Note: The following, based on Orson Scott Card's original Secular Humanist Revival Meeting, is designed to be presented as a podcast. Potential producers should feel free to drop me a line.

Two decades ago, a saint came before us to preach the American values of a secular nation in the humanist tradition.

His name was Orson Scott Card. He called his preaching the Secular Humanist Revival Meeting. He was a Saint of the Latter Day.

And as time went on the warnings he gave came true. Religion crept into our science classrooms. Children were told how to pray by bureaucrats. Churches were corrupted by government money, corrupting themselves in the process.

Now we are engaged in a great World War, a Crusade between the Christian and the Muslim world, bomb matched by bomb, atrocity by atrocity.

And in that conflict, where are we? For that matter, where is Card? Gone to the other side, I’m afraid, writing plays and books where only those of the One True Faith find redemption, where only the Chosen are heroes, where action is motivated mainly by belief.

Do you hear me? Am I talking loud enough?

That’s how Saint Orson began his preachings, and how he grounded them too. Because he could never talk loudly enough to shake the soul on behalf of what made America great.

So now with creation science, renamed Intelligent Design, worming its way into our secular classrooms, with churches grabbing for the state’s money with both hands as “faith-based charities,” with a Millenialist in the People’s White House working toward the Final Days, the time has come for a Second Revival, one more hope of secular redemption.

Do you hear me? Am I talking loud enough?
Who is this fool who stands before you, in your pulpit, proclaiming the miracles of evolution, of science, of the human mind, calling for proof over faith and saying America’s Founders did not want a Christian Nation, but a Humanist One, a Secular One, where all Gods are created equal, and endowed only with those powers willing believers will give them?

I’m no one special. I have no best-sellers to my name. I have never spoken to Larry King. I am, like you, a very ordinary man, a seeker, a journalist, a truth-teller when he can find truth, a writer of fiction when he can’t. I’m one of the congregation.

What do I believe?

I don’t. I just have some good ideas.

My ideas are based on methods.

I trust the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, and synthesis.

I trust answers that lead to more questions, answers that can be validated, answers that can be used to create things that work.

I trust democracy.

I trust contention, open argument, and transparent political systems that give power, for a limited time, only to those who gain the honest trust of the people.

I trust the market.

I trust buying and selling, the freedom to own and to work at what you’re best at.

Most of all I trust people. I trust in their essential goodness, in their ability to muddle through.

Do I believe in any of this? Not absolutely. I hope for balance, continual fine adjustments, the greatest possible good for the greatest absolute number. But I don’t believe in perfection.

For that matter I don’t believe in a Hairy Thunderer who performs miracles like parlor tricks in order to force belief on people, who is as petty in his judgements or limited in his reach as, say I am. I don’t believe in he God or she God or it God. I trust the truth will be revealed to me when the time comes, and that it will be good.

Does it matter to me what you believe? It shouldn’t. So long as you are free to believe in your absolutes, and I am free to believe in my absolutes, and all our neighbors are trusted to contend on behalf of their beliefs, freely, then I’m relatively content. I’m not satisfied, I never will be, but I’m content.

Unfortunately that’s not where most Americans are today. That’s not where 51% of us stand at any rate.

No, most Americans now believe absolutely in absolute truth, and any relativism that contradicts it must be wrong, must be heresy, must be suspect, might be treason, could be dangerous.

God – and they often pronounce this with three syllables – Ga-w-d -- created the heaven and the earth Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BC, beginning at sunset of the 22nd.

The idea that Ga-w-d may have used evolution to experiment with life, or cosmology to evolve our universe, they firmly reject – they just stick their fingers in their ears and go “nono-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-“ until it goes away.

Never mind that the Bible was written to peasants, often by politicians, and its books eventually chosen for inclusion by bureaucrats, then put into English by a committee under a King. To most Americans the King James Bible is the inerrant word of Ga-w-d, every word of it.

They may be right. I don’t know. I wasn’t around then. Were you? So far as I know the world was created around 6 AM on the 12th of January 1955, because that’s when I was born. This whole world may just be the deranged product of my imagination.

Fortunately there’s a way to test this hypothesis. Is there anyone here older than I am? Raise your hand. Did the world exist as we now know it when you were a kid? It did? Hmmm. Are you perhaps a product of my imagination? No.

Heisenberg said that reality is impacted by our observation of it, that light is a wave or particle depending on how your experiment sees it. Are you by any chance uncertain? The world was here?

I guess I’ll have to change my hypothesis then.

We can test Bishop Ussher’s hypothesis, that the world began Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BC, beginning at sunset of the 22nd, in the same way. Are there bones about older than, say, 6,000 years old? Yes there are. Are there in fact human artifacts older than that? Yes, there are.

That’s the difference between scientific theory and belief. Theories can be tested, they can be used, and they may be discarded. Belief can’t be.

The problem with what’s now called Intelligent Design is not just that its theories can’t be tested, as my theory and Ussher’s theory were just tested.

It’s that you can’t do anything with it. The idea that, here, a miracle occurred, that we can’t know what happened because it just did, doesn’t lead to any new invention. It ends the discussion.

No good theory ends discussion. No good scientific theory is firm. It’s all theory. It’s always theory.

This may be the hardest fact with which we secular humanists must contend. Evolution is, in fact, just a theory. Quantum mechanics is just a theory. Cosmology is just a theory. Gravity is just a theory.

That’s what makes them science.

As Saint Orson once said, you only learn when you change your mind. Scientists do this all the time.

When I was a child dinosaurs were lizards, and all died off. Now they’re birds, and they’re all around us.

When I was a child the speed of light was absolute, 186,000 miles per second, and nothing could speed it up nor slow it down. Now an experiment shows that light can be slowed.

When I was a child computers could only work by running each instruction, in order, from the beginning of a program until its end. Parallel processing was impossible. Now it’s all around us.

You can only be educated when your mind is open to being changed. Close your mind and, once things break down, as they do for all of us from time to time, there’s no way you’re going to be able to fix them.

America’s Founders knew this. Most were Christians of one sort or another. They were Anglicans or Catholics or Congregationalists or Quakers. Some were even Baptists.

Every one of these groups had come to America to escape religious persecution, because their home countries ended discussion. They said, here it is, the One True Church, inerrant, without flaw, obey or be damned, be imprisoned, maybe be killed.

And that’s what coming to America was for many colonists. It was damnation, permanent exile. If we could send families today to other planets, to other solar systems, it would not be much different. A trip of even a few light years, there and back again, can’t be done in one lifetime.

Yet when our forefathers and foremothers came to these shores, most had their own churches established in their colonies as the One True Church, inerrant, without flaw, obey or be damned.

Colonial America was filled with state churches. The Puritan fathers of Massachusetts refused to let Roger Williams dissent from their faith, so he took his Baptist heresy over to Rhode Island. The same happened to the Congregationalists of the Connecticut Valley. The Catholics of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland were certain the Anglicans of Virginia were going straight to hell, and vice versa.

Benjamin Franklin had a different idea. Every Philadelphia church with a building fund got his blessing and his money, although it must be added not his regular attendance. He even contributed to Philadelphia’s first synagogue. Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers who refused to push their religion on others, and they were very soon a small minority in their own colony. Tolerance became a necessity.

So when it came time to write a Constitution, to transform America from a collection of states into one nation, the Pennsylvania experiment was insisted upon. States and even Thomas Jefferson refused to endorse the Constitution until they had some guarantees of rights. And the first was that religion would be protected from the state, that it would be free and unbound, and that each faith would seek only willing supplicants. Rhode Island refused to even approve the Constitution until after this Bill of Rights was ratified. But back then they were mostly Baptists.

How could the Founders agree to have a secular state, with no state religion? It was because they all shared, every one of them, a humanist philosophy. They called it “The Enlightenment,” the idea that men and women should be free to discover the world unbound by any absolute. They were devoted, every single one of them, to freedom of thought, and to the greatest possible freedom of action. They came here, and their own forefathers came here, to get away from the “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” of their home countries.

As Madison wrote, the government must abstain “from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others.”

In other words, the best way to protect religion from corruption is to keep the state away from it. Or as Saint Orson said, “once any religion gains the power of the state it becomes the state, and loses all its holiness.”

Faith is meaningless if it is compelled. If a soup kitchen feeds you, then demands you pray to its God in order to take that soup, is your prayer really worth anything? If a school demands your child recite a specific prayer, to a specific God, at a specific time, in a specific way, where is the God in that? Where is the faith in that child?

Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough?

It has always been hard to be an American. Those who signed the Declaration of Independence knew they were signing their own death warrants. They pledged “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.” Most lost all three. The men who wrote the Constitution, just 12 years later, were of another generation entirely.

They did have a secret code that tells us what they were about. It’s on our money, revealed in things like the pyramid with the blinking eye, the straight, tall needle of the Washington Monument. Disney turned this National Treasure into a road map to gold, but it’s really something far more valuable. It’s the secret of our souls, as Americans.

Those are Masonic symbols on our money and on our monuments. I’m no Mason myself, but this I know. Masons come from many sectarian denominations, which believe many different things. But they come together in a secular hall and they do good works, although the clowns on the little scooters I’m not so sure of.

If you took their faith whole, if you believed in America as something apart from your God, then you were elect, a new man, bathed in their secular faith, washed in the Enlightenment. You were still imperfect, however, and you could still do great evil. Thus there were checks on every man, and power was balanced so that no tyrant could rise to take power the people had not freely given, and so no one could retain power without the peoples’ continuing consent.

So it has gone. America is an imperfect nation, whose history is filled with sins. But the Founders expected that, they accepted that. Redemption would come as it comes in science, from change.

Early America had to deal with the stain of slavery, which made its ideals ring hollow in foreign ears. Our Manifest Destiny, a nation stretching from Sea to Shining Sea, was nothing but racism. Our Indians were exterminated while Mexico’s were, once converted to the Holy Mother Church, allowed to live. That’s why many Mexicans look the way they do, that’s where they get that “Mestizo” look about them – the wide noses, the reddish skin, the dark eyes and straight black hair. They’re Indians. And they’re taking over. Woo-whoo-whoo.

We have always had classes in America, rich and poor. The capitalists of the 19th Century shot and killed men who tried to organize labor and bargain for a living wage. Oppression remained a part of our national life in the 20th century, with strikes and Depression and Jim Crow.

Our nation is not perfect. We are all sinners. We won world power by seizing it, burning whole cities, sometimes with atomic fire.

Our great secular, humanist state knows all this. Thus we have rebuilt many of the same cities we bombed, and left them to find their own truths. We have given as well as taken, and taken as we gave, until today we represent all the nations of the world. There are men and women within the sound of my voice whose fathers and mothers came from Europe and Asia and Africa, from Australia and Latin America, from China and India, from Iran, from Iraq, from Syria, from North Korea, and from the place where I’m standing now.

They are, every one of these people, Americans. And their children are Americans, good, loyal Americans. No other nation in the history of the world does this.

Japan doesn’t embrace Koreans. We do.

Serbs don’t embrace Croats. We do.

Hutus don’t embrace Tutsis. We do.

Jews don’t embrace Muslims. We do.

And when all these people are Americans, they embrace one another.

America is also a nation of 10,000 faiths, all actively practiced, all loudly proclaimed.

We have Bahai and Buddhist temples, Shiite, Sunni and Black Muslims.

We have Maronite and Roman Catholics, Russian and Greek Orthodox. We have Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish temples. We have a wealth of faiths invented right here – Mormons and Southern Baptists – as well as churches that get by merely on their ministers’ brand name.

We have more. We have Wiccans and Taoists and Quakers and Existentialists, we have Animists and people who practice voodoo or the native rights of The People, Navajo, Sioux, Cherokee, and atheists who see any belief as hokum.

America is the most religious nation in the history of the planet. We’re a Christian nation, but we are also a Buddhist one, and a Muslim one, and a Hindu one. When God hears the prayers of America, he or she hears dozens of languages, a great cacophony. And then there are the atheists and agnostics who either don’t know God or don’t care.

All this is worth cherishing. All this is worth savoring. All this is worth protecting. This is our legacy, it’s what makes us special.

But there are many Americans, perhaps most Americans, who don’t see things this way any more. They proclaim America as a “Christian” nation, by which they mean their specific Christianity. Maybe they expect Baptists to recite Mormon prayers in Utah, Catholics to recite Baptist prayers in Georgia, and what do they have in store for Dearborn, Michigan, where most of the people are Muslim, or New York City, or California?

The fact is they haven’t thought it through. The fact is they Believe. And you can’t argue with belief.

I’m not trying to.

Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough?

No, I am not.

For we are engaged here in a great struggle, between Belief and Science.

Belief is winning.

When do we become human beings, and when do our human lives end?

Scientists and religious leaders disagree on both counts, as they should. Yet this government seeks to impose its Beliefs about those questions on the rest of us. They would force a woman, newly pregnant, perhaps in a rape, perhaps by her father, to bear that child at the point of a gun, on pain of imprisonment, and to live with the result for her lifetime. They would force a woman whose brain has died to continue living, simply because the heart and lungs haven’t gotten the message.

What is the truth of science? We can argue that all day. Yet many governments across this country are imposing religion on our science textbooks. Many people of faith prevent the exhibition of movies about volcanoes, or dinosaurs, or cosmology, simply because they say it threatens their belief.

Your children are being taught lies, at your expense, in your schools, paid for by your secular tax dollars. Books are being taken out of your libraries, the reality of sex is being banned from our media. Scientists have been systematically removed from the creation of government policy, and science itself has been politicized.

All these lies are told in the name of faith, by true Believers in One God, one Bible, inerrant, without flaw, obey or be damned.

Is this America?

You bet it is.

But I am also America. So are you. So is everyone within the sound of my voice, anyone who can raise a voice to protest, anyone who can write to an editor or a school board or a city council or to their Congress, anyone who will speak before their fellow men and women, demanding again the freedom of the Enlightenment which the Founders laid down their lives to give us.

Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough?

No, I am not. I never can, I never will, I never hope to. I do not wish to ban faith as faith seeks to ban science. I simply want my right as an American, to see that faith should contend against faith freely, openly, using only such money and such power as its own members freely give it.

Never the power of the state, for that corrupts everything it touches, including faith. Especially faith. That’s why we have fixed terms of office, checks and balances, courts and the press, the whole messy cacophony, the whole beautiful unholy mess.

On the other hand, I can’t fight for this secular America, this humanist America, all by myself. The preachers and powerful know where I live, and when the hunt begins for heretics, it is as it has always been…preachers first.

So now it is your turn to testify. I don’t want your money, or your time. I just wish to share in the product of your mind, to get from you a good argument and not just contradiction.

The ushers have passed out index cards and writing implements among you. I ask you, in lieu of an offering, to write on that paper, with that writing implement, one great truth, scientific or otherwise, which you are willing to lay down your life for, as the Founders laid down their lives centuries ago.

Write it down, then pass it back. The ushers will bring these cards back to me, and we shall share what they say. Any belief worth having, after all, is a belief worth sharing and proclaiming.

And while you are doing that, let me entertain you with the story of evolution, as it might have been described by God to Moses, if God only had the words and Moses the understanding to fathom what he was being told.

In the beginning the universe was without form, and void.

Then BANG! BANG! I say.

The energy of a hundred million galaxies sped out at 186,000 miles per second in all directions. Protons and electrons began their little dance. Energy came to rest in the form of hydrogen, and this hydrogen ignited, combining with itself to form helium, then heavier elements, spinning and pulling at itself under the tug of infernal gravity.

And it was good.

Over billions of years the great gasbags spun, as they continue to spin, and burned as they continue to burn. Gravity slowed them down to form galaxies, and within galaxies star clusters, where more stars were born and are still born today. Hydrogen bound to hydrogen to form ever-heavier elements, and in some cases these spun out, then cooled to create planets that could not burn any more, but which revolved around the stars until those stars exploded, or ran into other stars, or just burned themselves out.

And it was good.

Over hundreds of millions of years the elements on these planets combined, forming molecules. And on many planets, on at least one planet, carbon-based molecules combined to create new kinds of structures, amino acids that combined and divided. These acids were coded with base pairs, guanine and adenine, cytosine and thymine. They danced together in a rich protein stew, forming ever more-complex compounds, called Deoxyribonucleic acid, which twisted and bent upon itself, and could be reproduced by breaking apart into identical halves, which would then combine again at the base pairs. Life on Earth began.

And it was good.

Over tens of millions of years the rock called Earth cooled, spinning under the force of gravity, water separating from rock and air separating from water. These molecules, this DNA, began combining into ever more-complex forms. Some forms drew sustenance from the Sun itself, storing energy through photosynthesis and becoming plants. Other forms consumed the first forms, and became animals. Still others didn’t know which they were. The animals consumed the plants, the plants consumed the remains of the dead animals, the rock continued to spin. Gravity sucked it all in to itself.

And it was good.

Now millions of years were passing. Plants and animal kingdoms evolved into climax states. They were destroyed, and evolved into new forms. Some plants used the animals to reproduce, creating fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grass. Water flowed over the Earth, hardened into new forms. Masses of land spun around the planet, creating continents, then breaking apart. Animals multiplied in the seas, in the air, on the land, consuming one another, and the plants. Great ecosystems were born, thrived, and died in fire, but some say in ice. Gravity pulled the remains into its grip, hardening the carbon to diamond, combining it into oil, cracking atoms and molecules under heat into gold, silver, and all the riches of the Earth.

And it was good.

Somehow, one line of these animals evolved to use tools. They evolved to walking on two legs. They learned how to create their own fire. They learned to create beer, and drank of it, and stopped hunting to stay for the party. Some even lived long enough to see their children have children, and to teach these children as grandparents. Men and women settled down and became civilized.

And it was good.

Man discovered nature, man discovered God, man discovered science. So today, we have the capability, unique in creation as we know it, to build cities, to build machines that can destroy our world a thousand times over, to build a pyramid of knowledge that can reach to the stars.

And it is good. My God it is good.

So today we see ourselves as the height of creation. We seek the answers to how we got here, and where we are going, among the stars, among the elements, among the plants and animals of our own world. We pray for the wisdom to one day leave this rock, to explore the universe, and to see the face of God in every star, on every planet we touch, until each of us finds our own time at an end, and sees the face of whatever God there is at the end of our days.

Amen.

Now, please, pass those cards up, and let’s read them together. I’ve told you what I think, what I suspect, the good ideas I live and would die for.

Let’s have yours.

(time spent reading the cards)

Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough?

No, I am not.

I am one man, one secular, humanist American. There is no such thing as a secular humanist church. I’m just an old fraud.

But if you can hear me, then you can speak. If you are within the sound of my voice, you can repeat what I say, or change it, and add your own voice to the chorus. If you can write, or speak, then organize, and fight for your country, for your right to change your mind, for your children’s right to see the stars, to learn science, to climb on the back of the knowledge we create and find their own way, unhindered by prejudice, by mere faith, and gifted with science, engineering, with the ability to change.

Do you believe? I hope to hell not.

Spread the word. Take back your country.