So…
How’ve you been?
Yes, yes. It’s been a long time, I know. What have I been up
to? Well…..
- I got divorced. I did post, once, right after that so I
guess I don’t need to mention that
but it seemed like the appropriate place to start.
- I became an atheist activist.
- I became an atheist activist.
- I started a freethinkers group, the Flagstaff Freethinkers
- I helped start up the Northern Arizona University Secular Student Alliance
- I started volunteering with the Secular Coalition forArizona as their Community Outreach and Development Director
- I started dating the only professional, state-level secular lobbyist in the country
- I started dating the only professional, state-level secular lobbyist in the country
- I commenced to lose myself in volunteering – both for the
coalition and elsewhere, being a single dad half-time, developing the Flagstaff
Freethinkers – 150 members and growing, as well as other nontheist communities
throughout the state, going to conferences all over the country, building a
relationship – oh yeah, and keeping that day job thing going.
Who cares, right? Yeah.. I know – I’m just giving the
background.
So what have I really
been doing?
What I have been doing is evolving my ideas around what this
movement is, what I think it should be and what, if any, role I should play in
it. Even more fundamentally I have been learning. I have been developing,
expanding my concept of ethics and compassion. I have learned about the work of
Greg Epstein and the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. I have learned about
Ethical Culture. I have learned about the Unitarian Universalists. I have had
some hard lessons, I have had knapsack thoroughly unpacked with Sikivu Hutchinson. I have
seen the amazing efforts of diplomats in the disheartening fight for secularism
in my theocratic state of Arizona. I have broken bread with Dawkins but it was
the conversation with Sean Faircloth that I remember most from that night. I
stood in the rain at the Reason Rally but it was the march to the hill at the
Secular Coalition for America’s lobby day that made the trip to D.C. valuable
to me.
I was content for a long time, mostly because I needed it as
part of my process, to pick religious dogmas and cultures and cannons and
‘moralities’ to pieces. I had an axe to grind and believe you me I still do! I
also am ready for more than that. I need more
than that. I want to do more than point out the problems, I am not here to champion atheism, really what I want is to participate
in efforts towards solutions.
I need community. I need social justice. I need to do
something productive and positive. I need to participate in active compassion.
So that’s what I will be working on, and writing about much of the way moving
forward – building community, finding purpose in service and social justice and
the way all of that is motivated by a purely secular worldview. It’s not all
going to be secular community activism, Engineers Without Boarders, Humanist
schools in Uganda. I still have a lot to vent about. There is at least as much JTEberhard left in me as there is Chris Stedman so I will probably be a little
“bi-polar” between my firebrand and my diplomat but that is who I am right now.
I wish I had been writing about this personal process along
the way. I would like to have been more conscious and attentive to it for one
thing but I would also like to have documented it and shared it with you good
people, well… person. The next post will be a short discussion of my thoughts
looking back at it from where I am now.