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Each night at midnight, a northern wind finds the bedroom window and strikes the harp’s strings to awaken King David. He calls God, “midnight.” Chopin wrote 21 of them. Ignace Leybach remembered only for his fifth. Faure, Scriabin, Satie, Poulenc. Debussy. Shostakovich. Mendelssohn. Have a secure grasp of the long phrases. Whistler painted a series …

Even before the Easter candles were lit, Illuminating the grainy lines of their faces There in the darkened church, I knew how tired And weighted down those immigrant laborers were, And just by hearing the creak of their crowded pews. At stroke of midnight, when everyone rose to sing Christos Anesti, and I could believe …

The best path forward for humankind involves consigning as much of our religious heritage as possible to history’s proverbial dustbin.

In a quarter century, cognitive science has revolutionized our understanding of religion.

The roots of religious behavior may lie deeper than many cognitive scholars of religion think.

The greatest challenge in advancing the social science of religion may lie in better organizing the social scientists.

Prejudice against atheists is real. It’s global. And it’s worse than you think.

Humanist philosopher Andy Norman challenges superstar intellectual Yuval Noah Harari about the meaning of humanism.

Traditional religions and their deities cannot be stretched to accommodate contemporary scientific cosmology.

This year is the silver anniversary of the re-opening of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum by what is now known as the Council for Secular Humanism. (The birthplace of nineteenth-century agnostic orator Robert Green Ingersoll had been restored and opened as a museum twice before—in the 1920s and the 1950s—each time closing after a …

New York State has no monopoly on radical reform history.

Trump is not feminism’s real enemy: that would be the misogyny at Christianity’s core.

It’s the Ingersoll Museum’s silver anniversary. Celebration will ensue.

How much nuance is too much? The answer is not a given; it’s up to us where to draw the lines.

Disputes about free will may reflect our fears about fatalism and moral responsibility.

Many GOP ideologies are profoundly illiberal or staunchly undemocratic—or both.

Why is it so hard to agree that sexual demands in the workplace are wrong, period?

Iraq needs a future beyond the dueling sectarians.

How much lower can the GOP’s current incarnation go?

William Franklin Graham Jr., best known to the world simply as Billy Graham, died at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on February 21, 2018. He was ninety-nine. Graham was perhaps the world’s best known Christian evangelist. He supposedly provided spiritual counseling to every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. Graham was a longtime …

Tom Flynn, in his Op-Ed “A Modest Proposal: Get Religion Out of the Charity Sector” in the December 2017/January 2018 issue, says he can’t see how denominational charities can maintain their identities if they steer their fundraising activities far outside of their own communities. Does that mean religious charitable organizations will refuse money from heathens? …

Few who know the field support the Trump/DeVos agenda.

Discovering that the universe is unauthored … and that life without a higher meaning is enough.

At last we can settle whether God exists—so long as God doesn’t chicken out.

Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World, by Jeff T. Haley and Dale McGowan (Durham, N.C.: Pitchstone Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-1634311267) 151 pp. Paperback, $14.95.   Some atheists embrace missionary work. They maintain we should strive, through peaceful persuasion, to eradicate belief in gods. There are no deities, and …

Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know, by Daniel R. DeNicola (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-262-03644-3) xii + 250 pp. Hardcover, $27.95.   “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance,” observed H. L. Mencken in Notes on Democracy (1926). Gettysburg College Professor of Philosophy Daniel …

That brute dull thud of its lumpy leather pelt. An exercise in oblivion’s blunt obtuseness. No wonder you turned around so I could see How you rolled your eyes, still sharp enough to know That this was dementia, and it was time to pass The medicine ball around in a mind- less circle, Wheelchair by …

Was there a historical Jesus of Nazareth? Or is he best understood as, pardon the expression, a mything person?

A leading Mythicist rebuts an earlier critique.

From left or right, responses to Islamic extremism make matters worse when they fail to address the truth.

A critique of myth theory by two professors from Yale and Notre Dame fails to hold water.

So-called Christ-myth theorizing has become an obstacle to genuine humanist scholarship.

Against all odds, a bright young woman in Baghdad lived as an open atheist—until she could do so no longer.

Muslim societies seek shelter in religion when they feel threatened. Withdraw the threat, and many may secularize on their own.

To reconcile religion with science, we should begin by ceasing to require that all religions worthy of the name must embrace the existence of the supernatural.

When we replace nuance and context with absolutism, we turn ideas into dogma.

To defeat terrorist groups enduringly, we must overcome the conditions that let them to thrive.

The suffering of animals is an overwhelming, screamingly obvious contradiction to the ridiculous notion that there is a good god.

Do supporters of the “cake artist” understand the mischief that would follow if his argument for refusing service to same-sex couples became settled law?

Re: “A Modest Proposal: Get Religion Out of the Charity Sector,” Tom Flynn, Free Inquiry, December 2017/January 2018. This memo is to assert that this proposal is not a good idea and that beyond being more unattainable than The Nine Demands, it is unlikely to energize the secular humanist movement. Furthermore, it is likely to …