Written by Atheist Alliance
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13 July 2010
{mosimage}AAI President Stuart Bechman
Welcome to the Atheist Alliance International website, and specifically my webpage.
Raised in a religious background, I lost my religion at about the time I became an adult. But at the time, I didn't know any other people who thought religion and Christianity in particular was a bunch of bunk; so I concluded that there was something wrong with me to doubt what seemed so obvious and true to everyone else, and I spent the next decade and a half hiding my religious non-belief from public view as best I could.
Then about 15 years ago, I happened to get a new computer that had something called an internet browser on it. I had heard about this new internet thing, and was quite curious to see what could be found on it. In a serendipitous bit of randomness one night, I fired up my computer, opened up my browser, and typed the word "atheist" in the search engine. Immediately, a whole new community that I didn't even know existed opened up in front of me; and I was amazed to find sites and people behind those sites who shared my lack of belief in gods and proud to say so.
It was like an orphan suddenly finding his long-lost family. This started me on an amazing journey to recapture my psyche, my heritage, and my integrity. I learned more about freethought and religion in the next few years than I had learned about either in my prior 30 years.
And I found a community. A community that took reason and science seriously as important tools of learning; a community that valued knowledge; and a community that believed not in divine realms or beings but in the goodness of people, the ability to solve our own problems, and the promise to create a better future based on reason and science.
My own career has been in business management, accounting, and computer science; and when I was elected as AAI's president last fall, I brought these skills with me to build a stronger, more responsive organization that would be at the forefront of transforming our society of superstitious faith into a community of reason.
We have started that transformation this year at AAI by revisiting our vision and mission statements, our values, and our goals for the next several years. We have established new communications with our affiliates and our individual members, and we have upgraded our website to allow us to better provide services and programs to our member base. Over the next several months, expect to see features and modules added that provide more and more timely information to you, our members, that you can then use to create and build your own local groups and raise your visibility and voice in your community.
There is much work to be done, but I look forward to the challenge. Thank you for giving me the chance to make AAI the organization that we all want it to be.
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