Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a history of the main nonreligious organizations in North America. While giving an overview of the secular movement both in Canada and in the United States, organizations are presented as being integrated in the secularization process and linked to the political and cultural context, including: the anti-atheist wave of the 1960s; the need for community; the raison d’être of these groups; and secularity in Canada and the connections between Canadian and American groups. Detailed descriptions of the various organizations are provided along with a brief history of their development. Prominent individuals within these groups are described, such as Paul Kurtz, Madalyn O’Hair, Henry Morgentaler, and Marian Sherman, and how their experience shaped the secular movement in North America is examined. The great diversity of approaches within those groups is highlighted and various dimensions of the secular movement are discussed: at the individual, group, and societal level. I conclude with a case study of the Satanic Temple, to show how this unique organization uses its specific imagery for secular purposes through protests and political activism. The Satanic Temple is a secular activist group that uses the symbol of Satan to trigger reflection about the hegemony of Christianity in the US public sphere, while bridging the gap between secularism and religion. This example highlights the desire of these secular organizations to claim their place in the public sphere and to claim the rights of nonreligious/atheist individuals within a predominantly Christian nation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".