ALL ARTICLES

“The views of the alt-right lie
distinctly outside of what we have come to accept as the boundaries of the Overton Window.”

Given the lapses by scientists, governments, and corporations in permitting harms that have come about through the development of technology and marketing of products outside of medicine, might we consider applying the Belmont Principles to scientific research in general?

“Many people are increasingly getting their news mainly or only from their own personalized social media sources; this tends to exclude information that differs from their own beliefs.”

“If organized, we could have a major influence on public policy (and not just among Democrats). Now, we are ignored.”

“The media should affirm the post-truth world as an antidote to the childishness of the feel-good propaganda in which they have basked for so long.”

“It’s a humiliation for
the whole country and all of us in it to
ave an ignorant, dim-witted, narcissistic bully as head of state, one without even a façade of grown-up decent behavior.”

“While I understand the shock and fear—and indeed, I feel some of it myself—we mustn’t allow it to cloud our thinking.”

“A hard-Right ideology ramps up gradually—and so does tolerance to it.”

Secular Bengali bloggers are hugely valuable, because they contribute intellectually to the war of ideas against jihadists.

There was another election remarkably similar to this one…

“In past centuries, religious wars, persecutions, and cruelties were common.”

Wells is best known as an advocate of the thesis that Jesus is a mythical— not historical—figure

“His views often riled many of his fellow humanists.”

Letters in response to Free Inquiry Volume 37, No 2.

“So here we are in early 2017 with a president who never attended or sent his own children to public schools picking as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.”

For so many reasons, no god (even if one existed) could seriously demand worship!

Review of: Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation

Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower: Finding Answers in Jesus for Those Who Don’t Believe, by Tom Krattenmaker (New York: Convergent, 2016, ISBN 978-1-101-90642-2) 245 pp. Hardcover, $25.00. Despite the title, Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower, this book is classified by the publisher on the dust jacket as “Religion-Spiritual,” and it is. One wonders …

Poem: Dear now-I-lay-me-downs, Dear tight-white shoes, Dear if-I-dies…

“A science of right and wrong is on our doorstep. In fact, the concept of mattering brings it within reach.”

“The subjective sense of mattering
may be the reality toward which all those sterile controversies about an objective meaning in life were
ointing all along.”

“Not only does religion offer us an immateriality allegedly shared by God and his heavenly hosts, it also offers us cosmic mattering, and it doesn’t get any bigger than that.”

“How, one might ask, can humanism compete with worldviews that exploit the power of myth?”

America seemed unanimously religious, but freethought, that seeming nineteenth-century relic, was already in the throes of rebirth.

Given the continual, reliable failure of prayer, either God has little affinity for his creation or he simply does not exist.

“‘The atomic bomb is not an inhuman weapon,’ stated General Leslie Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project.”

“Trump has been the ‘box of chocolates’ president-elect: you never know what you’re going to get.”

“We are looking at the very real possibility—even the likelihood—of the rise of fascism in the United States.”

“No good policy can come from either denying that the problem exists or from exaggerating the true number of our adversaries.”

“The prospect of returning America to the ugly era of illegal back-alley butchers is horrifying. What made it possible?”

Letters in response to Free Inquiry volume 37, issue 1.

“As President-elect Trump likes to throw around the word loser, let’s list some of the main losers in the Election Day debacle.”

“All opinions should
be free, whether they’re called
religious’ or not.”

“Religion happened to me by accident of birth, like the birthmark on my shoulder.”

“I speculate as to what it must have been like for those learned men who first wrote down the legends they had gathered from many sources as they decided which ones were true and which false.”

“No matter how committed you are to logic and evidence, you cannot escape yourself, and, yes, this means that there is always a subjective
element to our thinking.”

“Here the authors—distinguished scholars from a wide range of fields—examine how the Christian faith
fits within our current scientific understanding of the cosmos.”

Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, by Julie J. Ingersoll (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2015, ISBN 9780199913787). Endnotes, bibli­ography. 320 pp. Hardcover, $29.95. The author examines a surprisingly little-noticed segment of the Christian Right—the teachings of theologian R. J. Rushdoony and his followers, who are largely responsible for the rise …

Whatever she grew / In the flower box / by the front door…

“Broadband Internet brought
pornography into tens of millions of American homes—for free. Within just a few years, the entire country was wired. And watching.”