Members of the End of the Line Humanist in Oak Park/Forest Park will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its founding at Shanahan’s Creole Kitchen next week.
The group is a chapter of American Humanist Association. Humanists are nontheists committed to living ethical and compassionate lives. They do “good without god or religion,” Karen Ury, president of the local humanist group, and Sue Slezewski, vice-president and secretary, explained.
“We are good,” each said, “not to earn a reward in the afterlife, but for the sake of being good. I am good to others, because I know it’s the right thing to do. If you treat others poorly, it’s because you lack empathy, not because you lack religion.”
“When I see how nice and kind my students are to each other,” Slezewski, a middle school teacher, said. “I don’t think about religion. I think about the goodness that is inside them. I don’t think they are operating on the level of religion.”
The group, however, is not anti-religion. “We’re not not anything” Ury said.
She added that they believe those ethical principles come from inside each person and not from an external source. The End the Line Humanist Group – the name refers to the area, or the farthest points west for the Blue and Green lines — is composed of people who share the same values. And, in that sense the values shared in the group culture come from other people.
Slezewski said she joined the group in 2016 because, We are driven by empathy, logic and science. That’s the vibe that attracts people to our table at the Day in Our Village and why they join us.”
“We aren’t running from anything like bad religious experiences,” she added. “New participants are attracted to what we do.”
For example, one of the groups’ recent speakers at a meeting at the Oak Park Library was Karen Ozment, who wrote “Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose and Belonging in a Secular Age.”
Another speaker was Mary Beth O’Conner, who recovered from an addiction to narcotics and became a federal judge. When she was in recovery, she was required to attend AA meetings which follow a spiritual program known as the Twelve Steps. Not interested in an approach that involved a “higher power,” O’Conner created her own program without a spiritual dimension.
The End of the Line Humanist talks a lot about separation of church and state.
Ury said that the group, which numbered less than 10 members when she joined 10 years ago, now has 900 followers on Facebook — 560 on Meetup and 300 on its mailing list.
She said that the group tries to get together at least once a month, but those gatherings can take the form of a service project with Beyond Hunger or Housing Forward, or as speaker, or a social event with games like Trivia or a book discussion.
Sometimes a meeting will focus on a question like “how many tons of carbon dioxide are emitted into the atmosphere annually?” [answer: 37.12 billion metric tons]
“When I looked at the group’s website,” Uri recalled, “I realized that I was a humanist. This is what I always believed; I just didn’t know there was a name for it.”
The 10-year celebration will be held at 7 p.m., Wednesday Dec. 14. Shanahan’s Creole Kitchen at 7353 Madison St. in Forest Park.
For more information, visit https://elhumanists.org
From the Humanist Manifesto III
The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs. Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience. In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism. In order that religious humanism may be better understood we, the undersigned, desire to make certain affirmations which we believe the facts of our contemporary life demonstrate.