ALL ARTICLES

On May 16, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s utterly unqualified and virulently toxic education secretary, was the featured speaker at the Alfred E. Smith Foundation in New York City, with Cardinal Timothy Dolan in attendance. Her speech was a vicious attack on our public schools and on the provisions in three-fourths of our state constitutions that bar …

I am told religion makes people behave better. I do not dispute it. When religion draws a line and slaps a thou shalt not sticker on it, believers mind the old Ps and Qs. This came dramatically to my attention over lunch with Brad, whom I hadn’t seen in years and whose name isn’t really Brad, as …

I have always been struck by the way people go through life oblivious to past struggles to understand life, ignorant of the intellectual tools and creative efforts by which distant or past cultures have benefited. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1937 essay “On Being Modern-Minded”: We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and …

What do you think of when you hear the word mythology? Many of us tend to picture a culture’s “mythology” as a collection of stories and personal narratives particular to that social group and their way of life—usually with the most popular and enduring myths of each culture intending to explain key features of social life, …

Pilots have a saying: there are bold pilots and old pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. I am a good geologist (now retired), and geologists have a comparable, mutually exclusive saying: there are good geologists, and there are religious geologists, but there are no good, religious geologists. Geologists, as a group, are probably …

The rise of the GOP and the decline of compassion go hand-in-glove. This dreadful phenomenon affects not only the old, sick, and struggling of our own nation but also rejects all hope for desperate people in many war-afflicted nations as they struggle to survive, eat, drink, and escape catastrophic carnage. To have witnessed this increasingly …

I’ve never been to one, but I imagine that Bible theme parks are amazing creations. Built for the glory of God and the edification of human beings, they are devoted to showing the wonders of God’s creation and teaching visitors truths from the Bible. One of the most famous of these parks—or infamous, perhaps, to …

Women v. Religion: The Case Against Faith—and for Freedom, edited by Karen L. Garst (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2018, ISBN 978-1634311700) 224 pp. Softcover, $16.95.   With a bold title such as Women v. Religion: The Case Against Faith—and for Freedom, Karen L. Garst has once again provided an opportunity for women who have suffered at …

An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt, by Herb Silverman (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-1634311052) 264 pp. Softcover, $15.95.   Can anyone write an objective, reasonable review of an essentially autobiographical book about someone he knows well and admires? Perhaps not, but An Atheist Stranger in a …

Think Before You Like: Social Media’s Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed, by Guy P. Harrison (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017, ISBN 978-1633883512) 380 pp. Softcover, $18.00.   Since I initially read Guy P. Harrison’s book Think Before You Like: Social Media’s Effect on the Brain and the Tools …

Things, they are no fools. They tableau. The trees pose, too, as the yogini know. And my trousseau of objects rearrange themselves each night. They want to be still- lives, to be of record. The time they change changes because letting me watch would sacrifice their modesty. The slender jug switches shelves with the Bakelite …

I met him on the empty cattle walk. We knew that he had planned to go away. I was surprised when he began to talk To me with sorrow that he could not stay, That he was going to Jerusalem Where he would live and work on a kibbutz and learn from people who would …

This evening we examine The Koran Where the Prayer of the Cataclysm explains How in the aftermath of the great deluge “Each soul shall know what it has done and what It has failed to do.” The few familiar words Weigh heavy in my throat till it constricts. They show, like stones across an endless …

Ingersoll was a brilliant man and a rousing orator, but he wasn’t always ahead of his time.

Almost alone among Golden Age freethinkers, Ingersoll’s ideas about women would not seem out of place today.

The story of an epic battle between freethought and censorship.

The Council’s Freethought Trail has a new look and new features.

There is no deus ex machina. The battle against climate change is on us.

OK, so Christianity is untrue. But what if it were made “true”?

Five U.S. presidents whose grasp of church-state separation was exemplary.

Christian theology’s new champions have achieved far less than their admirers may think.

Radical-reform history is obscure largely because religious conservatives want it that way.

Far from freeing us, social media has made many more cautious about speaking their minds.

The recent cloning of macaque monkeys is impressive, but we’re still a long way from human reproductive cloning.

The cyclical view of history is not just a testament to human folly but to human limitations.

Trump’s inability to grasp the reality of other minds is so extreme it amounts to a handicap.

There is no biological necessity for predators; a good God could have (and should have!) arranged the world differently.

The West now is firmly in the Secular Era, when supernatural religion fades to a discredited fringe.

A dissenting view from Greta Christina’s on rationalist dogma.

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)

Greta Christina (“Rationalist Dogma,” FI, February/March 2018) would have us believe that open debate is an overrated vehicle for free speech and, worse, an exercise that often subverts social justice while masquerading as the free exchange of ideas in the civic square. When we bring “bad ideas” under debate, we harm society by rendering them …

The afterlife is comforting but a myth; those who know the truth learn to make do with less ambitious consolations.

Humanae Vitae, one of the greatest mistakes of the twentieth century, turns fifty.

One opponent of sexual harassment realizes that he’s been less than blameless.

Infinity may be real, and Zeno’s Paradox may not rebut it.

I cannot be a part of worshipping a god with strong psychopathic traits.

How to ensure, if asked to proffer a prayer, that one will never be so asked again.

Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, by Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-691-17735-9) 223 pp. Hardcover, $29.95. I have to say I felt a bit misled at first by the subtitle of Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby. The implication seemed …

What Secularism Means to Africa: What It Has Been, What It Hasn’t Been and What It Could Mean for Human Rights, edited by Jon O’Brien (Washington, D.C., Catholics for Choice, 2017, ISBN 978-0-998416-1-6) 40 pp. Softcover, $15.00. In America today, we struggle nervously against a rising tide of efforts by the “theocrat Right” and their …

The River of Consciousness, by Oliver Sacks (New York: Knopf, 2017, ISBN 978-0-385-35256-7) x + 237 pp. Hardcover, $27.00. The River of Consciousness, the book neurologist Oliver Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) was working on just before his death in 2015, collects ten essays written over the past fifteen …