So I went to my first Ethical Society Sunday platform today.
I've been looking (not hard but keeping my eyes and ears open) for an organization that might help me provide a sense of community and tradition based on secular ethics for my son. I've checked out the UU church in my town, lots of nice people but although they do make people feel welcome most of the congregation is theist and the children activities are to much geared towards xian lessons.
So I checked out the Ethical Society (
http://aeu.org/) and it sounded much more like what I was looking for...although I hesitated over the 'religion' label, still they had an interesting speaker (
http://www.nwei.org/NWEI/Voluntary_Simplicity.html) today and I thought they deserved a look.
It was a nice program, an opening statement, some music from Mozart and Beethoven from two talented musicians, one on clarinet and one on violin, the Voluntary Simplicity talk in which the speaker didn't just give a laundry list of how to reduce your carbon footprint but talked about her experiences, what led her to environmental activism, how she's seen communities and support groups spring up around efforts to live lower impact lives and other environmental activities.
Lots of nice people that I felt very comfortable around and I'm likely to go back, at least when they have interesting topics, but I was among the youngest people there - and I'm no spring chicken :) and I asked about children oriented activities and there just isn't any children in this community. There was one young couple and the wife said she had been raised in the Ethical Society (in NY area I think she said) which was encouraging but they had no children and part of what I was looking for is a place to bring my son and help get him involved.
There are other community activities we can get involved with of course but I was hoping to find an organization that did have ethics and generalized community involvement (as opposed to one specific aspect like spots, politics, environment) from an explicitly rationalistic and secular point of view as its foundation. The Ethical Society seems to met that except for the lack of children and very few young people (at least in the Boston chapter).
I was just curious if anyone else here is a regular member or attends platforms or events sponsored by the Ethical Society.