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What comes to mind when you hear the term wokism? Activism countering injustices against minorities and the marginalized? Confrontation and cancellation, both public and private, of figures of the past and the present? A step forward for integration, inclusion, and acceptance? A step backward for academic and scientific research and discussion? How did a word …

The 1619 Project The publication of The 1619 Project is a good place to start for understanding the controversy over critical race theory and woke liberalism. The project started as an effort on the part of a group of African American writers for The New York Times to focus on the role that slavery has …

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most …

In this book, John McWhorter argues that woke ideology has become a “religion” whose followers, the “Elect,” are failing in their efforts to reduce racism and are actually harming Black Americans. In the excerpt that follows, he offers an alternative approach.—The Editors Chapter 5: BEYOND “DISMANTLING STRUCTURES”: SAVING BLACK AMERICA FOR REAL IF YOU HAVE …

Native American repatriations—the removal of human remains and artifacts from museums and universities and their subsequent reburial—may proceed faster in 2022 than in any preceding year. Yet repatriation hinders science because human remains and artifacts are used to reconstruct the past, which in turn helps us understand our common human experience. Factors that impact repatriation …

Look around the world and you see religious fundamentalists vying for power. When they get it, they force everyone else to obey their rules. They are hard to stop. Today it is happening in the Middle East; a few centuries ago, it was in Europe. This opera tells the horrifying story of fundamentalists gaining total …

The Freethought Trail (www.freethought-trail.org) is the Council for Secular Humanism’s online tribute to some 185 radical-reform history sites. All are located in west-central New York State (between Rochester and Rome; very roughly, within 120 miles of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York). The Trail focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth …

It’s hard not to get disgusted with human beings sometimes. We seem to have such a talent for destroying everything, and then doing it all over again a few years later. It’s not enough that we’ve trashed the climate we depend on for survival, or that we’ve laid waste to countless species and their habitats …

When the Russians invaded Ukraine in February 2022, President Joe Biden offered to fly President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country to a safe haven. When Zelenskyy replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” he instantly became the hero of the West, fighting for freedom and democracy against the despotism of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. It …

The religion factor is yet again getting insufficient attention when it comes to dark human affairs—in this case regarding the Russian assault on Ukraine. Early in the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure, set in Alaska, main character Dr. Joel Fleischman asks, “Why can’t the Russians find a way to govern themselves and let us off of …

One of the goals of the Enlightenment that inspired the American and French revolutions was the rejection of exclusionary group privilege based on religion and aristocratic ancestry. This was epitomized by the French slogan “la carriere ouverte aux talents”—careers in public service and the professions open to men of talent irrespective of birth, faith, and …

35 Years Ago “Lack of religious worship, prayer, and ceremony has affected my life very favorably—by giving me much more time than I otherwise would have had to be committed to other, quite worldly pursuits. Including personal pleasure! “I consider life meaningful even though I reject the idea of a theistic being, because I make …

Free Inquiry Pronoun Future S. T. Joshi (“Pronoun Follies,” FI, February/March 2022) is in a state about the campaign to replace the third person singular him/her with the plural they—even for singular references to appease the transgender community. He would have been in a real tizzy a few centuries earlier when the singular ye was …

It was divine intervention, I tell you. I was driving along, belting out “Nobody Loves Me” with operatic gusto, when a “Jesus loves you” billboard stopped me halfway through the part about eating worms. For proof, it cited one of two Bible texts perpetually poised on the tips of ardent Christian tongues: “Greater love hath …

In an age simultaneously still reeling from the decline of religion and one in which science has yet to fully deliver on its promises, it seems to me agnosticism is surely the only mature response. Both theism and its opposite certainly have their merits and bright ideas; Lord above knows I’ve dabbled in both, myself, …

When my daughter Sasha was about three years old, she began asking questions about religion. She wanted to know if such an entity as a god existed, along with whether other characters, such as Santa Claus, were real. Her little friends talked about a god, and later when she attended pre-school, the question of religion …

Editors’ Note: When Tom Flynn unexpectedly died in August 2021, he had many articles in the works for publication in FREE INQUIRY, including this one. We present it along with Flynn’s introductory comments. The Mail I Get … In the summer of 2020, I received a proposal from one Alan Tarica for an article on …

I believe that E=mc2. I also believe that God does not exist. I used to believe that God exists, but now I do not. Most of what I believe is based on testimonial evidence, that is, things I heard from others. Very little of what I believe is based on direct evidence, that is, things …

Hello, God, it’s me. I haven’t bothered with you for quite some time. I figured: What’s the use? But then it occurred to me that maybe you are real. In that case, I request something very simple from you. Can you … would you … please write up your job description? You know—what your duties …

Don’t fall, don’t cry, and please don’t worry the evening meal flavors the great domain rain hammers at the glass, sparks in the stove little boy can taste the delicacies of evening. School is done for the day, homework will come then sleep in the cozy down bed, close to the door almost to ensure …

Andy Norman, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, with a foreword by Steven Pinker. (New York, NY: HarperWave, 2021. ISBN 978-0-06-300298-2.) 397 pp. Hardcover, $29.99. Brian T. Watson, Headed into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time, and the Future We’ll Face. (Swampscott, MA: Anvilside Press, 2019. …

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, by Steven Pinker (New York, NY: Random House/Penguin/Viking, 2021, ISBN 9780525561996). 432 pp. Hardcover, $32.00. Steven Pinker is one of my intellectual heroes. I have read and benefitted from his previous work on language (The Language Instinct, Words and Rules), cognition (How the Mind …

Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic, by Stanley Corngold (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-691-16501-1). 744 pp. Hardcover, $39.95. Within the world of atheists, humanists, and freethinkers, there are some who take inspiration from the world of science and mathematics and others who take it from the arts and humanities. The former group includes …

So it has been, so it will be. The ancient hag and the child crouch under the thorny acacia tree, with the show soon to begin the men from a distance safe, gather on the crest of the hill. Down below, with a thorn, and the delicate dried gut of a gnarled rat, she stitches …

How beautiful you look, my darling, In whose glass I see the Best parts of me. Ah, to drink the image with a Draught And feel whole. Now she’s practiced in the Art of dying. Less of her shall there be to be Seen, A wine of misery. I love you in your old age, …

Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary) “The Affirmations of Humanism”: We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, …

The survival instinct is strong within our species. Preservation of one’s existence is of supreme importance, and as social organisms, this concern for survival extends to others as well. In fact, it is reasonable to suspect that the impetus for the evolution of the concept of an afterlife was an attempt to reconcile the need …

In 2016, Congress passed the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, a.k.a. Public Law 114-281. Section 2 of the Act—an amendment to the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998—conveyed Congress’s “revised” view that “freedom of thought, conscience and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs, and the right not to profess …

We may have been brought up as Christians in Christian households—our parents and grandparents may have been Christians—yet now we are not Christians at all. There is no contradiction in that assertion, which is, furthermore, true. I am an example of someone nurtured in that way yet one who is not a Christian—who is, indeed, …

Death is the mother of religion. Would faith ever have been born if not for life’s only inevitability for all: The Reaper? As the first Homo sapiens discovered, we are all renters in life until we buy the farm. So, even before the wheel, mortals invented the first life insurance policy: religion. Each major creed …

Author’s Note: This is dedicated to Sue Gibbons, because she loved Tom Flynn more than anyone did (and he her), and he helped greatly with this article, as with so many other things. Not long ago, in the context of discussing an article in The Guardian about a documentary on the exploitation of “Jane Roe” …

The Decline and Fall of C. S. Lewis In assessing C. S. Lewis’s achievement as a Christian apologist, the key is chronology. He is, of course, best known for his writings of the 1940s, and it is as the author of such celebrated books as The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles that he …

What is Dubai and why should we care? Is it the murmurings of a nascent Arab Enlightenment where reason and science are valued, giving hope to its future? Or is it a gleaming, modern facade under which beats the heart of an Islamic theocracy run by a PR-savvy ruler? That was the question Richard Dawkins …

The trouble with humans is that we never know when to stop. We know how to invent things, but we seem to be completely unable to figure out how to uninvent them—or even just stop using them once we’ve invented them. We can commission like crazy but we can’t decommission. Like, for instance, cruise ships …

These days, folks go on about how back in olden times American conservatives, who tend to be Christians, were much more reasonable than they are now. Many claim the religious Right and its Republican Party has gone radically, toxically authoritarian in its adoration for Norman Vincent Peale–adherent hyper-narcissistic Donald Trump. McCain, the Bushes, Reagan, and …

Criticizing the idea of human dignity is about as popular as attacking motherhood, apple pie, and cute puppies. In its current form, the idea is well-intentioned, and the phrase itself—“human dignity”—has a satisfying emotional ring. But I have serious misgivings about invoking human dignity as a consideration in political and legal contexts. Let me explain. …

World-renowned paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey died in his home in Nairobi, Kenya, on January 2, 2022. He was an advocate for the advancement and acceptance of human evolution, especially as it related directly to Africa. Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was born on December 19, 1944, in Nairobi to Louis and Mary Leakey. He spent …

“Ant Man,” “Father of Sociobiology,” “Father of Biodiversity”: these epithets were how E. O. Wilson became affectionately known due to his lifelong work with insects and in environmental advocacy. He was also known for his secular humanist ideas pertaining to religion and ethics. Wilson died on December 26, 2021, in Burlington, Massachusetts, at the age …

35 Years Ago “The view that religious belief and practice were indispensable for the preservation of social order, not only between classes, but within classes, seems to have been held by leading statesmen like Napoleon and Metternich, who were not themselves noteworthy for their religious piety. Some members of elite groups in Western society who …

Abortion Arguments Shadia Drury (“A Pagan Approach to the Abortion Debacle,” FI, December 2021/January 2022) seems to think that the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade based on some abstract “right to choose” and that Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected to Roe v. Wade “because no one can claim a right to choose what so …