I can see what you are saying about the ad, and I’m not arguing over whether religious fanatics CAN do crazy things. The problem was that I felt they were saying that all who are religious are automatically fanatics who might do crazy things. Perhaps they weren’t trying to say that, but that’s the message that came across to me.

When I made a distinction between freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religion, I was certainly not saying that everyone must be religious. What I got from the ad was the idea that freedom from religion meant it’s absence (just as freedom from slavery means slavery (in the US) is gone). Everyone has the legal right to choose a religion (or lack thereof). But it’s just as wrong to say that religion should not be allowed as it is to say that having no religion should not be allowed.

Having not gathered the statistics on prisons myself, I’m not able to really verify their validity. Unfortunately, it’s hard to verify the validity of any statistic (including those of secular programs). I was only pointing out prison ministries as an example of what faith based ministries are doing, not as sole proof of why they are a good thing for society.

Again, thank you for comments. You raised some important issues which I hope have helped me to clarify what I’m trying to say.

Will

As for freedom OF religion, that actually does imply freedom FROM religion as well, since by adopting Religion A you are almost always REJECTING Religions B thru Z. Freethinkers and humanists are simply rejecting one more than you do. And under our constitution, we all have the right to do this. Religious freedom is really freedom of conscience, which includes the right to choose “none of the above.”

As for “which part of the faith based prisons” we humanists and freethinkers might have issues with, there are many, given that their statistics are skewed by the fact that only certain participants are allowed in and those who drop out often aren’t counted as a failure of the effort. Put simply, those who run such programs often cook the books to get their wonderful success statistics. Moreover, secular prison programs based on literature and philosophy, and which don’t use suspicious statistics, have a very high success rate. See “Prison Inmates Meet Socrates” in the May/June 2000 issue of the Humanist magazine ( http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_/ai_62111876?tag=artBody;col1 ).

Fred Edwords, director of communications
American Humanist Association