Melbourne in 1906. It is the operational arm of the rationalist movement in Australia.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to humanism:
Andrew James William Copson, FRSA, FCMI, MCIPR is a humanist leader and writer. He is the Chief Executive of Humanists UK and the President of Humanists International.
The Birmingham Humanist Group was formed on 23 May 1962 at the Arden Hotel, New Street, Birmingham, England, at a meeting convened by Dr Anthony Brierley. It changed its name to Birmingham Humanists in 2000 and voted to become a Partner Group of the BHA, which changed its name to Humanists UK in 2017. It holds most of its meetings at the rooms of the Community Development trust in Moseley, Birmingham.
Frederick James Gould was an English teacher, writer, and pioneer secular humanist.
The Rationalist Association, originally the Rationalist Press Association, is an organization in the United Kingdom, founded in 1885 by a group of freethinkers who were unhappy with the increasingly political and decreasingly intellectual tenor of the British secularist movement. The purpose of the Rationalist Press Association was to publish literature that was too anti-religious to be handled by mainstream publishers and booksellers. The Rationalist Press Association changed its name to "The Rationalist Association" in 2002.
Camp Quest is an organisation providing humanist residential summer camps for children in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway. It was first held in 1996 in Kentucky to provide an alternative to the traditional religiously affiliated summer camps, for the children of nontheistic, humanist or freethinking families as well as children from a religious upbringing. Camp Quest currently consists of 13 affiliated camp groups and its current executive director is Kim Newton.
Larry Jones is a retired chemist dedicated to the furthering of humanist thought. He is the founder and former president of the Institute for Humanist Studies, a founder of the Secular Coalition for America, and has been involved in numerous other humanist organizations.
The secular movement refers to a social and political trend in the United States, beginning in the early years of the 20th century, with the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism in 1925 and the American Humanist Association in 1941, in which atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers, and other nonreligious and nontheistic Americans have grown in both numbers and visibility. There has been a sharp increase in the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated, from under 10 percent in the 1990s to 20 percent in 2013. The trend is especially pronounced among young people, with about one in three Americans younger than 30 identifying as religiously unaffiliated, a figure that has nearly tripled since the 1990s.