Personal liberty must be combined with social responsibility - Apr 30, 2018 Newsletter

The fourth Humanist fundamental contains a lot, so I'm going to break it down into a few parts. It begins:

Humanism insists that personal liberty must be combined with social responsibility. Humanism ventures to build a world on the idea of the free person responsible to society, and recognizes our dependence on and responsibility for the natural world.

As previously stated, Humanism seeks the greatest possible freedom for every individual compatible with the rights of others. This new clause puts an onus on each individual, however, to also work toward the betterment of society - and also the environment.

In this way, Humanism rejects hyper-individualistic ideologies that would say every person is an island. Rather, we recognize that without any supernatural element to intervene, it's up to each of us to try to make the world a better place for all.

We must be advocates for the values we support - ethics, science, democracy and human rights (which we've set out over the past few weeks).

Humanism is undogmatic, imposing no creed upon its adherents.

We further recognize that the principles we've been discussing are not immutable, capital-T Truths given to us from on high but rather agreed points that describe a common worldview. Even within that, there's plenty of room for disagreement (as anyone who's attended a Humanist meeting can attest!) and our worldview is continually evolving. One need only to look at how many different declarations and manifestos there have been over the years to see how difficult it can be to describe an undogmatic worldview.

It is thus committed to education free from indoctrination.

Finally, in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we recognize the right of children to a good education. For us, this means that each person has the right to learn to think for themselves and the state should not provide, or fund, faith-based education.

Taken together, this principle underscores our efforts to build communities that can affect social change, our work on Human Rights and our Secular Schools campaign.

Annual General Meeting

Our 2018 Annual General Meeting will be held on Sunday, May 6, 2018 at 10:30 AM at the Oakridge Seniors' Centre in Vancouver. Doors open at 10:00 AM.

At our AGM, we will elect new directors to our board. The Board consists of 5-8 Directors, who are elected for two-year terms. The Board meets approximately every one to two months to oversee the governance of the Association and to set strategy.

Find out more and RSVP.

Please note that Sunday is also the BMO Marathon in Vancouver so there will be extensive road closures. Make sure to plan accordingly.