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Am I the only one to notice that religions across the world have been even more of a nuisance—and, in a distressing number of cases, far more than a nuisance—than usual lately? At this point, it is hardly worth noting how Buddhists (yes, Buddhists) in Myanmar continue to persecute the Muslim Rohingya or how Israelis …

My June/July 2021 essay on how the little-noticed mass death of billions of immature humans, as well as the endless suffering of animals, rips away any pretense that a god and his earthly creation could be benign and moral spent nearly all its time denouncing worship of a creator as fatally depraved. I briefly noted …

Thinking is like playing tennis, driving a car, giving a talk, dieting, or speaking a foreign language. It can be done well or badly. In the jargon of modern education, good thinkers are called critical thinkers. Critical thinkers have a mix of attitudes, skills, and habits that set them apart from sloppy thinkers. Are you …

Few people realize it, but secular humanism—the progressive crusade to improve life for all—may be the chief driving force of western civilization. Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. The movement soared three centuries ago in the Enlightenment, when bold thinkers sought to end the divine right of kings and …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Modernization is brought about by taking seriously (1) the cognitive claims of scientific knowledge and the scientific method, and (2) the moral claims of secular life and its quality. It is because traditional religions are often inimical to these claims that they need to be combated and their authority …

I appreciate Tom Flynn’s close attention to my book The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism. To have such a long review by the editor himself is satisfying, even when he and I disagree. I’m also flattered to have the book characterized with a reference to the venerable Walt Whitman. Flynn recognizes that my book breaks …

From time to time in this space, I have alluded to the Abrahamic god’s contract. In response to incessant, nonexistent reader demand, I obtained the most recent version of said contract and secured exclusive permission to publish it in Free Inquiry. Aren’t you glad you subscribe? * * * Preamble 1. The purpose of this …

Philosopher Reginald Williams uses Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to flog COVID-19 research and policy as being stifled by authoritarian politics suppressing all but the establishment view (“Thomas Kuhn and COVID-19,” FI, October/November 2020). Kuhn’s book was a wildfire hit among nonscientists. Among scientists, not so much. The failings in Kuhn’s understanding …

At age seventy, my episodic memory can rarely replay events I have witnessed. But every detail of October 8, 2011, is engraved in my mind. On that evening, at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, Christopher Hitchens received the Richard Dawkins Atheist of the Year Award. Five hundred atheists and onlookers attended the awards banquet, …

“You accuse me of being a nihilist? Of course, I’m a nihilist. You say that like it’s something bad.” When I think of nihilists, I usually think of Russian anarchists trying to overthrow the Czarist monarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to my ever-handy Google dictionary, an anarchist is a person who …

An Archaeology of Disbelief: The Origin of Secular Philosophy, by Edward Jayne. Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2018. xx & 198 pages. 978-0-7618-6966-5 (cloth); 978-0-7618-6967-2 (electronic). Edward Jayne, an English professor emeritus in his eighty-third year at the time of publication of this book, offers in eight chapters a compact survey of skeptics and (more rarely) outright …

While we await our Sybil and she denies us entrance Demanding the bough of a tree which in our youth Cried out to us—the one of many looked upon— And when received she shows us in Anchises lures us with the dream we dream at dawn Though he was sworn to secrecy, he welcomes us …

The human heart cannot love; it is the mind that learns to move. The sun does not really set; we simply turn away from it. The sky may blaze a deep azure, but only to one standing here. We wish upon a falling star, a piece of dusty meteor. A child may be invincible; a …

The following is adapted by the author from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing).  Stewart is the recipient of  the Council for Secular Humanism’s Morris D. Forkosch Award for best humanist book of 2020. —Eds. Most of us are by now familiar with the public face of Christian nationalism. …

A group of the world’s top ecologists have issued a stark warning about the snowballing crisis caused by climate change, population growth, and unchecked development.[1] Their assessment is grim, but big-picture societal changes on a global scale can still avert a disastrous future. Within the lifetime of anyone born at the start of the Baby …

In the documentary People You May Know, Charles Kriel, special adviser to the U.K. Parliament on disinformation, and filmmaker Katharina Gellein Viken unpacked the political connections between religious fundamentalists, oligarchs, and the company Cambridge Analytica, whose infamous mishandling of the personal data of millions of Facebook users was revealed in 2008. Even though Donald J. …

Even though about 84 percent of the world population is religiously affiliated, the question of whether praying for someone can give that person some health benefits is still relatively understudied. This likely is because the topic is controversial: for religious people, applying quantified measures to the effects of prayer sounds blasphemous. Similarly, for secular ones, …

Edward Tesler lived in the USSR until he moved to the United States in 1980. —Eds. “I love boxing. You are sitting in a comfortable chair, looking at the ring, and somebody else gets hit in the face.” This joke sounds apolitical, but it too reflects big politics. Everybody knows about the centralized planning of …

Chinese thinking is a history of a gradual distancing of man from supernatural beings and their influence, ending in an essentially humanistic approach to life. From the Ch’un Ch’iu period (722–481 BCE) onward, there is a progressively more humanistic interpretation of laws and statutes, regarded previously as being of divine origin. Confucius (551–479 BCE Kǒng …

Most scientists consider evolution a firmly supported theory. This article does not challenge these scientists. But do scientists generally agree that evolution is a fact? Some scientists and philosophers of science maintain that a very well-supported theory deserves to be called a fact. Others maintain that a theory never becomes a fact even if it …

At this point, we all know claims of religious freedom can work like magic words. Say “religious freedom,” and you can demand tax money for your school or social service program even if you proselytize and discriminate, and you can ignore inconvenient employment laws. Just say that your religion demands it, and even public health …

Full disclosure: I admire the New York Times and its commitment to cover the world in depth when so many news outlets have abandoned that mission. Still, the Times has its blind spots, among them a relentless natalism. The paper seems glued to the notion that human numbers (to say nothing of the economy) must …

Beyond Humanity was the title of a book I coauthored in 1996 with Earl Cox. It was an early look at the possibility, if not probability, that in the not too distant future, quite possibly in this century, self-aware devices of extreme intelligence will be developed. If such a thing happens, the book predicted, it …

There has been much loose talk of late about an impending civil war in the United States. For some desperate individuals, our stark political differences—compounded or, indeed, caused by differences in education, socioeconomic status, and religious (or nonreligious) belief—are so extreme that one’s opponents are not regarded merely as antagonists to be defeated at the …

The campaign to complete the endowment fund of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum exceeded its ambitious target following unprecedented donor response to a spring fundraising campaign. In early March, an email appeal announced a seed gift of $40,000 by Museum Director Tom Flynn, which would be used to match the first $40,000 in donor …

Philosophy professor and ethics collaborator Richard Thompson Hull died on March 15, 2021, in Tallahassee, Florida, after several years of health problems. Born December 29, 1939, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Hull served in the U.S. Army after high school for six months and then served in the Army Reserve for six years before attending undergraduate …

Hector Avalos, a respected biblical scholar despite his open atheism, died after a battle with cancer on April 12, 2021. Born October 8, 1958, in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, Avalos completed his undergraduate studies at the University at Arizona. He was awarded a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. In 1991, he received a …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “High in the back area of the Coliseum, using an electronic scanner receiver, Bob Steiner and Alec Jason had quickly located the frequency used by the Popoffs—39.17 Megahertz. A tape recorder was attached to the receiver, and every word was heard. When Popoff made his entrance, we heard Mrs. …

Scientology Robyn E. Blumner’s editorial “Scientology’s Tale of Disgrace,” (FI, April/May 2021) reminded me of my one and only encounter with Scientology. In 1992, I spent a summer doing mathematical research with colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. While walking downtown one day, my wife, Sharon, and I saw a Scientology storefront mission. …

In December 1885, Robert Green Ingersoll wrote a tribute to Elizur Wright, who had died the previous month. Ingersoll said Wright had been “one of the Titans who attacked the monsters, the Gods, of his time … at the peril of his life.” Because during Wright’s lifetime “a majority of Christians were willing to enslave …

In his favorable review of The Jefferson Bible: A Biography by Peter Manseau, Rob Boston notes with approval that Manseau “holds Jefferson to account for one of his most disturbing inconsistencies” (Church & State, November 2020, 19–20). Boston specifies this inconsistency: Thomas Jefferson seemed to admire Jesus’s morals while enjoying a comfortable life built on …

Several years ago, I was having lunch with an old friend from middle school. When I mentioned that in some political race I had voted Libertarian, he said with a scarcely veiled hint of sarcasm in his voice: “In other words, you voted for the Democrats.” And a couple of decades ago, when I told …

Not paying attention during Mass was a sin, and I did my best to pay attention—even though most of the time, the service was painfully dull. But one Sunday in 1962 when I was twelve, the celebrating priest read a quote from Jesus that was not dull but quite shocking: “But I say to you, …

“[T]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen … that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. … It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” —James Baldwin, “Letter to My Nephew”   As …

Having read the stories that religious people invent to make themselves feel better, I realized that atheists do not have similar made-up stories to make us feel better. Here is my vision of what the afterlife might be for nonbelievers. The next time someone says to you, “You can go to Hell,” the correct response …

Cogento, by Thü, translated from German by Lena Blos and Thü; English editing and proofreading by Camille De Kok (Baar, Switzerland: Ecliptic Planetary Publishing, 2019, ISBN 978-3-033-07501-6). 493 pp. Hardcover, $28.00. Also available in e-book formats for all devices. One thing’s for sure: you’ve never read anything quite like Cogento. Author Thü (a.k.a. Thomas Hürlimann) …

Wayward: A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity, by Alice Greczyn. (Austin, Texas: River Grove Books, 2021, ISBN 1632993546). 366 pp. Softcover, $19.95.   This harrowing memoir (excerpted in Free Inquiry’s previous issue) offers the most disturbing picture yet of growing up in the purity-focused Christian fundamentalist subculture of the past three decades—and that’s …

All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, by Michael T. Klare (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019, ISBN 978-1-62779-248-6). 293 pp. Hardcover, $30.00.   “There is, therefore, a direct clash between current White House doctrine on climate change and the Pentagon’s determination to overcome climate related threats to military preparedness.”—Michael T. Klare “We …

Scott Joplin died in a mental institution the year my father was born in Toronto, the final card in his parents’ hand, almost enough for a game of gin. King of ragtime, Joplin suffered a breakdown when his opus work, “Treemonisha,” met with no success. Another genius depressive, Rachmaninoff, felt stifled by being asked to …

Dear Andrew … we went to the Rodin Museum today. You, me, and Alice. First, we had brunch—a lovely brunch, outside, easy conversation, “get to know you” conversation, still, “the mother is visiting and I’m meeting her” conversation. You were lovely, contained, warm, engaged, funny. And then we went to the Rodin Museum. It wasn’t …