Brighter Brains is engaged in the Rwenzori Mountains of Western Uganda ( Photo by Dylan Waters

Jessica Xiao is a writer and the former assistant editor at TheHumanist.com. She also previously managed the operations of Humanist Press and was the projects assistant at the American Humanist Association. Additionally, she was a community facilitator for the McGill University Social Learning for Social Impact MOOC on edX and a current volunteer grant writer for the Montreal-based international women’s economic development nonprofit Artistri Sud.

I believe responsible people should strive to create utopia, paradise on earth, equal opportunities for all and the annihilation of suffering. To be an ethical human is to care about and work deeply for others who are less fortunate, and strive in community for the greater social good. Change is putting vision into practice. Brighter Brains Institute (BBI) is a community that invites others to perform good deeds in the world.BBI is presently engaged in western Uganda, helping sixteen schools that we either built or financially support. Eleven of these are humanist schools. We provide food, shoes, clothes, books, reusable sanitary pads (provided by AFRIpads ), school supplies, and medical care for the children. We build classrooms, we provide teacher salaries, and we launch businesses like motorcycle rental and chicken farms to earn income for the schools. We work with many women’s collectives, and we emphasize women’s equality. We promote humanism with Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles by Rodrigue Tremblay as our main source material. Our most recent campaign is to distribute condoms to secondary schools and to teach sex education, family planning, and birth control. At our humanist schools, we forbid religious influence.Uganda is poor—this allows us to accomplish an enormous amount with our budget. Five hundred US dollars pays a medic to work at our clinic for a year. Twenty-five dollars in food can feed 250 children lunch per day. One thousand dollars can build a classroom for sixty children. We can keep an orphan in school for a year by paying his forty-six dollar tuition. Uganda is also relatively safe, people speak English, the landscape is beautiful, the culture is fascinating, and there is already a humanist presence there. We work almost exclusively with the Bakonzo tribe, an ethnic group that I find very wonderful to interact with. We’re also in the Rwenzori Mountains region, and I like to hike. [caption id="attachment_16723" align="alignright" width="300"]Hank Pellissier[/caption]When Uganda gained independence in 1962, the public education system was largely handed over to the Anglican and Catholic Churches, because they were the only institutions large enough and wealthy enough to administer it. Subsequently, these churches have had an enormous indoctrinating influence on Ugandan school children and on the culture itself. Catechism is taught in many public schools, and about 50 percent of the schools in the region we work in are parochial. Ugandans are extremely religious, i.e., superstitious, particularly in their belief in the power of prayer. The consequence of this religiosity in Uganda is that the nation is now one of the world’s most homophobic nations, and women are frequently treated as powerless, second-class citizens. Our humanist schools emphasize that human intelligence, power, and education is the path towards societal improvement—not prayer! Just stating this is huge—and blasphemous. The humanist principles we teach in our schools offer other progressive ideas that have little to do with a god. This is useful in getting people to relax their tribalism. It’s not generally reported in Western media, but there is inter-tribal conflict throughout Africa. The Bakonzo, for example, have had deadly skirmishes with the Batoro and Basongora tribes.So far, there have been no risks at all. We are operating in a region that seems to be about 62 percent Anglican, 32 percent Catholic, and about 5 percent Muslim. I estimate that based on the number of schools operated by each. There seems to be no animosity between those religions. There is violence in the region occasionally, but it is always “tribal”—one tribe attacking the other.Being an atheist missionary just means I am proselytizing the abandonment of religion in Africa. I am actively working to convince people to leave their foolish and damaging creeds. I was raised Catholic and told many stories of priests hiking into jungles to convert tribes. I am repairing their mistakes. I am hiking in and telling them to abandon the false religions. I mean that literally, in some cases. Several of the schools we work with can only be accessed by trails. Steep trails. I fell over a cliff last time I went and infected my foot, ending up in the ER when I returned. But it was worth it; we went to a village where the inhabitants had never seen white people. They were frightened at first.Christian churches were established in the remote places we visited. I don’t think there is any place in Uganda untainted by Western religion.I half-seriously define transhumanists as the “people who want to live forever and are willing to become robots to do this.” Transhumanists are those who regard technology as a wondrous path to an improved future. They are frequently optimistic in their forecasts; for example, many believe the so-called singularity will arrive around 2045 in the form of smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligence that will easily solve problems that stump the “meat-bag” intellect. I would prefer to not die, or at least die only when I was willing to do so. I would be fine with a machine heart and machine organs and unbreakable metal bones, as long as my brain and feelings remained human.[caption id="attachment_16724" align="alignleft" width="300"]MotherGivers Humanist School, funded by BBI[/caption]I coined the term “transhumanitarian” because I was trying to convince the transhumanist community (which I was very much a part of) that humanitarianism should be a key attribute in the philosophy. Transhumanism means “better than human”—“super human”—and I was trying to convince the community that being “super generous” should be an integral part of being transhuman. I was not entirely successful. I have received much more support from the humanist and atheist communities, mainly because they’re larger. The transhumanist community was very generous for its size.Humanism believes that humanity (not deities) is solely responsible for determining its fate. Transhumanists (mostly) agree with this, and view technology as a miraculous tool that can mold our bodies, our brains, and our world into something vastly superior. As an ex-Catholic myself, I experience religion as encouraging fear, intolerance, and passivity. As a humanist, I am happy to “spread the good word” of humanism in Africa, releasing them— especially the children—from the bondage of intolerance, ignorance, and terror. I am thrilled to tell them that their minds can be their best friend, via education and rational thinking.We rely on donations from individuals. If someone wants to create a special individualized project, like a clinic in their deceased parent’s honor, or a classroom named after their daughter they can contact me at brighterbrainsinstitute@gmail.com. We’re also looking for farmers and businesspeople who want to help the Ugandans start businesses that support the schools. Chicken and pig ranchers, for example. And we’re looking for volunteers who want to go there and teach. I’m excited to be taking my wife and two daughters with me to Uganda next year, where we’ll all live and teach the children in BBI’s humanist schools.