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Would it be more polite to return the loan of tulips before their life of bloom waned? or would it show an apter appreciation of the favor to enjoy them to the end? While I was debating this question and putting one or another of them into the compost, the pink-and-white tulip made certain yellow …

The cover of the October/November 2019 issue of Free Inquiry did not include a critical prefix identifying the main article of the issue. The text should have read “Why Apostasy Laws Won’t Stop the Rise of Ex-Muslim Women.” Our apologies to Zara Kay and Peter Clarke for the unfortunate error. You can find the corrected …

Attempts to acknowledge Christianity as the official religion of the United States date back to the founding constitutional convention and have erupted at regular intervals for the past two hundred years. The current onslaught was initiated by pseudo-historian David Barton in the late 1980s and continues to this day under the banner of Project Blitz, …

Alas! It’s come to this. America has long prided itself on being a Christian nation founded on Christian teachings and principles. Wrong! The Founding Fathers and Mothers detested the harmful and arrogant bond between monarch and church in their former nation, Great Britain. At best, most of our nation-establishing progenitors might possibly be described as …

Search the literature; read the news; comb the mission statements and recommendations of various environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and it will become obvious how climate change utterly dominates public discourse, leaving the overpopulation issue behind. The average global per-person carbon footprint is 4.9 metric tons per year, according to the Global Footprint Network. Multiplied by …

The recent demographic surge of the irreligious Nones presents a quandary to organized humanism. On the one hand, it constitutes a floodtide of defections away from traditional religion, thus easing, among other things, the chronic challenge facing humanists and atheists to counter discrimination against unbelief in the modern world. On the other hand, the newcomer …

As I write this, it is the end of February 2019. Four months prior, I nearly succumbed to a rare and potentially deadly medicinal side effect of a newly prescribed medication, as well as other ensuing nosocomial infirmities. I am finally able to work and finish this essay, the ideas of which began to gel …

It’s funny how a group of smart fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds using logic and cogent argument can one-up today’s U.S. Supreme Court. It happened in an Advanced Placement U.S. Government class at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. According to the Washington Post, teacher Tessa Guarracino assigned the Bladensburg Cross case as a moot-court …

In my previous essays on this subject (“Humanism’s Chasm,” FI, February/March 2019, and “Meanwhile, Back at the Chasm,” FI, August/September 2019), I probed the differences between older humanists, most of whom had cast off a traditional religious upbringing at measurable personal cost, and their younger counterparts for whom nonreligious identity often comes more easily. We …

It seems unfortunate that climate change is speeding up and pushing us toward the cliff with accelerating force at the same time we are also putting ruthless authoritarians in power all over the heating-up planet. Maybe the two are not coincidental but linked—I suspect there’s a hope that if the authoritarians are authoritarian enough, they …

We live in a sharply polarized political and cultural environment in which it has become increasingly difficult to discuss urgent issues across the divides. With the emergence of purity policing and call-out culture, amplified by social media, it is difficult enough to conduct honest, civil conversations even with people who share most of our own …

In the United States and around most of the world, recent trends in the economy and communications technology have advanced the process of secularization, which Max Weber referred to as disenchantment. Organized religion’s “three Bs”—believing, belonging, and behaving—all show declines in most societies. The general public has become less obedient to religious authority and less …

The presidency of Donald Trump has divided the United States along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. He has shredded the Constitution by acting and speaking as if he were above the law. Like autocratic leaders from time immemorial, he identifies himself with the nation. As the French monarch Louis XIV famously said, “L’état c’est moi.” …

Existentialists see that life is profoundly absurd. Here’s why: People search for a meaning to it all, but the universe has no discernible purpose, no moral code, and no cosmic guidelines. Honest thinkers feel adrift, floundering on their own, lacking sure rules. Biology and evolution put us here, but that’s all we can know. We …

“The United States is again deeply embroiled in presidential politics. … “We do not wish to pass on the merits [of any candidate]. We simply wish to point out that the nation would be better off if religious faith were not injected into the political arena by either side. … “We believe in the civic …

“Even in a rural area, word about an airplane crash gets out fast and the media was soon present. “‘Where are you from?’ “‘Tampa.’ “‘Tampa? What were you doing all the way up here?’ “‘Attending an atheist/humanist convention in Toronto.’ “‘R-e-a-l-l-y!’ “I told the whole story to three or four different reporters … . “They …

Back at the Chasm Tom Flynn’s August/September 2019 op-ed, “Meanwhile, Back at the Chasm … ,” noted that some young activist Nones are “relatively uninterested” in church-state separation. Really? If so, don’t they realize that without church-state separation women’s reproductive and other rights could be flushed down the drain, our public schools will be replaced …

Conservative bloviator Ross Douthat used his September 17 column in The New York Times to slam presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg for a remark he made on a radio broadcast discussing abortion rights. Buttigieg had evidently noted that the Bible does not condemn abortion and indeed in the Old Testament repeatedly uses the term person (in …

The African leopard is not part of the cat family. I beg the indulgence of the taxonomically anal-retentive. I am well aware that Panthera pardus pardus falls under Felidae, and that felidae has meant cat ever since Julius Caesar asked Cicero to think up a shorter way to say “those pointy-eared creatures the Egyptians are …

When talking about the meaning of modernity, there is a tendency to focus on the interplay between the products of the modern age and the psychological conditions those products give rise to: factories and nervous exhaustion, atomic bombs and existential anxiety, eight dozen different kinds of cereal and world-weary ennui. These products are all very …

From The Nineteenth Century, No. CXLIV, February 1889. pp. 181–192.   Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education had been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left, for some years, altogether to his own devices. At that time, I was a voracious and omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of …

One of the most powerful online tools for researching the career of Robert Green Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic,” is back—and more formidable than ever. The Robert Green Ingersoll Chronology recently went live at https://chronology.secularhumanism.org. The site permits interactive online searches of the life of Ingersoll. It comprises 1,345 public lectures, 113 political speeches, 344 letters, …

In doing research to develop the Walking Tour of Ingersoll-related Sites in Washington, D.C. (http://ingersoll.wash.org), I used the original Ingersoll Chronology to discover the events and dates of Robert Green Ingersoll’s life while he was living or visiting the nation’s capital. I could count the number of times he delivered lectures, where, and which lectures he delivered. …

We continue with more exclusive transcripts from the National Association of Voice Activated Therapists that we think exemplify the successful integration of religious belief in therapy. As in our previous installment, these are recordings of quarter-hour telephone therapy sessions from the 1990s, on which the statute of limitations for libel and invasion of privacy has …

Atheism and Agnosticism, by Graham Oppy (Elements in the Philosophy of Religion Series, Cambridge University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1108454728). 67 pp. Softcover, $18.00.   The Cambridge Elements series aims to provide brief, authoritative introductions to subjects of interest. This volume delivers admirably. At sixty-seven pages, it’s nearly too short to stand alone as a book. …

Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, by Andrew S. Curran (New York, New York: Other Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-59051-670-6). 320 pp. Hardcover, $26.95.             “Skepticism is the first step toward truth.” —Denis Diderot Denis Diderot just wanted to level the playing field: religious zealots on one side, and he …

Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life, by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore (New York: Norton, 2018, ISBN 978-0-393-25496-9). 236 pp. Hardcover, $26.95.   Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore’s new book, Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic, carries the subtitle Atheists in American Public Life. But it could just …

We think it is new. We are so, so afraid. We think there has never been, ever been, a thing like our thing. So, we are so afraid. Just think. A village rapes a girl. A village burns a man. Here is the maelstrom. Here is the horror. People we like are like people we …

When we started we used only the most beautiful words. We looked them up. We strung them together. Then we read about minimalism and simplicity. And getting to the point. And stripping words away like adjectives and adverbs. Wanting to reveal what was underneath. “To tell the truth,” they said. “That is the goal, and …

It didn’t stop me from leaving Islam because I wanted my freedom to work and live independently. I’ve been disowned, but I’ve never felt so at peace. —Fay If Islam wants to remain viable in the modern world, it can’t keep making life hell for women. That should be obvious; certainly, it is obvious in …

  As I write, Dominic Ongwen is on trial before the International Court in The Hague. Ongwen was a child soldier, then an adult soldier, and eventually a brigade commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.). That brutal force operated primarily in northern Uganda but also in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.), South Sudan, and …

“[A] right is a non-negotiable claim. If you have a right to something, then you must not be prevented from having or doing that thing; in addition, others are duty-bound to allow or even enable you to exercise that right.” —Stephen Law The Council for Secular Humanism (hereafter the Council) has taken a divisive stance, …

Jon Guy has written an impassioned essay taking strong exception to a 2015 editorial in which we maintained, among other things, that the American Humanist Association (AHA) had employed an inadvisable legal strategy in its representation of an Oregon inmate, James Holden. AHA filed a lawsuit on Holden’s behalf when his federal correctional institution denied …

Yep. If I were African American, Latino, or Native American, I wouldn’t believe my own rhetoric. Why should I? White people have been in charge for so long and oppressed so much that libraries cannot contain all the atrocities that have occurred just in the United States. From slavery to genocide, from Jim Crow laws …

“Who or what was the first cause?” Inquiries of this nature go back to a time when people wore hides and wondered why the large bright object in the night sky was always changing shape. Those who asked such questions were curious. Those who finally answered such questions were scientists. Those of us who now …

In his 2018 book Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray gives his understanding and opinions on seven ways that Western thinkers have fashioned worldviews free of Western monotheism. Gray rejects secular humanism as an attractive worldview, additionally rejecting four other manifestations of atheism. We believe Gray’s rejection of secular humanism is poorly founded and merits …

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see Saw a Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be … Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer and the battle-flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” (1842) The secular …

It’s hard to believe we’re back to “Love It or Leave It” again—it seems so very embedded in the years of the Vietnam War, Johnson-Nixon, Jane Fonda, George Wallace. Where does Donald Trump fit into that? He wasn’t an anti-war protester, but he wasn’t an angry homecoming veteran either. He was Mister Medical Deferment because …

Voluntary assisted dying, also known as voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide (though all these terms have their own nuances), is a perennial issue dividing religious conservatives from secular liberals. In Australia, several legal jurisdictions have been engaging with the issue since the 1990s, and it is currently under consideration by the parliaments of two states. …

Readers of this magazine have no doubt observed that certain state legislatures have recently fallen all over themselves in passing the most severe and uncompromising anti-abortion legislation in decades—and that’s saying something, because hundreds of laws making abortion difficult (and in some instances nearly impossible) for those women who have the misfortune to be poor …