ALL ARTICLES

Arguably: Essays, by Christopher Hitchens (New York: Twelve, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4555-0277-6) xix + 788 pp. Cloth, $30.00. In his final column for Free Inquiry (February/March 2012), Christopher Hitchens described himself as “a self-taught amateur writer.” If one were inclined to take this characterization seriously, and if such faux modesty could be purchased by the yard, …

The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2012, ISBN-13:978-58648-843-7) 291 pp., $25.99. Without doubt, The Good News Club is one of the most important books to appear this year. In it, investigative reporter Katherine Stewart exposes the staggeringly serious under-the-radar tsunami of …

John Emerson Roberts: Kansas City’s “Up-to-date” Freethought Preacher, by Ellen Roberts Young (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4628-7292-1) 244 pp. Cloth, $29.99. On rare occasions, vanity presses bring forth a noteworthy title. For students of the history of freethought, religious humanism, and Midwestern intellectual culture, this is one of those occasions. Independent scholar Ellen Roberts …

Before I heard how loggers loosed their logs on down the mountainside by sluice, constructing miles of flume along a floor of bowing ferns; before I grasped how water works with gravity to minimize the timber’s heft and haul; before I sank a hatchet deep and marveled how a body hardens by unalterable law, I …

By any measure, the period since the mid-twentieth century has been a golden age for both the science of sociology and the discipline (or business) of opinion polling. Never before have so many Americans been surveyed, measured, and compared on so many indices and by so many specialists. Still, across the age of surveys, men …

Something novel happened during this century’s first decade: Social scientists (re)discovered the nonreligious. Call it “reaching critical ma ss” or a “tipping point,” but suddenly quite a few researchers in quite a few places began to focus their attention directly on the nonreligious—not just as a foil for better understanding the religious but as a …

We seem to be poised on the threshold of a bright new era in which nonreligious Americans will be properly studied by the social sciences. What better time to review what we know about the various flavors of religious nonaffiliation and nonbelief? And what better time to review the facts and fallacies that have shaped …

Our nation’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War presents an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of that war and what we can learn from its awful carnage. Most historians today would agree that slavery caused the Civil War. No slavery, no war. That interpretation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. …

Even a minimal acquaintance with religious assertions and theological dicta makes one tiresomely familiar with claims affirming the truth and logic of a given faith. The faith in question may be specific (Catholic) or general (Christianity), but the assertion is always that the faith is true and logical. The truth of a faith cannot be …

  Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. . . . If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. . . . Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. —Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) The religious frequently use Pascal’s Wager as a tool to try to convert …

Words are like people; they can get kidnapped. Religion is one of those words. In our part of the world, right-wing conservatives have commandeered the words religion, faith, and belief to connote that these words bind one to the idea of a personal deity who talks and even writes books and thus acts as a …

My son plays on a vintage baseball team. They play by 1861 rules, use 1860s language, wear 1860s uniforms, and sell soda pop and Cracker Jack. It is what they call a “gentleman’s game.” There is only one umpire, and he is asked for decisions only when the players cannot agree. The umpire will occasionally …

Most of what I have to say in response to these two articles is in my editorial starting on page 4 of this issue. Oddly, that editorial didn’t begin as a conscious rejoinder to these articles; only after I’d written it did I realize how it related to them. Still, I agree with Lawrence Rifkin …

  If a solar storm should burn off the peculiar damp that clings to this planet, this would be a very small change—no change at all in cosmic terms, which are apparently based on averages. The u niverse is lifeless now and will be lifeless then, so negligible is our presence in it. —Marilynne Robinson, …

Lee Salisbury was at one time an up-and-coming charismatic Christian pastor, even a healer! How did he wind up actively involved in the ranks of Minnesota Atheists? Often, successful Christian activists simply cannot allow themselves to entertain doubts as to the worthiness of their enterprise, but Salisbury had a yearning for critical thought. He left …

  Religion’s Attractions Ronald A. Lindsay (”Religion’s Attractions, Humanism’s Challenge,” FI, December 2011/January 2012) seems to think that humanists have a responsibility to subvert religion: to combat beliefs on both an intellectual and emotional level. But in what arena is this battle for hearts and minds to take place? Why this competition? Do I detect, …

Christopher Hitchens first appeared in the pages of Free Inquiry in Fall 1996 as the subject of an interview—rather lengthy at six pages—that focused on his investigation of Mother Teresa, that icon of religious sacrifice. His book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso) had come out the year before. His goal …

If you haven’t read it, you will almost certainly have seen it: the critique of Professor Richard Dawkins that arraigns him for being too “strident” in his confrontations with his critics. According to this line of attack, Dawkins has no business stepping outside the academy to become a “public intellectual” and even less right to …

Just before this past Thanksgiving, I spent three days inside Vatican City at a very unusual conference. The topic was stem-cell research, a subject of fierce political and moral debate because some forms of stem-cell research involve human embryos or, potentially, cloned human embryos. So what was I, a known proponent of embryonic stem-cell research, …

When he was not yet president, Barack Obama insisted: “To build a better free world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries” (foreignaffairs.com, Summer 2007). He …

Few people notice, but a profound shift is discernible in history and current trends. Secular humanist values—rooted in improving people’s lives without supernaturalism—are gaining ground, decade after decade, century after century. They’re becoming the standard of civilization, overcoming past ugliness. Evidence confirms that wars are diminishing, democracy is spreading, dictatorships are fading, health is improving, …

One of the tragedies of humanity is that we’re all mortal—every one of us, and everyone we know and love, will someday die. Our forebears, to whom we owe our existence, are all gone or going. Another aspect of this great tragedy is the transience of our knowledge: not only will we die but memory …

On November 8, 2011, Mississippians voted 58 percent to 42 percent to reject a proposed state constitutional amendment intended to establish legal “personhood” at the moment of fertilization or implantation. The amendment, supported by leaders of both political parties in this most religious of all states, was aimed at outlawing all abortions and several types …

Critias? In the Great Minds series? Have we run out of really great minds already? Who was this guy Critias anyway? (And how do you pronounce his name?) The last question is the easiest to answer. There are two choices in pronounciation: to Americanize or to pseudo-Hellenize. The Americanized form, used even by professional classicists, …

Religion promises a rewarding relationship with some supreme reality. Neither naturalism nor democracy does that. How can religion function in a democracy? Only religion hijacks one’s cognitive centers. Having committed to religious promises, people feel certain about the spiritual rewards. Religious people love certainty and detest doubt about their commitment, whether that doubt be internal …

Find intelligent design in nature and what—rejoice? A better reaction might be despair. Those betting with Kierkegaardian fervor that order in nature is the result of intelligent design should be very, very careful: getting what they want could be awful. The amazing order evident in the universe can, of course, be seen as the result …

Picture the moment of gorgeous relief when labor is finally over and your doctor hands you your healthy baby boy. He has everything in the right place: ten, ten, two, and one. Then imagine that the doctor asks if you’d like to have one of your son’s pinky fingers removed. Confused, you ask why anyone …

I’m Mark Twain. Those of you who may have heard of me probably know that I was buried in 1910, and not prematurely. I can’t blame them; I was dead. You may be wondering why this old man has come back to life. Oh, I know I’m supposed to wait until Jesus’s second coming. But …

Darwin the Writer, by George Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-960843-0) 244 pp. Cloth, $35.00. An odd thing happens when one sits down to read a book about Darwin’s skill as a writer. After only a few pages, there is a strong desire to put down the book about Darwin and go …

Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion, by Phil Zuckerman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-974001-7) 224 pp. Cloth, $24.95. Historically, those most interested in the reasons people leave religion have been the religious. Those who have already left typically aren’t concerned with why people leave; they’re just glad for the company. But …

  At the Astapovo Station No God. . . . No God sees. . . . No God sees the truth. . . . No God sees the truth, but waits. . . . So who? . . . So who sees? . . . So who sees the truth? . . . So who …

Through drugs and implanted medical devices, we can now enhance the capacities of humans. The changes brought about so far are still relatively minor (for example, using Ritalin to increase the ability to concentrate), but it’s highly likely that we will develop the means to modify an increasing variety of human traits within ten to …

A problem with the current debates about emerging technologies is that they really are debates—plural. Reasonable policy approaches to embryonic sex selection, for example, or to human reproductive cloning, if it were available, might not generalize to more radical technologies that could reverse the aging process, dramatically increase our cognitive capacities, alter the gross morphology …

  Perspective 1 Adrienne Asch Proponents of so-called moderate genetic enhancements contend that we nee dn’t worry much about possible upgrades to future human beings because they will not be transformative. Proponents of more radical enhancements endorse possible radical changes to humans that might come from their envisioned radical genetic and biotechnological innovations. Like other …

When I was seventeen I was part of a six-week summer seminar at Cornell University on the theme of “the individual and the community.” A dozen of us nerdy teens read an intensive diet of John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud under the tutelage of two philosophy professors. Afterward, I was a determined socialist …

Improving the brain’s cognitive performance is the next great frontier for not just the brain sciences but also the wider field of medical therapy. As soon as some fresh discovery about the brain’s functioning is announced, there are novel proposals for modifying and enhancing that brain process. Therapies that repair poorly functioning brains are treatments …

Can terrestrial religion survive intact in a universe in which innumerable planets orbit other suns? The short answer may seem to be no. At first glance, the world’s religious traditions do not appear to have room in their myths to deal with the discovery of new planets in far-off star systems. However, religions are resilient …

In everyday life, evolution explains phenomena that nothing else can—and not just in biological specialties. It is the master key to much that has been locked in mystery. If you seek real understanding in almost any field, you must not reject evolutionary theory. It has never been my bread and butter, as I practiced medicine …

God rewards the faithful, either in this life or the next. The faithful do not know when these rewards will come, but they can be confident that they will come—eventually. Moreover, God does not ask for much in exchange. God requires only that the faithful be faithful, that is, that they trust in him and …

Rachel Tabachnick is a researcher and writer who monitors the religious Right. Recently, she has focused on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a new strain of Dominionists—Christians who believe, basically, that they ought to be running this country. The NAR helped organize a prayer rally last summer for Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry. …