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A recent Canadian case, The Queen v. Sears and St. Germaine, involved the now-familiar issues of free speech, dehumanizing propaganda, and public expression of hatred. Decided in late January 2019, the case ended with convictions for James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine, the editor and publisher, respectively, of Your Ward News (YWN), a loathsome “community …

Pity the poor white nationalist! He (and it is almost always a he) is not faring well these days. You think otherwise? Au contraire, mes amis! Take no notice of the fact that incidents of abuse and violence against persons of color committed by white racists are, in numerical terms, on the rise—whether it be …

The American Founders did not romanticize democracy. They were liberal democrats, which means they were liberals first and democrats second. They thought that liberal principles such as the rights to life and liberty and the freedom of thought and speech were more fundamental than democratic principles such as elections and majority rule. In our time, …

“Humanism’s Chasm” (February/March 2019), my editorial speculating that generational factors may explain why membership in national humanist and freethought organizations has remained relatively static while the number of young Americans not identifying with traditional religion has skyrocketed, elicited thoughtful and articulate responses. Here are two, drawn from each side of the generational divide. One essay …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “The dangers to children associated with faith-healing sects are enormous. They are cared for by people with no medical knowledge, people who are trained to deny disease and its symptoms as illusions, people who demand more faith as the disease gets worse. They have no standard for judging when …

Matilda Joslyn Gage I am a faithful reader (and subscriber) to Free Inquiry and was delighted to see Robyn Blumner’s article about Matilda Gage (“Resurrecting Matilda Joslyn Gage,” FI, December 2018/January 2019). I, too, had never heard of Ms. Gage even after reading lots about woman’s suffrage over the years. My question is not about …

Adolf Grünbaum was born in Germany in 1923 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1938. From a young age, he had philosophical questions that led to theistic research and the declaration of his atheism just before his bar mitzvah. After learning English in the United States, he earned his undergraduate degree …

Tsunamis of information and misinformation inundate us every day through print, broadcast, and social media, more than anyone can possibly wade through. Dealing with any of it intelligently requires a lot of connecting of dots, with not enough help from the media. Let’s look at a few examples. On January 18, the annual “March for …

Today’s gods are lazy. And it’s our fault. Back in the day, gods established their bona fides by staging spectacular miracles. Lotuses sprouted from the baby Buddha’s footsteps. Zeus hurled thunderbolts, reversed Earth’s rotation, and turned infants into adults. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob parted the Red Sea, split the moon, and, millennia …

Adult Bible Studies is published quarterly. It is identified on its inside cover as “An official resource for the United Methodist Church approved by the General Board of Discipleship and Published by Cokesbury, The United Methodist Publishing House.” Its reading for Easter 2018—which fell on April 1, appropriately enough—was titled “He Has Risen” and opened …

My involvement with religion began and ended at a very young age. I am seventy years old now, and while my memory is hazy on some of the details, the essence and psychological impact of my early religious experience is still vividly with me. It took me many years, however, to come to a deeper …

The recent dispute in Free Inquiry over whether or not humans are apes spotlights a very important controversy that keeps popping up in the secular and skeptical communities. As is usual, the dispute was between non-biologists. In the biological community, there is no disagreement on the matter. As an active paleozoologist who publishes in the …

Dateline: Baghdad Archaeologists have uncovered an ancient scroll purporting to be a legal brief drafted on behalf of the biblical Job. The discovery has created a stir in biblical and legal circles. Scholars surmise Job feared his cursing God would serve to make Satan’s case in the wager over Job’s faithfulness. So instead he sued …

In my opinion, economic inequality is the second greatest danger that Americans will face in the near future. The first is climate warming. And, like climate warming, the consequences of economic inequality creep up on us slowly, until it is too late to change. The danger is the fact that great wealth translates into the …

Extremism, by J. M. Berger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018, ISBN 9780262535878). x+201 pp. Softcover, $15.95. Extremism is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, consisting of short expert overviews of subjects of current interest. The accusation of extremism appears often and, like terrorism, is too often one of those very elastic words …

Minds Make Societies, by Pascal Boyer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0300223453). 376 pp. Hardcover, $30.00. Minds Make Societies by Pascal Boyer is a fresh new perspective on approaching our social world. Boyer has a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking scientists on topics of society and culture today. His hallmark is …

The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution, by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, with foreword by Stephen Fry (Random House, 2019, ISBN 978-0525511953). 160 pp. Hardcover, $13.69. The Four Horsemen is a transcript of a 2007 conversation between four prominent public intellectuals, each the author of a bestselling …

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist, by Angelica Shirley Carpenter (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1941813188). 272 pp. Hardcover, $16.95. Sexual assault, misogyny, racism, isolationism, homophobia, human rights violations, and the Christian Right’s use of the Bible to justify all of the above—the news stories of the past few years in the …

Divided We Fall: The Secular vs. the Sacred, by Marie Alena Castle (Bloomington: Archway Publishing, 2018, ISBN 978-1-4808-6132-9). 244 pp. Softcover, $17.99. Marie Alena Castle, for decades a tough-as-nails activist in Minnesota for abortion rights and church-state separation, died on May 25, 2018—the very same day, coincidentally, that voters in Ireland approved an abortion-rights referendum …

I gave my guitar away— the one I used to strum in our living room, the one which you had once swung swiftly over my head. I gave it away. But the chords are still ringing, plucked gently in my head, the song stays the same. I bought a new one, and though I sleep …

Under the white coverlet now as then, the sweeping tide of sheets, the same cool turning, I dive, I tumble toward dreams. Memories run wild. Night must have released all its prisoners. My ghosts are younger now. Imagine that. I am older than my ghosts though the darlings retain a certain authority. I love this …

In shape, Back and breast From ear to ear In thought and manner We push, Men pull — A spine, divinely curved, Too straight & We break at the nerve.

Since Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, his second major book about evolution, in 1871, researchers have made many discoveries that flesh out Darwin’s little-known ideas about the evolution of morality. Recent papers in Free Inquiry by Ronald Lindsay and James Hughes have touched briefly on the evolution of morality, but there’s much more …

In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This is the “sex education” Linda …

Turkey’s secular education system is under threat. According to a 2018 Washington Post article, an education official called for all school children to be taken to local mosques for morning prayers before lessons. While it may be a seemingly incongruous demand in a country known for its secular constitution, it represents growing confidence on the …

One of America’s most prominent atheists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has been severely criticized, even threatened, for her views regarding Islam. Critics say she has misinterpreted the Qur’an, inaccurately characterized Muslims, and promoted “Islamophobia” in the United States. They further posit that she does not understand that Islam is a religion of peace, not war, and …

The Roman Catholic Church reached the point of crisis some years ago. The ever-expanding scandal of priestly sexual abuse and, just as bad, the intricate and systematic cover-up by the highest authorities has deepened the shadows in which lay Catholics have painfully struggled. What should they do? Leave the Church for Eastern Orthodoxy or Episcopalianism? …

If I were not a rational human being averse to the supernatural, I might be less painfully aware that I live in a world obsessed with subjects that should long be dead, buried, and in many cases forgotten. Surely one such is the question of whether science and religion are compatible or in conflict. On …

Here is one of organized humanism’s most persistent puzzles: In an America where the number who live without religion has snowballed, why hasn’t the membership of national “movement” groups—atheist, agnostic, freethought, and secular humanist—kept pace? I’ve been covering the “Rise of the Nones” since 1990, when Barry Kosmin (now a Center for Inquiry [CFI] board …

I am approaching my sixth year since I landed in the United States as a refugee from Iraq. Since then, there have been so many changes—gaining eighty pounds is the most obvious of them—but I can say now that I can speak with some authority when I engage in discussions about extremism, and in particular …

As a young Royal Air Force officer, Arthur C. Clarke helped develop a radar landing system as part of a team with Louis Alvarez, who then aided the Manhattan project, later helped determine when the three shots were fired at president Kennedy, and then  proposed that a meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs. Shortly after …

Let’s step back a bit. At a time when we are constantly bombarded with information (true, false, biased, or fabricated), it can be difficult to take note of broader social and cultural developments that have radically changed the simple act of living in the United States at this moment in history—and, in my view, changed …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “… the question of the sacrifice of innocent life in war … I find an extremely difficult problem. Temperamentally I am inclined to the simple view (to misquote one of the late Michael Flanders’s characters) that ‘killing people is wrong,’ but I have to recognize that, until mankind finds …

“The Signature of Freedom,” by Tom Flynn After reading Tom Flynn’s editorial, I wanted to respond because although it could be argued that the right to suicide might indeed be the ultimate right and “signature of freedom” as Tom Flynn describes it, it still may be an enormous mistake and loss for the individual and for …

On November 6, Arizonans voted sixty-five to thirty-five to crush an effort to expand the state’s tax-credit voucher plan to divert public funds to mostly church-run private schools. That makes it the thirtieth (!) state referendum between 1966 and 2018, from Massachusetts to California and from Florida to Alaska, in which millions of voters have …

Not long ago, a champion of humanity set me straight. Someone in our monochromatic, melanin-deficient lunch gathering had mentioned race, and before I could think better of it I had naively blurted something about racism not being a good thing. The above-referenced champion politely pointed out my error. The real problem, he explained, is that …

A hunk of cheese. A glass of watered-down wine. The company of a good friend. That, according to the most influential philosopher of the Hellenistic Age, is pretty much the summit of human happiness. Epicurus of Samos (341 bce–270 bce) inherited an Athens that had been broken by the Macedonian might of Alexander the Great …

Translation by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson from The Epicurus Reader, edited and translated by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis, 1994. Epicurus to Menoeceus, greetings: Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old. For no one is either too young or too …

Mormonism is a sect of Christianity that has expanded to include even more incredible stories than those found in standard Christianity. In addition to believing in the absurdities of the Old and New Testaments, Mormons need to believe in the absurdities of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrines and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great …

To me, one of the more intriguing aspects of life—in particular, “intelligent” life—is that once a life has ended it is as if it never happened, at least to the one who lived it. The reason is simple: As the memory is housed in the brain and the brain would be dead and hence no …