ALL ARTICLES

I am a blasphemer. Even now, some forty-five years after tossing the last vestiges of my Catholic indoctrination into the dustbin of childhood beliefs, this is still an oddly unsettling thing to write.

Pat Oleszko is an accomplished performance artist whose work often trespasses on “forbidden” religious ground. Her sensibility is absurdist; her methods encompass raucous costuming, rowdy street theater, and puppetry of sometimes breathtaking complexity.

The walls surrounding me were adorned with Arabic calligraphy and an image of a beautiful, large mosque beneath a bright blue sky. As a child, I would gaze at these images, admiring the intricacies of the calligraphy, every line and squiggle elegantly limned with shimmering silver paint.

Every Tuesday afternoon, five friends played pickup basketball, then went to their favorite bar and grill for a bite to eat. They made quite the melting pot: a Roman Catholic, a Protestant evangelical, a Jewish guy, a Muslim, and an East Indian Hindu.

In the preceding issue, Part 1¹ of this three-part symposium in print took a think-tank approach, emphasizing naturalism’s implications for education and public policy. In Part 2, we turn in a more critical direction.

The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods—ancient, medieval, and modern. We can divide it into rival traditions (empiricism versus rationalism, analytic versus Continental) or into various core areas (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics). It can also, of course, be viewed through the critical lens of gender or racial exclusion, as a discipline almost entirely fashioned for and by white European men.

What I’m about to write is against everything I was taught in college and seminary, where I earned three master’s degrees and then pursued PhD studies for a year and a half in fields related to the philosophy of religion (PoR).

I certainly share our editor’s sense that academic philosophy is in bad shape, and his concern for the future of our discipline. But his diagnosis—that, in what he sees as a kind of culture war in our profession, the side that appeals to “awe and transcendence” seems to be winning—strikes me as way off the mark.

Are secular humanists obliged to sign up to naturalism? Should we define humanism (or secular humanism, as some prefer to call it in the United States) as involving a commitment to naturalism? Many humanists often define humanism that way, of course.

It began on May 13, 1917—a series of “miracles” and “secrets” that three shepherd children claimed the Virgin Mary shared with them in Fatima, Portugal.

Under the right circumstances, a brave freethinker can rescue a fundamentalist society and lead it away from oppressive religion. That’s what Mustafa Kemal Atatürk did for Muslim Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s.

Happy International Blasphemy Rights Day (IBRD)! Secular humanists and other free-speech stalwarts celebrate IBRD each September 30. For more on the observance, see my Introduction to this issue’s cover feature, “Art, Blasphemy, and Humanism”.

It’s been a cliché of political campaigns for decades that liberals are effete snobs, while conservatives are salt-of-the-earth workin’ folks constantly wounded by the scorn of the pointy-headed intellectuals (a.k.a. the Jews).

On July 6, 2017, Donald Trump delivered a speech in Warsaw that was clearly intended as a landmark in the fog and swirl of geopolitical debate. The Warsaw speech evoked a vision of global politics, and it gave a suggestion of what Trump’s confusing presidency stands for.

Like other U.S. presidents before him, Donald Trump has vowed to defend Western civilization against the menace of Islam. Other presidents defined the values of the West as liberty, democracy, and the rule of law, but Trump has defined them as Christianity, culture, and tradition.

If we’re going to fight the rise of hard Right bigotry in the United States and around the world, we need to be willing to get uncomfortable.

Re: “Religion Is an Empirical Question—Finally,” by Robyn E. Blumner (FI, August/September 2017). Religion has been studied in the social sciences for over a century. The problem that we face, however, is not religion as such as an aspect of world culture but rather the ontological content of religious doctrine.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of two important occurrences now largely out of the public eye: New York State’s last Constitutional Convention and subsequent referendum and the outbreak of Nigeria’s civil war.

From Plato to Kant to Russell, philosophy has been in the business of describing the mind in a way unavailable to the lesser disciplines.

The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society . . . consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms.”

Yes, the evidence for the theological Christ is weak. But it simply doesn’t follow that there is no historical person behind it. Were that the case, virtually no person in the ancient world would have existed.

The culture wars have left us with a country that is polarized to the point of paralysis and a national political discourse that becomes more divisive, childish, and vulgar with each passing election year.

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” wrote Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor.

No one in the last forty years has thought or written more for the general public about a person’s right to choose when it is time to die than Derek Humphry.

Oh God.
…
Oh God is.
…
Oh God is great.

I have no picture of you—

oh, how do we die

It’s important to understand that the “beautiful total eclipses should be seen as compelling evidence of God” thing is part of a greater cover-up conspiracy…

Who cares about philosophy, anyway? You must, because you have one.

Philosophy is always going to be the default home of nonnaturalists and antinaturalists. Since no other discipline will take them seriously, they gravitate toward philosophy and find each other.

Philosophical naturalism comes in different flavors, but it is essentially the idea that nothing supernatural affects events in the world around us –– or perhaps that nothing supernatural even exists.

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? The German philosopher G. W. Leibniz, co-discoverer of calculus, called it “the first question that should rightly be asked.”

During the past two decades, an attack has been waged in the United States against both methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

Naturalism is obviously a philosophical view. It is a view about what is, about how to inquire and what to inquire into, and about what we can meaningfully talk about. Moreover, because of these features, naturalism is also a view about how to do philosophy.

Karl Marx never wrote the phrase “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” He wrote, “[Religion] is the opium of the people.” Close enough. Marx saw religion as a fantasy that allowed people to balm their degraded lives.

Nothing is as destructive to a political ideology as a hypocrisy exposed. An accidental hypocrisy indicates ignorance, and ignorance, thankfully, can often be remedied with evidence and reason.

I recently made a joke on Facebook about both ISIS and the absurdity of New Age religions and positive-thinking cults by saying that “If you don’t like ISIS, join them because change comes from within.”

I’m not asking this question in a general skeptical sense. I’m not asking what we do when we suspect that we’re wrong, how we examine whether we’re wrong, or how we know when we’re wrong. I’m asking a very specific question.

Secularization continues to make big gains. Those Americans who rank themselves as nonreligious and those who qualify as atheists (broadly defined as those who are not theists) each ballooned by a tenth of the total population in just ten years.

The concept of privilege as used by the activist Left is problematic.