March 18, 2009
On Saturday, March 28, hundreds of humanists and anti-war activists will converge upon the conservative town of Melbourne, Florida for the "Florida March for Peace," a state-wide mass march against American militarism and war.
Individuals traveling from 10 Florida cities will march in solidarity with national protests on March 21 in Washington D.C. (ANSWER Coalition) and April 4 in New York City (United for Peace and Justice).
The sparkplug behind the event is Jeff Nall, who describes himself as an anti-war activist and third-generation atheist. Nall is also an author and a doctoral student at Florida Atlantic University. "My humanism is the guiding force to my activism," Nall told the Humanist Network News in a telephone interview.
"We can't critique organized religion without lending an equally critical look at our nation," said Nall, who co-founded "Patriots for Peace" in 2003.
He has recently formed another organization called "Humanists for Peace." This group seeks to represent "both nonreligious and religious humanists who oppose militarism and seek to reform the United State's historically unethical foreign policy."
Humanists for Peace was created in an "effort to make the freethought movement as interested and involved in curtailing militarization as in curtailing the influence of the church in secular affairs," said Nall.
The above two groups are organizers of the march. So far, approximately 60 or so other groups have signed on to endorse it, including several other humanist groups.
Melbourne is east of Orlando, and has, despite its traditionalist bent, lately become an activist base for the anti-war movement.
Nall believes that the anti-war movement is a fertile ground for finding potential humanists. The humanist activist says that he has met many anti-war activists who say that they have never heard of humanism. However, once they are introduced to the philosophy, they realize that the nontheist belief system dovetails with their own personal views.
The connection between humanism and peace is not new. Nall points out that, historically, many freethinkers, have also been vehemently against war and imperialism. He cites Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain and Albert Einstein.
The folksy Twain was strongly opposed to American colonization and held the vice-presidency of an American Anti-imperialist League until the day he died.
A quote from Condorcet, one of the last great figures of the Enlightment, adorns the poster for the march: "Once people are enlightened…they will gradually learn to regard war as the most dreadful of scourges, the most terrible of crimes."
Nall is hoping to make more converts to peace activism by speaking at the American Humanist Association's annual conference in June of this year. There, his topic will be: "Humanism and the Peace Revolution."
For more information about the march, click here.
