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IndyStar.com Indiana Living
January 14, 2006
In no god they trust
Atheists, agnostics and secular humanists build a community of like-minded people
By Robert King
robert.king@indystar.com
In a state where lawmakers pray to Jesus before doing business, Reba Boyd Wooden finds herself leading a group that she says frequently feels marginalized -- the nonbelievers.
BUILDING A COMMUNITY: Members of the Center for Inquiry Community of Indiana (from left) David Heeke, Janet LaFara, Tim Gilliam, Steve Duerr, and hostess Reba Boyd Wooden listen as Marsha Hutchins leads a reading during a meeting. - Mpozi Mshale Tolbert / The Star
What they believe
The Center for Inquiry Community of Indiana includes members who are agnostics, atheists and deists. Most members also accept the umbrella term secular humanist. What these terms mean:
• Agnosticism: The concept that God's existence can be neither proved nor disproved on the basis of current evidence. Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the so-called "Monkey Trial" in 1925, was an agnostic.
• Atheism: A doctrine of belief that holds there is no God. Founding Father Thomas Paine and astronomer Carl Sagan were atheists.
• Deism: Belief in the existence of a God or Supreme Being based on nature and reason, not sacred texts. Well- known deists include Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and President George Washington.
• Secular Humanism: Rejects the supernatural and emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry. Maintains that people are responsible for their own lives and behavior should be guided by societal norms. Feminist author Betty Freidan, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and author Helen Keller counted themselves humanists.
• Sources: Star Library, Council for Secular Humanism
To learn more:
• Center for Inquiry of Central Indiana: www.centerforinquiry.net/indy
• Council for Secular Humanism: www.secularhumanism.org
• World Union of Deists: www.deism.com
• American Atheist: www.americanatheist.org
Wooden's Center for Inquiry Community of Indiana includes atheists, agnostics and secular humanists, the term for nonbelievers with which Wooden most closely identifies.
Their profound skepticism about God may be how most people define them. But Wooden said the secular humanists and others who are members of the center shouldn't be viewed so narrowly. They treasure science and reason, value common decency toward others and believe people must solve their own problems.
Still, Wooden said the atmosphere in Indiana is so colored by religion that many nonbelieving Hoosiers not only feel like outsiders, they also sometimes fear discrimination.
"They are asked from the time they get here what church they go to," Wooden said. "People try to recruit them to their church, and they are looking for something else."
Wooden, 65, hopes to develop her Center for Inquiry chapter into a thriving secular alternative. She is reaching into what appears to be a big growth market.
Humanists are still a small group. But the number of Americans who say they don't belong to any religious group doubled between 1990 and 2001 to 29.4 million, according to a survey by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. That was about 14 percent of the population. Other faith-based pollsters have found a similar secularization.
Wooden's CFI group has about 50 dues-paying members and a contact list of some 350 people. She plans to start a family group that would be like a secular Sunday school.
In some ways, the community functions like a church.
Wooden is certified to perform weddings. The community holds small group book studies -- not on the Bible but with volumes like "Freethought Across the Centuries: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment" by Gerald A. Larue (Humanist Press, $19.95). Occasionally, the center hosts picnics and other social outings.
But building a community of humanists, atheists and agnostics isn't easy, she said.
"They are all independent. They want to go in different directions. A lot of them are really kind of loners and are happy being loners," Wooden said. "A lot of people don't want to get involved in an organization."
Even so, the group added more than 30 people to its contact list since June, when it officially became affiliated with the Center for Inquiry Transnational, a 30-year-old organization that bills itself as the largest humanist organization in the world.
The Indiana chapter is just one of 15 started in the last year by the Center for Inquiry, which traces its roots to a group of skeptics who began investigating claims of the paranormal in the 1970s.
Jeff Jones, a 47-year-old atheist from Knightsville, joined the Center for Inquiry chapter here about three months ago after he met Wooden at another humanist gathering. He fears that the influence of Christian fundamentalism is threatening the foundations of American society.
"We will have a theocracy in the United States, except it will be a Christian theocracy instead of a Muslim theocracy like in Iran," Jones said. "We will have our version of the ayatollah, be it Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or those of their ilk."
Wooden, a retired high school guidance counselor living in Greenwood, said Jones' concerns -- how best to preserve the separation of church and state -- is an objective on which most humanists agree.
She has appeared in local media recently, representing nonbelievers on controversies ranging from intelligent design to prayers in the Statehouse. In March, her group plans to host a "Darwin Day Conference" to showcase the scientific evidence for evolution.
"A good alternative"
People choose the secular fold for various reasons.
Wooden, for one, didn't grow up as a humanist. As a child, her family faithfully attended a forerunner of what is today the United Methodist Church.
While she started out believing in God, she became skeptical as she grew older. The final tipping point came in college, when a Methodist professor at what is now the University of Indianapolis discussed how the books of the Bible were put together. From the discussion, she took away the idea that humans had more to do with its formation than did a god.
"I think that day is the day the light bulb went on," she said.
Still, Wooden stayed active in her church for years, even teaching Sunday school. "I didn't know there was a good alternative," she said.
Wooden dislikes terms like atheists, agnostic and deist because they focus on what their subscribers don't believe in. Instead, she embraces the term humanist.
To her, humanism means basing one's life on science and reason.
Science hasn't yet discovered what caused life and the universe to come together, so she is content to live with the question marks. Some believe in miracles, but Wooden believes there is a natural explanation for everything if you look long enough.
Rather than prayer, she values action.
Many cling to the hope of heaven. Wooden believes life ends at death. The only afterlife she sees are the memories one leaves behind and the way society has changed by your passing through.
Rather than quoting sacred scriptures, Wooden quotes philosophers Paul Kurtz and Robert Ingersoll and scientists Abraham Maslow and Carl Sagan.
Holding such views has consequences. Wooden said she knows humanists who keep their views to themselves for fear of turmoil at home, discrimination at work and lost customers in their businesses. In her own career, some parents asked that their children be assigned to another guidance counselor when they learned she didn't believe in God.
Wooden said most people fail to realize that humanists share many of the same values -- honesty, personal integrity and tolerance -- that people of faith hold dear.
In the end, she said, Hoosiers should understand that America is not merely a Christian nation. "Non-religious people are speaking out more. We have more people of more different religions here than we had," she said. "It is because our country is more diverse."
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Call Star reporter Robert King