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Reynold Spector has provided us with an ambitious and thought-provoking, if somewhat idiosyncratic, essay on ethics and the law. It makes for an interesting read, and he has several insightful observations. That said, I do have some areas of disagreement. More fundamentally, his argument as a whole is on my view inconsistent and self-defeating. To …

In this article, I am pursuing several objectives. First, I will address some of the problems with Sam Harris’s thesis concerning a science of morality that was introduced in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010). Specifically, I intend to demonstrate that Harris applies a not-so-carefully-developed language that …

Literalism can have serious problems. Difficulties set in after time has elapsed; vernaculars change, as do legal definitions, customs, and attitudes. The eighteenth century is sufficiently far away for issues to arise as to the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution (which, as a European, I find distinctly mystifying). This document has no …

Say that religious belief in general is irrational and often harmful, and few humanists will challenge you. Assert that some religions are more harmful than others, and there will be much less unanimity. Declare emphatically that among currently existing religions, Islam presents a clear and present danger in a way that other religions do not, …

Even in the religion’s infancy, Paul said that a man is not a Christian if he does not possess the spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9) and that “in the spirit” a man can “utter mysteries” (1 Cor. 14:2). How did the idea of “the spirit” develop? The Finnish New Testament scholar Heikki Räisänen explains in …

According to best estimates, the first Gospel recording the life of Jesus (Mark) was composed about forty years after his crucifixion and quickly became firmly believed by hundreds if not thousands of people. Surely this is too soon, and its success too stunning, for Mark’s account to be largely fabricated. Yet, we don’t have to …

The 2013–2014 term of the U.S. Supreme Court could be its most important in years with respect to church-state issues. We already know that the court will hear a case involving the constitutionality of invocations in local government settings such as city hall or county board meetings: Town of Greece v. Galloway (No. 12-696). By …

The year 2013 marks a noteworthy anniversary: it has been fifty years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the conjoined cases Abingdon School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett ended school-sponsored Bible reading in American public schools. This decision came on the heels of 1962’s Engel v. Vitale, which ended school-sponsored prayer. Those …

In those states that still have capital punishment, prisoners on death row often depend desperately on court appeals wielding the Brady Rule to keep them alive. This is Brady: “Evidence or information favorable to the defendant in criminal case that is known by the prosecution: under the Unties States Supreme Court case of Brady v. …

The newly revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychi-atric Association (APA)—DSM-5—was released this past May at the Association’s an nual meeting in San Francisco. Rarely has a new book met such a universal cacophony of critical reviews. Even before the tome had hit print, critics were falling over one another …

If we don’t speak up, the status quo wins. Yes, this fight can be painful. When we battle against deeply entrenched beliefs that people are emotionally attached to and are entangled with social and political and economic structures on every level, it can be difficult—more than difficult. We ask people to give up ideas that …

Many atheists, including myself, try to avoid the kind of god-talk that some people equate with belief in a deity. Although it’s reflexive in our society to say “God bless you” when someone sneezes, “Gesundheit” (“good health”) would be a more appropriate atheist response. Getting a wallet back from the lost and found with nothing …

Henry Morgentaler was born in Poland in 1923 and emigrated to Canada in 1950. All Morgentaler’s family members except for his brother had died in death camps. He became a physician and Canada’s best-known advocate for safe, legal abortion, and he detailed his activism in a feature article he wrote for Free Inquiry in the …

  Is Religion Dying? Tom Flynn’s admonition in “Is Religion Dying?” (Free Inquiry, June/July 2013) about the well-meaning but nonetheless complacent naiveté of many humanist young people should be taken very seriously. The Christian evangelicals have long since realized that they can no longer appeal to educated youth by portraying themselves as a culturally insular …

Australia and the United States have much in common. Both are English-speaking, continent-wide former British colonies. Both pretty much displaced their indigenous populations. Both are reasonably prosperous today. America’s founders, with fresh or not-so-fresh memories of Europe’s centuries of religious conflict, had the wisdom and foresight to put the concept of separation of church and …

There are no atheists in foxholes.” Attributed to World War II journalist Ernie Pyle and various other people, this gratingly smug (and of course factually inaccurate) dictum, often addressed to nonbelievers, seems on a practical level to mean something akin to “Sure, go ahead, be an atheist and sneer at religion, as long as you’re …

We will not easily recover from the tragedies in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. These tragedies successively became the worst mass shootings in American history. My sympathies go out to the survivors, and I urge support for them, especially from the secular humanist community. When any tragedy occurs by the hand of a human person, …

The so-called New Atheists have not fared well among scholars of religion. Generally, their work has been shrugged off as shoddy, unscholarly propaganda, or they have been taken to task for conjuring “straw man” caricatures of religious traditions, conveniently ignoring all the good that religious institutions have done, defining faith in a manner unrecognizable to …

Why Tolerate Religion?, by Brian Leiter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-691-15361-2) 187 pp. Hardcover, $24.95. Brian Leiter’s new book on secular­ism and religious freedom, Why Tol­erate Religion?, has received much attention. It is a useful contribution to the discussion of an important group of issues, and it was appropriately the topic of a …

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, by A.C. Grayling (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, ISBN 978-1-62040-190-3) 269 pp. Cloth, $26.00. British philosopher A.C. Grayling must certainly be familiar to many readers of Free Inquiry, for he has long been associated with the new atheism movement, and The God Argument might be read …

There Is No God: Atheists in America, by David A. Williamson and George Yancey (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013, ISBN 978-1-4422-1849-9) 150 pp. Hardcover, $36.00. There Is No God: Atheists in America offers very little that is new or noteworthy in the budding field of social scientific research on atheists in the …

Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom, by Marie Alena Castle (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-937276-47-8) 236 pp. Paperback, $14.95. Black Tuesday—March 26, 2013— made very clear the importance of books like Marie Alena Castle’s Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom. On that day, the Indiana …

Where have you come from? Far, from far. Where are you going? Tomorrow. It took forever. Now is never heard of but firsthand. The evidence of hours is ellipsis, ampersand. Of Course There’s a God Terese Coe Of course there’s a God but God has gone mad and got shot of the only mind he …

It should come as no surprise to readers that the general public overwhelmingly assumes that religion is tied to morality. This can be de scribed as the “Religion Makes You Good” theory. In more scientific terms, this “religious prosociality hypothesis” predicts that religious belief is associated with a variety of positive social behaviors ranging from …

Here’s a question you won’t find on a Gallup or Pew survey: “How much do you hate religious proselytizing?” Wouldn’t it be nice to know how Americans really feel about being evangelized? Don’t expect the answer soon! The problem is that neither major polling organizations nor such major funders of research as the Templeton and …

In 2009, when I published my book The God Virus, I received an overwhelming number of e-mails and phone calls from people asking for help dealing with the emotional and psychological trauma in connection with their leaving religion. In response, I founded Recovering from Religion, now a rapidly growing organization headed by Executive Director Sarah …

  The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed. —Attributed to William F. Gibson Many people are convinced that the end of the world is nigh—even aft er the failure of predictions in 2012 based on the Mayan calendar—due to what they believe is stated in the Book of Revelation. To be sure, …

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: first impressions Dear Lottie, What did it feel like when I first came here? It’s hard to say. At first, I didn’t feel much of anything. It was like waking up any other day. I knew everything had changed, but it didn’t feel different. I was still the same person. …

In case you missed it, Roman Catholics have a new pope. Pope Benedict XVI resigned, which no pope has done in almost six hundred years, and the College of Cardinals met in conclave and elected Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who chose the name Pope Francis. But of course, you didn’t miss it. No one …

I’ve been unusually steeped in the history of atheism and freethought in the United States and the United Kingdom recently. Barry Duke, the editor of the UK magazine The Freethinker, sent me a history of the magazine published in 1982 to mark its hundredth year of publication (Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The …

The central achievement of the American Revolution was to demote government to the role of a cop on the beat. The citizen became sovereign instead of the monarch. Self-government became an aspiration for all people, not just for rulers. The idea became prominent, at least for a while, that government’s proper role was to secure …

It is no exaggeration to say that the invention of monotheism has been the greatest misfortune of humanity. In the polytheistic world, every city had its gods, who were deemed to be its protectors against very real threats such as floods, famines, crop failure, volcanoes, military defeat, and other disasters. Even when a city was …

When I came of age in the 1950s, deep in Appalachia’s Bible Belt, narrow-minded sanctimony prevailed. It was a crime for stores to open on the Sabbath. It was a crime to buy a cocktail or a lottery ticket any day. Boot­leggers and “numbers” runners were nailed by cops. You could be jailed for looking …

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, popes have become the focus of heightened religious emotion. Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge and a staunch Catholic, has said that the Polish Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, spent his final years of physical and mental decline “acting out a …

  The Meaning of Life and Death Ronald A. Lindsay’s editorial “The Argument from Death and Meaningless—Again” (FI, April/May 2013) helpfully argued that if heaven destroys our individuality, it is not a reward but another form of death and therefore can’t make mortal life meaningful. Alternatively, if we survive eternally as ourselves, we will inevitably …

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the American national government’s founders, following the lead of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in Virginia, incorporated these words into the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In 1802 Jefferson explained that these words built …

  Shake it up, baby, now (Shake it up, baby) Twist and shout (Come on and twist and shout) —“Twist and Shout,” written by Phil Medley and Bert Russell. Recorded by the Isley Brothers, 1962 What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. —Romeo and …

Recently, I read a transcript of a debate on the resurrection in which the conservative Christian debater Michael Horner said the following: “God doesn’t send anyone to hell. . . . We each have the number one choice to make in our life, and that is, do we want to commence a relationship with the …

God or Godless: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Con­troversial Questions, by John W. Loftus and Randal Rauser (Ada, MI: Baker Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8010-1528-1) 203 pp. Paperback, $13.99. Baker deserves a lot of credit for publishing God or Godless: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Con­troversial Questions. It represents a departure from the traditional evangelical Christian …

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6) 448 pp. Hardcover, $28.95. Are consequentialist ethics adequate? According to University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, they are not. They suffer from two crucial flaws. First, they depend too heavily on reasoning …