Polls consistently show that some 10% of Americans - tens of millions of people - don't feel an affinity for any of the traditional faith-based religious denominations. Yet they have the same social, emotional, and other "spiritual" needs as everyone else. And they are also deeply concerned with such important principles as justice, honesty, right living, and the promotion of these values in the larger society. But the great majority of unbelievers have found it difficult to reconcile their views on these important subjects and their knowledge of the natural world with what nearly all religious organizations expect their members to believe on faith. Whether they think of themselves as atheists, agnostics, humanists, doubters, skeptics, freethinkers, or something else, these individuals have found themselves excluded from traditional church life in America.

As a result, many have felt isolated and unsupported in their conscientious inability to accept belief in the supernatural. Meanwhile, the faith-based churches have enjoyed a near-monopoly in providing their members with a sense of community, a ready source of personal, emotional, and social enrichment and support and representation of their views and values in the larger society. Up until now, unbelievers have had little choice but to remain alone and isolated. A few have chosen to compromise their principles, convincing themselves that their honest doubts just aren't that important. Sadly, many of these people are individuals and couples with children who have been made to feel that religious indoctrination is somehow necessary to the moral development of their offspring.

To some who are without belief in the supernatural, "church" and "religion" are intellectually indigestible, terms that are too closely associated with what they have been unable to honestly accept. It is the position of The North Texas Church of Freethought that this is an unnecessary handicap. A church is merely a group of individuals and families among whom there is a consensus about "religious questions" and the relationship of human beings to one another and to the larger world.

Freethinkers simply hold that the world outside of human thought, feeling, and imagination is best known through the tools of evidence and reason. Similarly, religion is no more than an assembly of beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors with which people relate to one another and the universe. Freethinkers simply cannot find a place for the supernatural in any of these things.

Belief in the supernatural, belief based on faith, belief as a choice (instead of the natural result of reason and evidence) and/or belief as a measure of one's self-worth or moral status: these are the things that most people who are unchurched find hard to swallow. These indigestible religious "bones" are what The North Texas Church of Freethought has dispensed with. We explicitly reject such doctrines and teachings as being incompatible with the highest ideals of good to which human beings can aspire: honesty, integrity, intelligence, insight, creativity, and compassion and respect for others, to name the most important

Our values, then, can be described in the following way:

We advance evidence and reason over tradition and superstition as the best tools we have available to come to know, understand, and appreciate ourselves and the beautiful and amazing Universe in which we live.

Evidence and Reason, not Tradition and Superstition