Austin Dacey was born on April 19,1972 and is an American philosopher, writer, and human rights activist whose work concerns secularism, religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience.
11 Facts About Austin Dacey
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Austin Dacey is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights, and a 2006 New York Times op-ed entitled "Believing in Doubt," which criticized the ethical views of Pope Benedict.
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Austin Dacey is a representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the creator and director of The Impossible Music Sessions.
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In 2009, Austin Dacey left CFI and published a critique of the secular movement.
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Austin Dacey has taught ethics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
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In place of the "privacy of conscience," Austin Dacey defends a model of the "openness of conscience," comparing conscience to a free press.
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Austin Dacey has analogized religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries to dissident Protestant sects such as the Anabaptists who constructed theological arguments for toleration and church-state separation in early modern Europe.
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In defending a universal human right to blaspheme, Austin Dacey has emphasized that it is a matter of freedom of conscience as much as just freedom of speech.
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Austin Dacey authored a CFI position paper accusing the UN Alliance of Civilizations of neglecting secular perspectives and perpetuating the "problematic division of the social world by religion" for which the "clash of civilizations" thesis is often faulted.
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From his early work with the Center for Inquiry, Austin Dacey has been interested in the cultural implications of science.
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Austin Dacey coined the term "accommodationism" to describe those "who either recognize no conflicts between religion and science, or who recognize such conflicts but are disinclined to discuss them publicly," a usage which has been adopted in blogosphere debates about creationism and the New Atheism.