Arnell Dowret will host “Equal Time for Freethought’s Secular Christmas Party,” focusing on the things that people do on and around the holiday season which transcend the “faith barrier.”

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The battle between the progressive secular Left in America with religion lies squarely on the frontlines of radical religious fundamentalism. It is clear for the American Left that an America dominated by the likes of Dominionists – Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim Lahaye and many politicians in the current Neo-Conservative Republican Party – will be an America minus democracy, diversity and equality.

But what of religious liberals?

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There’s a new youth movement afoot in this country.  It’s a counterculture fusion of politics and pop, and it’s taking over a high school near you.  Like the waves that came before it, it’s got passion, music, and anti-authority posturing, but more than anything else, this one has God.  So what does it mean when today’s youth counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwell’s than Abbie Hoffman’s?

In Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler, a dynamic young secular journalist, reports from this junction of Evangelicalism and youth culture, traveling across the country to investigate the alternative Christian explosion.

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See Below!

Humanism requires unselfish behavior and human cooperation for it to relevant to the future of human society.  It has become popular – perhaps as a backlash to the 1960s liberal strides – to think of humans as selfish, greedy and uber-competitive… A Hobbesian take on human nature which has been promoted to justify dangerous economic systems such as capitalism, as well as authoritarian fascist states such as the Bush Administration has been taking us toward.

Some scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers and Stephen Pinker, while not backing the latter, have backed the former, and now claim that science backs such draconian perceptions of our basic nature.

Others haven’t made such claims.

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