At the first meeting between HVD President Frieder Otto Wolf and EZW Director Reinhard Hempelmann at the EZW headquarters in Berlin, perspectives on the religiously and ideologically changing society were discussed. At the same time, the prerequisites and possible ways of involving religious and ideological actors in a pluralistic civil society in a contemporary and equal manner were discussed.
In the discussion on Tuesday, Wolf emphasized that he sees no fundamental contradiction between the existing constitutional framework for various forms of cooperation between the state and religions or worldviews and the Humanist Association’s demand for the realization of cooperative secularism. He described the acceptance of the forms of organizational constitution inherent to other religious and non-religious worldviews as being of central importance for the development of opportunities and possibilities for public participation of worldviews without a church-based self-image, which in the view of the association remains necessary. For state institutions, this is also indispensable due to the requirement of ideological neutrality formulated in the Basic Law. Frieder Otto Wolf went on to say that more differentiated considerations for assessing the social significance of the various religions and world views in the Federal Republic of Germany are essential for an enlightened discourse, which could also be beneficial for all relevant players in civil society. Other topics of the discussion included the new development of the Humanist self-image, the Glass Walls report on the discrimination of non-religious people in Germany and the book
Humanism: Basic Concepts
and the potential of an ongoing dialog between religious communities and non-religious worldviews.
