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New directions: Centers for Inquiry and human enrichment.

Article Excerpt
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is the newest star on the cultural horizon. Readers of this magazine should by now be familiar with its existence. The Center for Inquiry-International in Amherst, New York, is headquarters of the Council for Secular Humanism, publisher of FREE INQUIRY. Since there are now over a dozen Centers for Inquiry worldwide, and many new CFI Communities now in the process of formation, it is part of a rapidly growing constellation of Centers.

What is the purpose of each Center for Inquiry? Its first focus is on inquiry. We wish "to promote and defend reason, science, and freedom of inquiry in all areas of human endeavor"; and, in particular, to critically examine and, if need be, change the basic beliefs and values of society, its unexamined "sacred cows." Our second focus is on human enrichment. We endeavor to cultivate values that enhance the realization of human happiness.

Recently some of us participated at a grand-opening celebration of the Center for Inquiry-Community Long Island. We met in a restaurant in a place with the unlikely name of Hicksville, Long Island--which turns out to be centrally located and near a Long Island Railroad station! Gerry Dantone, the energetic coordinator of the new CFI-Community, welcomed everyone by remarking that there were 4,004 churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques on Long Island, but until the CFI-Community was created there was no explicitly secular institution devoted to beliefs and values that did not depend upon religious faith!

If, according to...