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“The United States is a Christian nation.” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this statement at a religious Right meeting or in the media, I wouldn’t be rich—but I’d probably have enough to buy a really cool iPad. The assertion is widely believed by followers of the religious Right and often …

Regular readers of Free Inquiry are probably familiar with some of the basic statistics regarding unbelief. People who describe themselves as having no religion (“Nones”) are increasing, and church attendance is probably not as high as has been believed by some.* While I have had my doubts in the past, I believe that the secularization …

  “I would not vote for man who was atheist because I believe you—you need to have acknowledgment, a reverence, a fear for alm ighty God. And I believe that’s where wisdom comes from.” — Anne Graham Lotz (the wife of Billy Graham Jr.) on Meet the Press, April 8, 2012 It’s a major election …

During the primaries, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum made an impassioned plea for rejecting the famous doctrine of the separation of church and state. He clarified his position on the ABC-TV program This Week on Sunday, February 26: “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea …

The home in the photo is the $1.75 million mansion of the Reverend Randy White, the former head pastor of Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Florida. While some people may be bothered by the fact that there are pastors who live in multimillion dollar homes, this is old news to most. But here is …

It seems that it was just the issue before last when we devoted a cover feature to the demographics of unbelief—to what we know, statistically speaking, about America’s unbelievers and how we know it. Wait, that was the issue before last (“Bridging the Gulf: At Last, Social Science Measures Secularity,” FI, February/March 2012). Perhaps it …

  Why Seculars Don’t Sing As a staunch secularist, it is understandable that Tom Flynn feels weird and wrong when he links arms and sings “Amazing Grace” (“Why Seculars Don’t Sing,” FI, April/May 2012). Many sec ularists share his feeling. I think Flynn’s op-ed goes astray, however, when it attempts to explain why. Flynn’s arguments—that …

On March 24, 2012, approximately twenty thousand godless folk gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Reason Rally. I was one of the speakers late in the afternoon of a rainy but inspiring day. This is roughly what I said: It’s the late afternoon of a long day; it’s raining, I have to …

“Sure, atheism may have better arguments and evidence. But religion is always to going to win on the death question. A secular philosophy of death will never comfort people the way a religious one does.” I’ve heard this idea more times than I can count. And here’s the weird thing—I hear it not just from …

This past January and February were a very busy time for theocratic enemies of free speech, thought, and inquiry. On January 11, U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux ruled a school prayer mural on the wall of a Cranston, Rhode Island, public high school unconstitutional. The suit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on …

It is hard to imagine a greater misfortune for the world than being saddled with a superpower whose exaggerated perception of its righteousness and innocence fuels its belligerence. The only thing worse is having an enemy that is just as arrogant, self-righteous, and belligerent. There is nothing new about such smug, myopic self-righteousness of course. …

It’s a truism that conflicts often flare up around religious fault lines. The Balkans, Israel/Palestine, and Northern Ireland are just a few of the best known in the world today, but there are many more. However, it’s often hard to say whether religion is actually responsible for inflaming or even causing the conflicts or whether …

Across America public school budgets are being slashed even though they are already too skimpy in most states. Teachers, librarians, counselors, and other staff are being laid off. Class sizes are being increased. Teacher job satisfaction is declining. Conservative lawmakers are attacking teacher unions on collective bargaining and tenure, evidently trying to make the teaching …

The desire to feel secure is the basis for human emotion and behavior, and it is the reason humans have believed in gods since the beginning of known history. The desire to feel secure, however, may result in a false sense of security due to a placebo effect. Placebo effects occur when religious or medical …

  “The First Amendment guarantees to each of us the right to practice the religion of our choice, or no religion at all. And let us remember, no matter how we identify ourselves, religious or nonreligious, we are all equally respected members of the American family. So, again, welcome to Washington. Welcome to the Mall. …

Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, by Bart D. Ehrman (New York: HarperOne, 2012, ISBN 0062204602) 373 pp. Hardcover, $26.99. Bart Ehrman is a historian and Bible expert who, although an agnostic, has for years been teaching the New Testament at an American University in the so-called Bible Belt. In Did …

The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights, by Austin Dacey (New York: Continuum, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4411-8392-7) 208 pp. Paper, $19.95. The word blasphemy has such an antique ring to it that one is tempted to think it went the way of the Spanish Inquisition. But prohibitions on speech …

The northerly winds blow cold today; scudding cloud-shapes distend and break with every gust, dip of oar, exposing voids, deep, beckoning. The northern shore’s a shadow line—a budding insubstantiality, or cosmic dust settled long before my feeble reckoning. . . . I paddle on, due north, into the wind, body inclined toward my canoe’s prow, …

Gordon Gamm, a lawyer and longtime humanist activist (among other positions, he has served on the board of directors of the American Humanist Association), approached Free Inquiry last year about the possibility of asking an historian to write an essay addressing the connections between the Enlightenment and contemporary humanism. Although humanists routinely reference the Enlightenment …

The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was the secularization of ethical debate. Historically, however, it would be one-dimensional—indeed wrong—to understand this phenomenon as the product of a virgin birth of ideas in the Enlightenment. Both deistic and atheistic …

In my previous Free Inquiry, article, “Jesus: What’s the Evidence?” (August/September 2011), I noted that the Jesus of the earliest extant Chri stian literature is fundamentally a supernatural personage. By “the earliest extant Christian literature,” I mean the early Epistles, including those most scholars accept as authentically Pauline (that is, written by Paul himself). In …

A long time ago, there was a small band of cavepeople trying to survive in a harsh world. The group’s two best hunters, Grog and Zog, had been tracking prey together for years. Among the many things Grog and Zog had learned was that when they worked together, they were more likely to catch the …

Don’t look now, but we’re in the middle of a revolution in human attitudes and belief. In Europe and North America, large portions of the population are nonreligious; that is, they reject belief in God and transcendent spiritual entities of any sort. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of humanity. Widespread religious skepticism …

In December 2011, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) held a conference titled “Daniel Dennett and the Scientific Study of Religion: A Celebration of the Fifth Anniversary of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.” Breaking the Spell launched an unprecedented era of openness for atheists and public discussion of the validity of religious belief. …

  On Excrement and ‘Spirit’ Talk Three cheers for Tom Flynn’s espousal of straightforward atheistic language, as opposed to the euphemistic (not to say pusillanimous) use of words like spiritual and sacred, carried over from discarded beliefs (“Excrement Eventuates!” FI, February/March 2012). As Flynn indicates, this mealy-mouthed humanism gives the impression that we are clinging …

Like philosopher Andy Norman, whose report on the recent Center for Inquiry–Transnational symposium celebrating Daniel Dennett’s 2006 book, Breaking the Spell, appears in this issue (available in the print edition), I was in attendance when psychiatrist James Thomson performed what Norman aptly calls “an unusual experiment: he had about one hundred ardent secularists link arms, …

I’m going to go out on a limb here: being an atheist demands that we work for social justice. A lot of atheists will argue with this. They’ll say that atheism means one thing and one thing only: the lack of belief in any god. And in the most literal sense, they’re right. It’s different …

One fashionable criticism of outspoken atheists is that we demonstrate the vice of scientism—whatever that is exactly. This criticism comes from many theologians, such as John Haught, but also from some secular philosophers. The critics seldom define scientism, and I doubt that they can agree on a definition. Is it skepticism about specifically religious “ways …

It could have been a good idea, the invention of gods. It could have been a way of solidifying thoughts about how humans could be better than they are. It’s an impressive and touching thing about us that we realize we’re not good enough. Gods (or God) could have been a helpful or even inspiring …

For years, public school systems and principals around the nation have rigorously exercised a “zero tolerance” policy that imposes severe, automatic punishments for students accused of dangerous or other harmful actions. An outrageous but not uncommon imposition of zero tolerance that I’ve been following concerns a then-freshman student, Andrew Mikel II, suspended from Spotsylvania High …

Television trivia websites provide a wealth of information about the industry’s envelope-pushing “firsts.” For example, television audiences witnessed the first lesbian kiss on L.A. Law in 1991, while the first interracial kiss appeared much earlier, on Star Trek in 1968. Trivia websites are less clear about which show first featured a couple sharing a bed: …

Intelligence is a bit of a slippery eel—it’s pretty tough to get it pinned down precisely. And yet, cognitive scientists do think there is something they call “general intelligence,” which describes an individual’s ability to perform well on a broad range of different kinds of intelligence tests. Put simply, someone who does well on one …

Freedom of religion is a hard-core American value that is rarely questioned. It was supposed to be the ultimate solution to the grisly wars of religion that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But religion is rarely satisfied with liberty. It invariably seeks dominance. It is akin to a wild beast that cannot …

As I write this, celebrity chef Paula Deen is being defended in some quarters against critics, including me, who have accused her of gross hypocrisy in taking on the nicely compensated role of shill for a diabetes drug. After not disclosing the fact that she had diabetes for three years while promoting foods that give …

In early December 2011, the Center for Inquiry–Transnational held a fascinating conference on the scientific study of religion in Amherst, New York. I was fortunate enough to attend, and I would like to share what I learned with readers of Free Inquiry,. The conference was, among other things, a tribute to philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Breaking …

This is a time of celebration and sadness, of exultation and grief. We commemorate the life of Christopher Hitchens, our “Hitch.” Atheism has lost a singularly eloquent voice—a fearless, groundbreaking intellectual giant who dared to challenge the most cherished notions of God and religion that still so thoroughly pervade human life. We have lost a …

On January 20, 2012, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (a Catholic) issued regulations, effective next year, that would require church-related institutions such as hospitals, universities, and social service agencies to provide coverage for birth control in their employee health-insurance plans and without a co-payment. The new HHS regulations were recommended by the …

Readers may know that I have argued that exactly none of the Gospel sayings “of Jesus” stem from a historical Jesus of Nazareth, and not for the simple reason that there was no historical Jesus. No, my reasoning on that score is inductive, not deductive. My initial working hypothesis was to assume there had been …

How does that creationist parable go—when one finds a watch, one assumes a watchmaker? Actually, Japanese-designed robots built by other robots might be more typical watchmakers today, but watches are a product of intelligent design and are often used as an example of such by creationists in their beloved—and deeply misleading—analogy. In fact, watches are …

Religion’s accusation that science strips humanity of all significance couldn’t be further from the truth. Science should be celebrated by all as an ennobling achievement of our species. We have nothing to fear from scientific knowledge; only those fearful of reality would distrust science. Friends of pleasing illusions and myths are no friends of humanity. …