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September 30 is International Blasphemy Rights Day, an observance founded by the Center for Inquiry (CFI). In this issue, we spotlight one of the courageous writers imperiled for writing critically of religion who has received aid from CFI’s Secular Rescue program. Ghluam Kabir (not his real name) was an admin for the Facebook page Pakistani …

Kennedy’s Retirement from the Supreme Court Is a Disaster The president has nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. If we are to rescue whatever is left of legally protected equality for nonbelievers, it is urgent that we oppose this nomination. The Proper Understanding of …

When the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan said in a famous law review article that state courts must “step into the breach,” he was urging defenders of individual rights to start litigating in state court, using state constitutions to continue expanding evolving concepts of liberty. Brennan’s call in “State Constitutions and the Protection …

I’ve been a practicing lawyer for thirteen years this summer, with three years of law school before that. The overwhelming majority of that practice and study has been focused on the federal court system, which means, in the final analysis, the Supreme Court. For those sixteen years, one person more than any has dominated the …

I first discovered that church-state jurisprudence existed—and that it could enhance my life—at age seven. On June 17, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 8–1 verdict in the combined cases Abington School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett. Both concerned state-sponsored Bible reading in public schools; the High Court thundered that this practice violated separation …

The cover article of Free Inquiry’s previous issue (“By My Own Hand: Suicide Can Be a Wise and Gentle Choice,” by Lowrey R. Brown) was expected to generate more controversy than it did. Consider the timing: Though the decision to publish Brown’s essay in the August/September 2018 issue was made months in advance, “By My …

The day after Scott Pruitt resigned as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Norman Eisen and Noah Bookbinder, of the watchdog organization Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, D.C., wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on the ethical trainwreck of Pruitt’s tenure. They recalled a long string of horrors, and then …

Every year or so, I re-read John Stuart Mill’s great statement of liberal principles and values, On Liberty (first published in 1859). More than any other, I suspect, this book has shaped my own thinking about politics, law, and society. Each time I read it, I notice new twists and subtleties. It’s always worth returning …

For those not used to seeing them, a face veil can be frightening to behold on a person. One is tempted to gawk at women covered from head to toe with their individuality stripped away. If they are wearing a niqab, it is possible to glimpse a set of eyes through a slit in the …

Ever since the debate between Patrick Devlin and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, conservatives and liberals have been arguing over the proper role of law in society. Devlin thought that the function of law is to uphold the moral values of society. In contrast, Mill thought that using the law to enforce the …

Some months ago, a conservative firebrand named Kevin Williamson was chosen as a columnist for the venerable magazine The Atlantic. The thinking, evidently, was that the magazine’s generally liberal readership might profit (it was never clarified exactly how) by absorbing a point of view remote from and generally hostile to its customary presuppositions. But then …

In 2014, I had a long phone conversation with Harlan Ellison, during which I took many notes. I had sent him a letter asking if he’d appear in (or at least consult on) a music video that my band, The Heathens, was considering shooting. Craig Else and I had written a song about L. Ron …

One cold spring day in 2005, I was alone in the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, setting up the exhibits for the museum’s twelfth anniversary season. The fax machine (the museum’s only phone) rang. Mind you, nobody calls me when I’m off in the Finger Lakes region doing museum setup unless it’s an office emergency. …

Giant Birds Gregory S. Paul’s op-ed “How Giant Birds Help Disprove the Existence of a Good God” (FI, June/July 2018) was a great counter to would-be intellectual William Lane Craig’s comments about predation in the wild. However, I would add to Mr. Paul’s arsenal. Craig wrongly thinks that predation is the only way to keep …

While nine out of ten K–12 students attend our public schools, too few Americans know a lot about those schools. And too few grasp the seriousness of clericalists’ and privatizers’ growing attacks on them. Much of this reflects the poor job that media, print and broadcast, have done in reporting on school matters (aside from …

There are places where belief in the wrong or in no deity is a capital offense, a fact that makes decent people recoil in horror and, when they can, take action.1 But in places like the United States of America, where killing someone for not accepting the right religion remains illegal,2 it would seem that …

So, what does a purely humanist civilization look like? What do people do and need, when it is taken as given that life is material and beyond it lies nothing?” For decades, the best we could do in answering this question as to the lived-in feel of a prospective humanist society was to point toward …

It was … 1975, I think; have to check my diaries to be sure. I’d finished at Uni that spring and gone off hitchhiking through Europe over the summer. Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Venice, Rabat and Madrid defined the limits of the whirlwind tour. Three months later I was on my way home, and after staying …

Persevere: A Life with Cancer, by Lisa Bonchek Adams (The Bonchek Family Foundation, 2017, ISBN 978-0999162903) 320 pp. Softcover, $19.95.   This book is a gem. Lisa Bonchek Adams was an atheist, a realist, and a talented writer and poet. Before her recent death from breast cancer, she shared her experience and her insights with …

Time Is Irreverent, by Marty Essen (Victor, Montana: Encante Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-9778599-4-8) 238 pp., Softcover, $14.99.   Time Is Irreverent is not really a science-fiction novel. It’s a novel that takes familiar science-fiction tropes and bangs them together like that mechanical monkey in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. From the clatter somehow emerges …

Organized Secularism in the United States: New Directions in Research, edited by Ryan T. Cragun, Christel Manning, and Lori L. Fazzino (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-045742-1) 321 pp., Hardcover, $114.99.   In November 2014, Pitzer College, home of prominent secularism researcher Phil Zuckerman, hosted the third international conference of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network …

1. who read … the greatest devotion … greater than learning … consists in accepting the world … exactly as it happens to be 2. who said … the greatest devotion … greater than learning … consists in accepting the world … exactly as it happens to be 3. who read it … to us …

It’s time to look beneath the stigma and see a socially-accepted role for suicide in a nation where our lives are our own. I will die. You will die. Death is not a question of if; it is only a question of when and how. Modern medicine has doubled American life expectancy over the past two centuries. At forty, …

Have you ever tried to read the Bible cover to cover? Even among Christians, a minority make it all the way through. According to the Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling organization, the average American household contains 4.4 Bibles, but 57 percent of people say they read from it less than five times a year. …

It is oftentimes claimed by Christians that the Bible is the main source of morality, and Christian organizations involved in humanitarian activities usually give copies of the Bible alongside their aid to give the impression that they are motivated by the Bible. This article challenges that notion and argues that the Bible is devoid of …

In the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of handwringing and lamentation from thinkers ostensibly “on my side”—individuals who identify as sitting primarily on the left half of the political line, especially nonreligious liberal public intellectuals—around the problem of “identity politics.” Many words have been spilled, online debates had, panels hosted, and books written …

As you know well, the Trump Administration is ignoring or even censoring scientific evidence that enforces past federal regulations that protect the American people. It is eliminating federal regulations restricting toxic pollution of the air and water. It seeks to do away with restrictions on the purity of our food. It seeks to eliminate restrictions …

In a review of our book Sharing Reality in Free Inquiry (April/May 2018), Ronald A. Lindsay disagreed with our views on the topic of what may be taught in public schools. Lindsay argued: “There’s no need for schools to address the God question. And if there’s no need for schools to address this issue from one side, there’s no …

What Haley and McGowan advocate seems less like the future of secularism than like a betrayal of it. Jeff Haley and Dale McGowan vigorously contend that public school educators should affirmatively teach there are “no gods, souls, or afterlife.” Of course, they recognize that their view of the appropriate curriculum for public schools has no …

When the prehistoric human race emerged from the Neolithic period and slowly began to form social structures, a new era began in the development of our species. The constant struggle for food and survival abated somewhat, allowing the human intellect to move to a higher level. For the first time in Earth’s history, a living …

There is a Congressional Fragrance Caucus. And a Congressional Fertilizer Caucus. (Do you think one was in response to the other?) There is a Congressional Dietary Supplement Caucus. (Get taken much?) There is even a Congressional Civility Caucus, which is not to be confused with either the Congressional Civility and Respect Caucus or the Congressional …

A few issues back, I proposed a possible longer-term goal for the secular humanist/atheist/freethought movement (“A Modest Proposal: Get Religion Out of the Charity Business,” FI, December 2017/January 2018). I admitted that seeking to end religion’s role in providing social services was a long shot, perhaps “unattainable.” In this op-ed, I’d like to propose a more …

Elections are like the trolley problem—and voting is like pulling the lever. If you’re not familiar with the trolley problem, it’s a philosophical thought experiment about ethical dilemmas. A trolley car has lost its brakes and is hurtling down a track where five people are stuck. You can pull a lever and divert the trolley …

These days, many who are secular and/or on the center-left just don’t get why so many on the evangelical Right seem so darn dead-set on denying the threat of global climate change, to the point that they thrill in chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” Many may imagine that if duly educated about the science of CO2-driven …

To those of us who wondered when, if ever, a significant majority of Americans would develop a shuddering loathing of the appalling gun violence that occurs daily in this country—rather than passing it off with callous indifference as some sort of inevitable, unavoidable by-product of the “price of freedom”—I can now say: The time is now. …

I arrived in the United States in March 2013 as a refugee from Iraq. I resettled in Houston, Texas, where two of my brothers lived at the time. A few days after I arrived in this country—of which I am now a permanent resident—I started searching for humanist and freethinking clubs in the local area. …

Jens Christian Skou, born in 1918, may have spent his life in Denmark, but his legacy spread across the world and time. Skou discovered a vital mechanism in the body’s cells, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. Skou graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 with a degree in medicine …

“The courage to doubt, on which American pluralism, federalism, and religious liberty are founded, is a special brand of courage, a more selfless brand of courage, than the courage of orthodoxy. A brand that has been far rarer and more precious in the history of the West than the courage of the crusaders or the …

“Western society has been deeply influenced by Christian doctrine, operating, as it has been, relatively unchallenged for most of the past two millennia. … [M]any of the destructive teachings of Christianity have shaped social attitudes in a variety of spheres and in ways that still adversely affect people, even those who never darken a church …

In Response After reading Whaley’s interview with God (FI , December 2017/January 2018), I bit my tongue while deciding not to comment, but after reading Imre Toth’s letter (FI April/May 2018), I felt an obligation to comment. I always had difficulty with people, especially Christians and supposed intellectuals as well as educators, not giving credit to the …