ALL ARTICLES

Society is better off when exposed to arguments against the existence of a supernatural being and against the supernatural generally.

Letters in response to the October/November 2013 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Make no mistake: America’s public schools, an indispensable component of our religiously neutral (that is, secular) democracy, are under serious siege.

If you are interested in studying anti-evolutionism up close, then central Kansas and my current home, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, are two excellent places to live.

You hear often enough the cry from the religious Right that our schools are teaching secular humanism. What is this all about?

A review of Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, by Loren Collins.

A review of The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, by David Montgomery.

A review of Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist, with a foreword by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich.

A review of The Way of Science: Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview, by Dennis R. Trumble.

Brief looks at a variety of books.

Poetry from the December 2013/January 2014 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Poetry from the December 2013/January 2014 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Online-only bonus: Further evidence that contemporary literary criticism has stumbled into arbitrariness and fancy.

Online-only bonus: The career of John Emerson Roberts began in religious orthodoxy, moved into freethought, and ended in agnosticism.

Just a couple of years ago, an objective observer might be forgiven for concluding that religious Humanism was dying—or at least that it was in a very bad way.

Moving beyond discussions of the existence of God and the evils of religion, groups of nonbelievers are meeting to ask the big questions that animate human life: Who are we? Why are we here? How should we live?

“Humanism” has different definitions and distinct meanings in different disciplines.

There was never any doubt about where John Dewey stood: he was a godforsaken and unrepentant atheist. Yet if he were around today, he would probably find the notion of “spiritual but not religious” attractive.

Humanism is often divided into the religious and the secular. Both share the basic values and beliefs of humanism but differ in the way they practice it.

If community glue is what religious people are getting out of their churches, then we have an obligation as humanists to provide a similar—albeit nontheistic—glue to our membership.

Sidney Hook was among the earliest American intellectuals to break with Marxism. That’s saying a lot: Marxist revolutionary thought held enormous sway over American intellectuals during much of the twentieth century.

Here’s the conundrum: on the one hand, as rationalists, we’re striving to be rational to the best of our ability. On the other hand, as rationalists, we’re striving to accept reality to the best of our ability. And the reality is that our brains are not rational.

Can the United States ration health care? This question looms large as the nation moves to expand access to health insurance.

Do people still talk about feminist epistemology? I haven’t kept up.

Surely today’s explosive disclosures of the NSA’s ceaselessly growing invasions of the Fourth Amendment—as revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—will not fade away amid the floods of distractions in this digital age. Or will they?

In a desperate effort to whitewash the Christian burning of witches, C. S. Lewis argued that the triumph of reason over the Dark Ages is not necessarily a triumph of a superior morality over an inferior one.

I am quite aware that my turn is approaching. The realization hovers in my mind like a frequent companion.

On April 1, 2013, several bloggers were put behind bars in Bangladesh on the sole basis that they were openly atheist.

Letters in response to the August/September 2013 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in attacks on public schools, which serve about 90 percent of K–12 students in the United States.

As Pakistan’s administration and social institutions have teetered toward collapse along its northwest border, extremists—and the Pakistani public—have encouraged the government to limit religious freedom and move away from secularism.

Mainstream Texas educators and scientists have been ineffectual in persuading legislators, much less the Textbook Committee’s majority, to desist from “kidnapping” real history and science. Here, I add ridicule to try inducing objectivity.

Margherita Hack, a leading astrophysicist and political activist in Italy, died at age ninety-one in June 2013.

The Citizen Lobbyist teaches its reader how a private citizen can lobby effectively in the halls of government. Period. And it does so without a wasted word.

Corsi claims that Christianity and Christian values, or at least his crabbed vision of them, are in grave danger of being destroyed by an all-out “War against God” being waged by the “Bad Samaritan” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Sadakat Kadri’s book, Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World, is wonderfully written, witty, and informative.

One part memoir, one part expose, religion-to-reason travelogues do more than satisfy our curiosity. They remind us that whether we roll the boulder of belief away slowly or shatter it with a single blow, we are not the first or the only ones to have done so.

Poetry from the October/November 2013 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

It has long been accepted as an article of faith that religion/spirituality (hereafter “R/S”) has a beneficial effect on both physical and mental health. Popular U.S. survey data appears to indicate a positive association between R/S and various indices of mental and physical well-being. However, this research is not without methodological controversies. Primary among them …

In America, a thoughtful parent must understand the foundation of ethics and morals to teach children. Similarly, in answering ethical and moral questions from medical students, residents, and patients over more than forty years as an academic physician and scientist, I have had to know ethical foundational principles. Before coming to the essence of the …