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“[S]cientific materialism is currently posing a new challenge to religious belief because up to this time no one has thought through the full implications for religion of the Darwinian evolution of the mind. Consider, for example … ‘the epigenetic rules.’ These are the features by which the mind is assembled. In some instances they are …

For the first time, a freethinkers’ meeting site has received an official historical marker. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation funds roadside historical markers in New York (the state no longer does so). Working with Town of Huron Historian Rosa Fox, in 2019 the Pomeroy Foundation delivered a marker for the James Madison Cosad farmstead, the …

Free Inquiry now welcomes digital submission of unsolicited articles. In the past, unsolicited articles had to be sent by postal mail (three copies with an electronic copy on CD or thumb drive). This method is still available for those who prefer it, but unsolicited articles can now be submitted online. All article submissions will be …

Overall I am amused by the fact that the writers published in your magazine seem to think that expressing themselves in a “professorial manner” ratifies their intellectual abilities, i.e., never say in a short sentence what can be said with “big words” in long paragraphs. As an agnostic who suspends judgment concerning the existence of …

Democracy in America is under increasing threat, just as it is in Brazil, India, and many other countries. Voter suppression. Gerrymandering. Shrinkage of responsible mainstream print and electronic news media. Expansion of extremist religio-political media. A Senate that is stacked to favor less populous over more populous states. A faulty electoral college that allowed a …

People with nothing important to think about may wonder what qualifies me to write for Free Inquiry. I am, after all, no expert on humanism. I’m no expert in theology, either. (But then, neither are theologians, unless expertise in the dealings of a nonexistent being is a thing.) And I can neither confirm nor deny …

“I know there’s a god,” someone once told me, “because I need there to be.” This was said at the end of a routine god/no-god debate. Amicable beer-drinking continued thereafter, but that specific conversation had clearly ended with that bit of insight. It was something of an epiphany for both of us. This was the …

I know, or at least firmly believe, that I am a person whose name is David Berman. I also believe that I am the same person now as I was an hour ago or ten years ago. Why? Because I believe I can remember my past actions and other happenings in my life. This is …

It is a commonplace belief that there is a war between science and religion. From the standpoint of science, the anthropologist Leslie White has argued that as science gains knowledge in one sphere after another, religion is forced to retreat. Thus, for instance, the rise of psychology has meant the decline of religious explanations of …

Edd Doerr was born on December 21, 1930, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Eugene Henry and Mary Catherine (Burk) Doerr. He received his Bachelor of Science from Indiana University in 1956. A former teacher of history and Spanish, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or translator of twenty books, including My Life as a …

Time Is Irreverent 2: Jesus Christ, Not Again, by Marty Essen (Victor, Montana: Encante Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-9778599-6-2). 236 pp. Softcover, $14.95.   Behold, born to us is a sequel to Marty Essen’s Time Is Irreverent, the madcap sci-fi metanovel that I reviewed favorably in these pages (FI, October/November 2018). As before, the book is …

The clematis vines into its top knot of magenta, each petal as bold as the arm of a starfish. My child, his attention unfixed, strokes the white keys of the piano as his violin teacher opens the hutch to feed Attila the Bun. The mimosa flowers in the garden color the air like the notes …

1. “Kiss me, once,” she said. … I kiss her, once. … “Kiss me twice,” she said. … I kiss her twice. … “Kiss me, once again,” she said. … I kiss her, once again. 2. “Miss me, once,” she said. … I miss her, once. … “Miss me twice,” she said. … I miss …

Had I known I’d find my way into this full-blown love, might I have creased my brow less? The boy with his violin, the daughter with her social ease, the husband plotting out the design of Mexican tiles across the floor. In this little house, where the wooden stairs creak and he must sometimes duck …

1. “Write a love poem,” she said. … “Only if you write one, too,” I said … She writes a love poem. … I read her love poem. … I write my love poem. … She reads my love poem. 2. “Write a last love poem,” she said. … “Only if you write a last …

Back in the late 1970s, the religious Right was embarking on social and political activism in a big way that would make it a major force in American life. To promote the effort, in 1979 Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and others did something as audacious as it was an unethical lie. They founded …

The first time I saw this meme—all that sweetness and purity on the verge of corruption, the spread of ethnicities representing the diverse peoples of our shared world, those innocent cherubic minds naively awaiting indoctrination at the hands of evil-doing religious zealots—I was genuinely upset. Of course, that was the point. It is effective. But …

The God Delusion is big in Saudi Arabia. Three million copies of Richard Dawkins’s bible of atheism were downloaded in the kingdom—one of twelve Muslim-majority states where the statute books prescribe the death penalty for apostasy. It is difficult to gain an accurate estimate of the number of atheists in Saudi. According to a 2012 …

I don’t believe in God, but at times when I am under loads of stress, I start to think I am the second coming of Christ. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2017 but have experienced the spectrum of psychotic symptoms since my late teens. The diagnosis was masked by other mental-health issues, in …

‘To Bruno’ My wife and I are at the end of a seventeen-day science pilgrimage that began in Venice and is ending here in Rome. We have been visiting sites in northern Italy—Padua, Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Vinci, among others—significant to Galileo Galilei and Leonardo da Vinci, two key figures in the Renaissance. We’ve seen Galileo’s …

Suicide is a human capability in nature; to be recognized as something more, it takes society. For centuries, society’s major institutions have judged suicide as inherently aberrant. Not everyone has agreed, and over recent years support for rational suicide has advanced, with some framing it as a human right. Arguments treating suicide as a human …

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, establishing women’s right to vote, was adopted on August 26, 1920. The centenary of this event is being broadly celebrated throughout 2020. As its contribution, the Freethought Trail—the Council for Secular Humanism’s online commemoration of radical social-reform activism in west-central New York State—will unveil about forty new site-specific …

“If I had more time, I would have written less.” —Mark Twain Were you brought up in a traditional religion that you subsequently left? If so, you’re like most Free Inquiry readers. Research also suggests you’re like most unbelieving Americans born between the mid-1940s and the mid-1980s. Among these cohorts (the Boomers and Gen X-ers, …

All is not well with the autocrats of the world. I refer not only to the real McCoys but the seemingly innumerable half-tyrants, dictator wannabes, and other such riffraff who, in the past decade or more, have alarmingly populated certain otherwise sane countries around the world. Indeed, there are now so many of these pestiferous …

When I lecture about public opinion surveys, I always begin by reminding the audience that the respondents are under no obligation to be consistent or logical in their responses. This is especially necessary when dealing with surveys on religion, for the topic is rather vague in the minds of most people. This is because religion …

For much of my newspaper career, I was West Virginia’s only full-time investigative reporter. I wrote about political corruption. (Two of our governors and numerous top politicians went to prison.) I exposed consumer frauds. (Various roofers, exterminators, baldness-curers, weight-salon operators, and other fly-by-night entrepreneurs were jailed.) I revealed stock frauds. (Some local brokers were convicted …

“The [Jehovah’s] Witnesses compute the time of the end [of the world] with their own variant of [the Book of] Daniel’s periodization of history by divine arithmetic, using an amazing conflation of unrelated biblical texts. William Miller predicted that Christ’s Second Coming would occur in 1844. After that hope failed, Charles Taze Russell, using different …

“The November 1994 American elections have revealed a surprising political shift to the right, with conservative Republicans gaining control of both houses of Congress and thirty governorships. Liberals and moderates are in a state of shock. … “Have we finally exhausted the possibilities of the New Deal coalition formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, …

Attention Biologists Real occurrence: While out in my backyard one day reading FI (and somewhat smugly contemplating my None status), I noticed this insect (see photo) commonly called a “walking leaf.” As I looked closely at it, my astonishment increased exponentially. Yes, of course, Darwinian camouflage—mimicry driven by survivalist evolution—but this particular example gave me chills. …

In October 2019, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) joined with Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) in a renewed effort to extend the District of Columbia school voucher program indefinitely. Begun a dozen years ago during the George W. Bush Administration, the D.C. voucher plan is the only federally funded school voucher program in the country. Feinstein’s ostensible …

If you’re looking to improve your parenting skills, I have great news. You can ignore the tower of parenting books your in-laws dropped off within minutes of the plus-sign’s appearance on the stick. Bastion of humanity and rationality Focus on the Family (FOF) points out that the bible on parenting is none other than the …

Back when Public Intellectuals still existed—and their tussles, splashed across the pages of a dozen different journals of note, were avidly consumed by a public not yet stultified by lower-hanging fruit—there lived a writer whose knife cut deeper than anybody’s in the field, wounding friend and foe alike with strokes of remorseless but profound psychological …

As we begin, McCarthy has decided to pretend to lose her faith to get the popular students at school to notice her. The ruse will soon take an unexpected turn …   People are always asking me how I came to lose my faith, imagining a period of deep inward struggle. The truth is the …

It’s hardly headline news these days that we Americans are dividing more and more into warring camps. Our social media are partly to blame, driving us into mutually hostile and suspicious “siloes” of opinion. I have a genuinely modest suggestion of one practice for dealing with these “interesting times” of ours—that old Chinese curse, “May …

The cry of the individual conscience, asserting itself in voice and action against the oppressive rule of custom and the law, echoes throughout the literature of the Western world. Sophocles’s Antigone defies the power of the state to give her brothers’ bodies a decent burial. When, in Ibsen’s A Doll House, Nora’s husband tells her …

No thesis, this. It’s merely one person’s take on the questionable, even dubious, link between religion and morality. Doesn’t history belie that almost universally accepted view that morality flows from religion? Does not all good come from God/religion, as claimed in the Bible? People who practice religion always live in accordance with moral principles, do …

Atheism, Morality, and the Kingdom of God, by David K. Clark (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-5275-1963-3). 177 pp. Hardcover, £58.99.   How should an atheist read the Judaic/Christian scriptures, the Old and New Testaments? Some atheists see no other use for the Bible than to mine it for passages to discomfort believers. There …

My Life as a Rat, by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Ecco, 2019, ISBN 978-0-06-289983-5). 416 pp. Hardcover, $28.99.   There are certain things you don’t talk about, such as your brothers cleaning their murder weapon, the math teacher who drugged you, or the uncle who lusted after you. In this riveting yet grim forty-fourth …

Identity—the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, by Francis Fukuyama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, ISBN 978-0-37-412929-3). 240 pp. Hardcover, $26.00.   Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man importantly broadened my political perspective. Now he’s written Identity—the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. …

He handed me a small object the shape of a brick, but smaller. It could have been a box, I don’t know. It was heavy. I asked him, “Is the sadness in it?” “Is it closed?” “Will it leak?” He looked back at me, steadily, attentively. But he said nothing.