Listen, Eddie Tabash is a strong man. Chair of the board of CFI, and a veteran litigator and church-state separation activist, Eddie has powerful intellect and an oratorical style that is both blunt and vivid.

But he is also simply physically strong. I’m serious. Do not mess with Eddie Tabash, he is astoundingly mighty. But that’s neither here nor there.

That power was on display as Eddie delivered his address to the Reason Rally, expounding upon the work of CFI, of which he is clearly very proud. Eddie spoke with real passion about the drive for the equal status of atheists, and the right to religious dissent. But he was just as strong talking about the importance of skepticism, and how we “reject the claims of ESP and UFO visitations” and promote “the application of the empirical scientific method to all areas of human endeavor.”

I was especially glad to hear Eddie tell the crowd of one moment that made him particularly proud of CFI and its work: When one of our representatives at the UN Human Rights Council, Josephine Macintosh, was berated by the Saudi representative during her presentation to the Council on Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. (“Tell that woman to shut up!” the Saudi delegate shouted.) Macintosh soldiered on, and soon garnered the vocal support of the U.S., Canada, France, and other countries.

“When religious fundamentalist tyrannies make such an effort to silence CFI,” boasted Eddie, “we know we are doing great work to rid the world of the scourge of theocratic dictatorships.”

He also spoke of CFI’s “critical role” in saving the lives of secularists in countries like Bangladesh where their lack of religious belief can get them killed by marauders with machetes, as well as our work to bring sanity to the regulation of homeopathy, to change the way we talk about climate change “skeptics” as opposed to “deniers,” and much more.

Eddie lamented that despite all of the work put in by CFI and other freethought groups, “hardly a dent” has been made in “the monolithic wall of superstition.” We all must continue to introduce critical thinking into the public consciousness, he said.

Oh, and of course, like a good chair of the board, he plugged our upcoming conferences. About Women in Secularism 4, he said, forcefully, that “the heavy hand of fundamentalist religious dogma” has too long been allowed to “hamper the millennia long struggle for universal equal rights for women,” calling such a change “thousands of years overdue because of religion.”

And he also plugged CSICon, especially the fact that James Randi would be there!

Boiling it all down, Eddie’s core message about CFI (and its merging partner the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science) was clear, that we aim to “strike fear in the hearts of anyone who wants to use religion or pseudoscience to manipulate or damage the scope of human freedom.”