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Secularists are realizing more and more the importance of organization. Religious folk propagate and reinforce their beliefs with weekly gatherings at formal institutions called “churches,” where they develop an extended social network of other human beings sharing the same beliefs. It’s a fantastic tool for community building and providing a support group that helps to ensure the health and well being of its members.

That’s why I support the idea of Atheist Sunday Schools, recently covered in Time Magazine.

There are all ready many communities online and off, like Atheist Parenting Groups and the American Humanist Association.

The American Founding Fathers can provide guidance on how to conduct such a weekly community-building exercise. Many of them were Deists, who believed that god’s word was found in the natural world, not in books written by men. Secularists don’t need to find god in nature, but there’s nothing wrong in finding meaning and purpose in the appreciation of the natural world.

I could imagine Atheist Sunday Sermons beginning like this:

Let us now read from the Jurassic period, where the fossil record describes a time when…

Let us now read from the field of Quantum Theory, where experiments reveal to us a world where…

Let us now read from the Hubble Telescope, and appreciate the unfathomable enormity of the cosmos and quintillions of possibilities available within its scope…

Where religious Sunday schools are an exercise in imaginative fantasy, atheist Sunday schools should be an exercise in appreciating measurable, quantifiable, and reproducible reality, fostering the virtues of free inquiry and healthy skepticism.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Photo by Anuradha Ratnaweera

The knighted science fiction author turns 90 years old today.

His book 2001: A Space Odyssey was made into a very trippy, far-out and visually stunning film, but also one that left out so many of the important plot elements that made Clarke’s novel so great. All that flashy, psychedelic stuff happening at the film’s end? That was the astronaut becoming ambassador to the human race, existing at all stages of a human lifetime at once.

2010: Odyssey Two was made into a straightforward science fiction film, with great special effects, but again failed to explain what was going on in the film’s final moments, when Jupiter gets turned into a star in order to thaw out Europa and promote the evolution of life there. We know this, because, in a crucial scene from the novel that gets left out of the movie, an alien life form emerges from the ice of Europa to swallow a Japanese spacecraft that has landed there, attracted by its lights, leaving a sole astronaut to describe what he has witnessed.

2061 and 3001 were also great books, hard SF, and very thought provoking. While I’ve read countless short stories by Clarke, the only other novel I’ve read was Childhood’s End, about an evolutionary leap in the human race and a great, quick read.

Clarke is also an official knight, which isn’t as cool as being a ninja, but pretty dang-gone cool nonetheless.

Happy Birthday and thanks for the futurist inspirations Sir Clarke!!!