Food for thought from The Center For Inquiry, a group fighting the good fight for our freedom from religious oppression.

"Sometimes it is not my words that best demonstrate why the Center for Inquiry (CFI) is worth supporting. Here are the words of Nabil, an Afghan atheist who escaped from Afghanistan to Cyprus thanks to help from Secular Rescue.

“[M}y uncle, an extremist mullah…called my mother and told her that he had to kill me because I had abandoned Islam.”

After Nabil found out that his uncle had directed someone to find him in Kabul and kill him, Nabil contacted Secular Rescue and made his escape.

Nabil (an alias) explains why he will never go back to Afghanistan as long as it is under Taliban rule:

“A hardcore religious and Islamic country such as Afghanistan will not be a safe place for those who are freethinkers and desire freedom—freedom from dogma and superstition. I just want to live with some dignity and peace; I want to live like a human being.”

At CFI, we know the freedoms we enjoy—our freedom of conscience, our freedom of speech, our right to keep government from imposing religion (the majority’s religion) on the rest of us—are provisional. They will remain ours only if we fight for them, defend them, and protect them.

Support Freedom of Thought!
That’s why CFI works diligently to protect the separation of church and state, the rights of atheists and the nonreligious in the United States and around the world, and the values of the Enlightenment that give individuals dignity and agency in their own lives.

• CFI is in every case before the U.S. Supreme Court where church-state separation is under attack.

• CFI lobbies against dozens of bills in statehouses across the country that seek to put prayer back into schools, use taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools, post Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, replace school guidance counselors with chaplains, and teach creationism in science class.

• CFI translates books on atheism, freethought, and evolutionary biology into languages dominant in the Muslim world and offers them for free through our Translations Project to bring the light of reason and science to the world’s darkest corners.

• CFI educates science teachers how to teach evolution and answer its religious fundamentalist critics through in-person teacher development workshops. The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES) has helped more than 3,500 teachers from every state to teach the science of evolution.

• CFI is the keeper of Freethought history with our extensive library of important books, our Freethought Trail, and our proud ownership of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum.

• CFI publishes Free Inquiry magazine to advance the most compelling, intriguing, and important thinking on secular humanism and atheism.

• CFI has helped hundreds of atheist activists overseas to escape from violence and persecution through our Secular Rescue program.

But in addition to all this extensive work to keep religious dogma and dictates from smothering freedom, CFI is the only secular organization that fights against all forms of pseudoscience and promotes science and critical thinking.

Our Generation Skeptics program gives young people the tools to combat the onslaught of misinformation they confront online. Using fun and engaging exercises, the program strengthens their skepticism muscles and gives them insights into the ways con artists will try to manipulate them.

Through our online series SkeptiLab! The Bunk Stops Here, we have been joined by a cast of celebrities who entertainingly debunk all sorts of pseudoscientific nonsense, including astrology, psychic power, dowsing, and telekinesis.

For a deeper dive into skepticism, we publish Skeptical Inquirer magazine and produce regular informative webinars on Skeptical Inquirer Presents.

Our ScienceSaves program nourishes a love of and gratitude for the benefits science has brought to our lives. A $10,000 college scholarship is awarded each year to the best thirty-second video by a high school senior on how science has saved them or someone they know.

We established National Science Appreciation Day on March 26 of each year—the day that Jonas Salk announced the success of the polio vaccine—to remind us that science and the scientific method are the secret sauce for human health and progress. This year twenty-three states proclaimed National Science Appreciation Day on March 26.

Reason, Science, and Secularism. This is what we do. This is what we fight for. This is what we protect.

Make a Difference Now!
But we cannot do all this without your ongoing support. If you already give to CFI, I cannot thank you enough. If you have been thinking about it, please consider giving this year. We stand for your values and amplify your voice. Please help keep us strong.

Sincerely,

Robyn Blumner
President and CEO,
Center for Inquiry