Fellowship

Celebrating significant events and milestones of social life
Supporting during times of difficulty
Sharing feelings of awe, joy, oneness...
Solidarity of action

To celebrate and venerate, without crossing over into worship.

To promote principles of effective rationality, in the light of shared human values, without distortion or dilution into mysticism or mythology.

The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic -- and life after death.

In a hotel ballroom next door to a reptile expo, Mike Sullivan flashed a beatific smile and welcomed fellow atheists to the Sunday morning service at the "Holy-day" Inn.

The fellowship brightened at the speaker's pointed play on words.

These church members dressed casually.

Each wore a plastic name tag.

The seated congregation of atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, doubters, skeptics and freethinkers could have been a group of new employees attending a company orientation or the gathering at one of those free-to-the-public financial planning seminars.

"Most people say they've never met an atheist," Sullivan told a visitor. "Fact is, they've met hundreds of them. They just don't know it."

"It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. ...It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it s with immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry , snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."

- C S Lewis

My country is the world and my religion is to do good.
- Thomas Paine

“There are those whom we seek and there are those whom we find. Occasionally we find – however fractured the relativity – one we recognize as kin. In doing so, certain curious aspects of character recede and we happily magnify the common ground.”
- Patti Smith

He drew a circle that shut me out --
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
- Edwin Markham