from the acting presidentAmerican Atheists in the FutureFrank R. ZindlerJust several weeks after I became Acting President of American Atheists, I discovered that the roof on the American Atheists Center in Cranford, New Jersey had been leaking for some time and water had already done considerable damage to books and other materials in our stock room. Worse yet, there were indications that the part of the roof covering the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library & Archives (C.E.S.A.A.L.A.) was also failing and that the special climate-controlled, fire suppression-protected rooms housing the rarest materials were in grave danger. As American Atheists officers and staff were in the very act of hiring a contractor to replace the roof, a heavy rainstorm penetrated the ceiling of the library itself, bringing down some ceiling tiles. Fortunately, prescient staff at the Center had covered the ranks of books with enormous sheets of plastic film and no serious damage was done. At the moment that I am writing this, the repair of the roof is nearly complete. The precious books, memoirs, publications, and ephemera that illuminate the path that reason has laid down over the centuries are safe ? at least from the elements. However, we will have to dip into our normally sacrosanct trust fund in order to pay the roofers the $77 thousand they will demand. Unless we can replace that money quickly, our financial future will be seriously insecure. We depend upon the earnings of the trust fund to support many if not most of the day-to-day operating expenses of the Center. Even a small reduction in that income will seriously impact our ability to function ? to do the things you need and want us to do. I ask everyone who can help to do so. Please add something extra to your normal contribution and indicate it is for the roof. With your permission, we will publish your name in an honor roll in the next few issues of American Atheist. Although the deadline for submitting applications for the position of president of American Atheists, Inc. is August 24, 2008, several absolutely excellent candidates have already applied. I can guarantee that if any one of them is chosen to be my successor in this office the future of American Atheists is more than secure ? it glows with promise. I am predicting a flowering of Atheism such as our nation has never witnessed throughout all of its history. The new president will be able to lead an organization that is less cumbersome and more efficient as a result of important projects now in full swing. Most notably, four affiliated American Atheists corporations (including C.E.S.A.A.L.A.) are being merged into the flag-ship corporation American Atheists, Inc. The reorganization will be transparent to members, but it will enormously reduce the numbers of headaches our new president will have to suffer in the line of duty. A complete overhaul of our financial procedures and an integrated computer database will save endless hours of needless effort for my successor ? hours that can better be spent representing Atheism in the world at large. American Atheists has always aspired to be a full-service organization for its members and for the cause of reason, separation of government and religion, and Atheist civil liberties. For many and good reasons, we have not always been able to deliver everything we wanted to. With your help, however, our new president will be able to depend upon a Web-site that will be state-of-the-art, a cable TV program Atheist Viewpoint that will be fully professional in its production, and a monthly journal that everyone will be proud of. My successor will, of course, continue with vigor to prosecute law suits in defense of the rights of Atheists and to maintain the wall of separation between state and church. In addition to all these things, however, the new president will preside over a fully functioning research library, where authorized scholars will be able to study the history of reason and the monuments left along the path leading to American Atheism. For too long this story has been suppressed, obfuscated, or simply consigned to oblivion. My successor will direct an expanded American Atheist Press, one that will not only be able to publish more new titles such as David Eller?s Atheism Advanced or Ren? Salm?s The Myth of Nazareth, but also finally catch up in the reprinting of Atheist classics that are perennially in demand. An educational outreach will be implemented with the aid of AAP publications. Finally, our new president will be able to depend upon the aid of a host of affiliated organizations ? organizations that in turn will look to American Atheists not only for inspiration and leadership but also for help of a more practical sort. For the future of American Atheists, the sky?s the limit. Assuming, of course, that the cost of the new roof doesn?t prevent lift-off!http://www.atheists.org/cgi-bin/membership
Dave
You have a bad attitude. As communications director you have a lot to learn. Try using openness and transparency as default guidelines for your behavior with respect to AA’s business.
Bart
Thanks for the post.
You have got to be kidding! He put it in the magazine! Frank is out of control.
Well if they aren’t talking off this blog then I would think talking on it is progress. It would just be nice if the parties involved displayed a bit more emotional maturity.
Arthur
Keep up the good work. Without your posts none of us would be aware of the dysfunctional depths the AA board.
Ellen
Please make a post here to let the membership know what you think to be the way forward for AA. You, unlike others posting here, have actually earned the trust of AA members over the years.
Possible? Likely?
Necessary.
Not necessary at all.
If AA is going to be a viable activist organization, it’s success and survival cannot be tied to any one person (that’s true for any organization). Johnson’s time with AA is over and there is no going back.
I would love to see Johnson and her supporters let go of their obsession with AA, shift focus to GAMPAC, and make GAMPAC effective. All atheists would reap the benefits of that. But instead of making GAMPAC great, some folks (you know who you are) just won’t let their beef with AA go.
What’s done is done. Let AA move in whatever direction it ends up going and lets expend our efforts working to help Johnson make GAMPAC great. A politically viable GAMPAC is an organization that I could really get behind with my support and I’ll bet I’m not alone there.
Chet
Arthur, I apologize for not believing your posts were being censored. However, with your fixation on AA and certain board members, I still think you are doing a lot more harm to the atheist cause than good. See my post above – if you have the connection with Johnson you claim you do and have done as much work as you say you’ve done, you would be an outstanding asset to her and GAMPAC.
It’s time to sh*t or get off the pot. Help make GAMPAC great.
Chet
Arthur would not be an asset to Ellen and has in fact hurt her career.
The best thing Ellen could do with Arthur is distance herself from him as much as possible. In an earlier post I made that was deleted I explained some of what Arthur did to cause many problems within AA.
Ellen’s mistake was not controlling Arthur or firing him when she could not control him. The animosity Arthur caused with the board and within AA did not hurt Arthur so much as it hurt Ellen. It continues to hurt Ellen.
If Arthur is involved in the GAMPAC, many of the same problems will just follow her there.
If Arthur cares about anything other then himself, he’ll stay out of any endeavors Ellen pursues. Such has not been the case to date though.
This is not my singular opinion. The web master made a previous post that is still there and many others now know the damage that Arthur caused. It will all come out eventually.
LOL
What is done will be done again. Who in the AA organization will not be spending inordinate time watching there backs after what happened to Ellen.
I will tell you the truth, this whole string sounds like the vatican (uncapitalized) bickering behind closed doors.
The difference between organized religion and atheism is that atheism doesn’t have a program to recruit and raise money. Personally, I think you do yourself a huge disservice by adopting atheism as opposed to being agnostic. Do you imagine yourself to have the scientific proof that a force of nature who was creative and conscious did not set the big bang off and sat back and watched what transpired? Atheism is a leap of faith as large as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. You want us to believe that the balance of nature, the food chain, the survival instinct, are all an accident. We are all agreed that organized religion is a self serving trap, but, atheists have chosen the polar extreme. You reject that the truth may lie somewhere between.
I am agnostic, and while I am convinced that organized religion is the most dangerous factor in the possible extinction of humanity, I find aheism to be arrogant based upon what is known in science.
NeoWolfe
Hey I’m just continually amazed at how long this blog has lasted being open to non-members, non-Atheists, and people who are openly hostile towards AA in general.
Bravo to AA for being so open and brave in this way. Seriously, the infrequent but still annoying vulgarities are really unexpected. I think we all know who I’m referring to…
)
Joe Zamecki
Austin
NeoWolfe
You obviously don’t understand what the word atheist means. That’s simple enough to fix. The mystery is why you haven’t?
NeoWolfe,
I’m going to second What. You have a faulty definition of ‘atheist.’
I’d be willing to bet that neither of us positively believes in a deity. We are both atheists by the most basic definition.
Belief that no deity exists is an altogether different beast (though it is, by definition, a subset of atheism).
AA members are being asked to donate to the library, but only “authorized scholars” will be allowed access to it. Why aren’t library privileges included with the membership? Rather than an occasional peek, members should be allowed at least a week per year to research. Furthermore, if the scholars are from such universities as Notre Dame, Baylor and Brigham Young, I can’t see how that helps the cause. Restricting access to knowledge is what the RC Church did during the Dark Ages.
For all the good they’ll do members in the library, the diaries might as well stay with Ellen Johnson.
neowolfe
And if this deistic being set this in motion, what questions does that answer for you? It merely brings more questions: From whence came this deistic being? What purpose had it in setting off the big bang? Did it conjure up the contents for the big bang, or were they already present?
Really? I see no evidence to compel me to believe in the gods of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. There, How much faith did that take?
Yet, if your deistic being sets it in motion, then just sits back to watch what unfolds, how is that any less of an accident, except that the initial domino was intentionally tripped? You seem to fall into the same trap of the goddists who think that humans are the end product of the creation experiment. That ALL THIS is for US. Hint: We’re just another species on the rock. When the cells started forming and splitting, it wasn’t with a plan to eventually become human.
Not sure exactly what you mean by the balance of nature-it can be quite chaotic. We’ve altered our status on the food chain. Survival instinct is partly genetic.
Jim,
Once the center is complete the library will be open much more often, to anyone who wishes to use it.
Curmudgeon writes:
“Arthur, even if Johnson was an effective president (which I am in no way convinced of), what reasoning can you put forth that justifies why she (or anyone else) should get to be president-for-life? 10+ years is plenty long enough for one president to head up any organization”…
MADALYN MURRAY O’HAIR WAS PRESIDENT FOR LIFE. I THINK ELLEN SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONE TO JUDGE HOW LONG SHE SHOULD BE PRESIDENT OF AA, NOT YOU.
CURMUDGEON ALSO WROTE:
“The last convention I attended before leaving AA was nothing but a Madalyn O’Hair love-fest and had NOTHING to do with modern activism. Under Johnson, it would have been just more of the same, year after year.”
Chet
YOU ARE SO WRONG, CHET. THE AA CONVENTION IN MINNEAPOLIS WAS THE BIGGEST AND BEST YET WITH SOME 600 ATTENDEES. WHERE WERE YOU? AND ELLEN, YOUTHFUL AND VIBRANT, WOULD HAVE MADE EACH CONVENTION MORE EXCITING. NOW WE HAVE A BUNCH OF OLD MEN WHO AREN’T CREATIVE ENOUGH TO ENVISION WHERE THEY’RE GOING NEXT AND ARE CONCERNED ONLY ABOUT A LEAKY ROOF.
AND DID YOU SEE NEW MOST RECENT AA MAGAZINE? WHAT’S THAT ALL ABOUT?
Smartgal
Why are you screaming? We aren’t deaf.
Or are you just having another tantrum?
Sorry about that. My problem is that I do not know how to isolate a quote from another blog message the way you other guys do. (I don’t blog a lot) So in order to differentiate my quotes from Curmudgeon’s quotes, I chose to use caps.
It would be helpful if, instead of being snide, Karen, you would tell me how to set off quotes selected from someone else’s blog. I do work on deadline and haven’t had time to experiment.
I object to your saying I am having another “tantrum.” Any bad vibes here seem to be coming from you, not me. It appears you don’t necessarily need caps to indicate a tantrum.
Dave Silverman wrote on 7/23/08 in the leaky roof thread:
“…meet the people who will take this movement forward with gusto.”
So far, I haven’t seen much movement and very little gusto.
Dave, I resent your referring pejoratively (on 7/25) to Arthur Brenner as being a “part-time short-term office guy.” I am a part-time worker for our AA-affiliated group and, believe me, it has turned into a full-time, even time-and-a-half unpaid job. Sometimes it feels like the Atheist movement has taken over my life. I suspect Arthur was overworked and underpaid, and the fact that despite that, he remains loyal to Ellen is telling. He knew what Ellen was up against; Frank, Conrad and Dick apparently did not. Because Arthur saw Ellen every day at the office–and Frank, Conrad and Dick DID NOT–gives him more credibility.
I find Arthur’s postings intelligent, fascinating, credible and right on the button. What he says coincides with what I have observed about the goings-on at the AA headquarters building whenever I visited there during Ellen’s tenure. Ellen’s hard work, understaffed and over-tasked situation was quite obvious to any observer. Yet, when it came time to taping the AA Cable TV show, she pulled herself together and was superb on camera–poised, attractive, chic, smart, articulate. I was always so proud that Ellen was representing me and you on TV and elsewhere.
Smartgal,
You know I respect you, but Ellen and Arthur are different people, and the situation with Ellen does not mirror MMOH … or yourself.
Respecting Ellen’s work and abilities (like I do) does not mandate that everyone who supports her is correct, or even good-natured.
Arthur was never more than a part-time office guy for barely more than a year. That is fact. That doesn’t mean he was worthless or undedicated, he just has no idea what happened, because he had very little access to what was really happening.
The Atheist movement took over my life 12 years ago. I have never earned a penny for my effort — I volunteer, just like the Board of Directors.
Ellen is fully capable of communicating on her own. If she wanted to blog, she would. She does not, because she, Like ME, wants to move on, so the movement at large doesn’t suffer from splintering.
At least that’s what I think she thinks, but what do I know? I only volunteered for her for 12 years.
You’ll get the gusto.
Smartgal says:
If you haven’t seen it, the July issue of American Atheist magazine consists of a reprint of a very old issue of American Atheist and a couple of Frank’s ramblings (letters that have already been posted on the blog). That’s it. There is absolutely no new content. On top of that, the magazine is one month late.
Back when Frank was doing the quarterly version of the magazine, it was almost always late. Since Ellen took over as editor and made it a monthly magazine, it has almost never been late. That has always amazed me. On top of everything else she was doing, Ellen was able to get the magazine out on time with lots of new content in every issue.
Frank (and Dave) have repeatedly stated that they are taking American Atheists in a new direction. This July reprint issue is just another example of how they have nothing new to offer. They have no new magazine content. They have no new direction for American Atheists. All they have to offer is the empty promise of a hypothetical new president who will supposedly have lots of ideas.
Frank: You never should have agreed to be the temporary president. You knew you wouldn’t have time to do a good job. If you had refused to take the job, Dick and the others probably would have backed down and allowed Ellen to continue as president. Now, the only way for you to begin to fix this whole mess is to resign from both the presidency and the board of directors. The sooner the better.
Arthur Brenner
brenner7@stny.rr.com
Smartgal said: “MADALYN MURRAY O’HAIR WAS PRESIDENT FOR LIFE. I THINK ELLEN SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE ONE TO JUDGE HOW LONG SHE SHOULD BE PRESIDENT OF AA, NOT YOU.”
Actually Madalyn turned over the reigns of presidency to Jon Murray a few years before they were murdered. She was president a long long time, but even she realized that she shouldn’t try to be president so long that she would’ve died from old age as president.
I think Robin would’ve made a great president of AA, seeing how she was so soft spoken and popular with the members.
Joe Zamecki
Austin
Thanks Joe,
It’s amazing how much you learn about an organization when you stay with it for so long, as you have.
Smartgal
OK, I apologize for being snide toward you. Now, will you try to enter the blog without a chip on your shoulder each and every time?
If you want to quote someone use the blockquote html code. Cut and paste your quote, and immediately before it, put (blockquote) and immediately after it put (/blockquote). Except, instead of using the parentheses, use the “greater than” and “less than” symbols above the period and comma on your keyboard.
You can also make bold type or italic type by inserting the letter b or the letter i instead of the word blockquote. Other html tags are found below the comment text box.
Now, let’s see if this comment gets through with the blockquote explained while being contained in parentheses.
Like this
OK, Thanks, Karen. I did it; Let’s see if this works.
Meanwhile, what makes you conclude that I have a chip on my shoulder? ? How does an attitude project itself on a screen, especially if I don’t feel I have that attitude? Are you sure it’s not just because I’m new on the blog? You guys take a lot of gaff from Phreeky and What and especially Curmudgeon, who sounds like he has a sledgehammer on his shoulder big enough to knock Ellen out of the New Jersey, let alone the presidency, yet I don’t see you attacking him. If you don’t want me to use the M word, then treat my comments with the same respect.
Or perhaps what is being projected here on this blog is that I want Ellen to come back as president of AA and I feel I am fighting those ignoramouses on this blog who say her dismissal is final, “so move on already.” I see red when I read stuff like that. NOTHING IN LIFE IS FINAL EXCEPT DEATH. Yes, I’m yelling that. I hate to continually read “Move on, move on, move on” from the Old Guys Network yet I see no movement going on except maybe backwards.
Is fixing a leaky roof “moving on”? That’s called maintenance, not progress, guys.
And why couldn’t you guys have done that when Ellen was president? I’m getting the feeling that Ellen endured a very lonely presidency.
Sometimes a dead horse stays dead, no matter how long you beat it.
New presidents are being evaluated, The deadline for applicants is the end of August, all according to schedule. So far, the applicants are SUPERB! Even if nobody else applies (but they will), the future is very bright.
Ellen has already entrenched herself in GAMPAC, and I personally wish her nothing but the best. She will always be remembered for her accomplishments, but her time as President of American Atheists is permanently over. Really, really, over.
I don’t know how much clearer I can be on this, Smartgal. Fight the fights you can win, or you’ll always be tired.
Translation: You are getting sleepy … very very sleepy. When I snap my fingers you will awaken and be under my command.
Insert maniacal laugh here.
bwoo hah hah ahh ahhhhhh…
I wrote the above yesterday.
I forgot to mention that I knew that Ellen was waiting for money from a legacy to fix the roof. She held off until that money came in because she needed to use AA funds on hand to pay salaries, property taxes and employee health insurance.The board has since gotten the legacy money and they fixed the roof. They just did what Ellen was going to do.