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Not long ago, I received a forwarded e-mail from an intelligent, articulate neighbor and friend whose pick-up truck sports a “Don’t Tread on Me” decal. The original message was att ributed to David Vincent Gilbert and began with these words: “These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read.” He went on to list …

I was about to leave work for a few days to attend a humanist conference. I was standing around the watercooler talking with a coworker who asked, “So where are you going?” “To a conference,” I answered. “On what?” she asked. “Humanism,” I replied. “What’s that?” she asked. I thought I was ready for this …

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, by Sam Harris (New York: Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2010, ISBN 978-1-4391-7121-9) 279 pp. Cloth, $26.99. In his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris describes what he calls “a science of human flourishing” (7). …

The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism, by S.T. Joshi (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011, ISBN 978-1-61614-236-0) 300 pp. Paper, $19. Since the Four (or, depending how you count, Five) Horsemen burst onto the best-seller lists, starting with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004), it has seemed that everyone is talking about atheism. How …

(Based on an article by Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation, December 7, 2009) “My father is buried here,” Sawadogo says, a hatchet slung over his shoulder, sitting among his cows, guinea fowl, goats, beneath acacia and zizyphus trees in Burkino Faso, western Sahel. Unlike others, he could not abandon his farm. “My father is buried …

In its October/November 2007 issue, Free Inquiry published a special section titled “Dealing with Dying.” Nineteen articles, most of them personal accounts by FI subscribers, explored various aspects of death and dying from the viewpoints of loved ones, sufferers, and a few who had cheated death. Response to the feature was overwhelming; in a departure …

Almost all of us want to continue living, and we will endure much suffering, if necessary, to stay alive. But some are confronted with circ umstances that they consider insufferable. Each day, hundreds in the United States and other Western countries hasten their own deaths, accelerating the day they otherwise would have died due to …

Like most secular people, I used to believe that everyone has a right to choose death. As an atheist, I had no patience for the religious argument that God created your life, and only he should end it. The legal argument against suicide seemed bizarre: you cannot steal from yourself, so it shouldn’t be a …

Cartwheels, backbends, headstands, and piggyback rides were as much a part of my growing up as playing Barbie and fighting with my sibs. My personal favorite was cartwheels, but over time they went the way of Barbie—shelved and eventually forgotten. The Bicentennial, puberty, and college graduation passed between my last spins and their reemergence. In …

I was a boy of fifteen, escaping my suburban neighborhood on foot and braving a highway to reach a neglected steel bridge that stretched over the Schuylkill River just outside Philadelphia. The twilight bled over the riveted beams, concealing the rusted green-painted angles. I walked over the water, pulling a plaque out of my pants …

So what’s it like, I’m often asked, to be alive more than six years after I’m supposed to have died? Well, one thing’s certain: I’m older by the calendar. But I hope that I’m younger in attitude and outlook. And it’s gratifying to be still walking on planet Earth, knowing my ashes had been scheduled …

I don’t believe in God, but I believe in hell. I’ve been there. It all began with a late-night phone call from my ex-wife, telling me that our eldest son had overdosed on drugs and was near death. She said that a buddy of his had found him and initiated CPR. When the paramedics arrived, …

When my mother’s body dies, her obituary will accurately state her date of birth, but the reported date of her death will be a lie. The truth is that her soul has been dead for a long time. Mom has dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease. Her memory is lost. She awakens every day not only to …

Four years ago, at age twenty-four, I was in high spirits because my boyfriend was about to finish his last trimester of college and move to the city where I live d so that we could begin thinking about our future. We had met in high school and had spent most of our relationship living …

I have a chronic illness. It’s not cancer, and it’s not heart disease: I have a chronic mental illness. I frequently deal with suicidal thoughts. I have gone through periods when I’ve had thoughts of killing myself every single day. Once, it lasted for two and a half years. I’m kept alive by my boyfriend, …

Father, Mother, and Dweezil took very different roads to death. All three were along in years and suffering as their ends drew near, but Dweezil the cat got the best deal by far. A vet solved his problems in seconds, and there were no dubious religious ethics to make a mess of it. My parents …

At what point does an illness go from being a challenge in one’s life to becoming one’s life? The progress of the transformation is so gradual, the change so nearly imperceptible, that one barely has time to realize that while a short-term coping strategy is helpful, a long-term plan is critical to the well-being of …

Theodicy refers to answering the problem of evil. The term was first coined by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to describe how the existence of evil in the world does not conflict with the supposedly essential goodness of God. Christian apologists spend an inordinate amount of time addressing this issue because the tremendous amount of …

Radio evangelist Harold Camping, who predicted that the Second Coming would occur in September 1994, is now positive it will take place on May 21, 2011. Sixteen years ago—in the Winter 1994/95 issue of Free Inquiry—I reported on that earlier apocalyptic date-setting episode (read that article here) What follows is an update that takes the …

Smallpox is caused by a virus with the scientific name of variola major. The virus affects only humans, not animals. Like the common cold, it spreads through sneeze and cough emissions, bedding and clothing, or direct contact. After it enters the nose or mouth, it heads for the lymph glands, whence it is given a …

Do we want to convert the religious? Should one of the primary functions of organizations such as the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry be to persuade the religious to abandon their beliefs? To answer these questions properly, we should first ask: What objectives would be served by converting the religious? The …

Barry A. Kosmin is director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture and a sociologist and research professor in the public policy and law program at Trinity College in Connecticut. He is the nation’s leading expert on the growing percentage of Americans who lack a religious identity, the so-called Nones. …

Freedom and Funding While Tom Flynn and I do not share the same view on the purpose of the “wall” of separation between church and state, I do find myself agreeing with him in principle and specifics in “One (National) Step Back, One ( Local) Step Forward” (FI, February/March 2011). As a strongly conservative Christian, …

On the day the 112th Congress was seated, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life reported on its religious composition. Pew’s press release reported that “the 112th Congress, like the U.S. public, is majority Protestant and about a quarter Catholic. Baptists and Methodists are the largest Protestant denominations in the new Congress, …

I don’t think that a single newspaper or magazine article on Egypt has ever failed to mention the presence, in the wings of Egyptian politics, of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s one of those learned references that is de rigueur for every commentator and analyst. Yet it was notable, as both the Egyptian and the Tunisian …

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced a plan to create a new program to jump-start the development of new drugs and therapies. The new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences will have the mission of trying to bring promising basic NIH research closer to clinical trials. To make this …

A humanist friend of mine recently learned that his reputation had been unfairly tarnished many years ago when he was in medical school. Somehow, his name had become associated with a bizarre and infamous prank. The incident featured several of his male classmates, who, drunk on at least testosterone, sneaked into the morgue one night, …

In an effort to defend religion against the well-aimed broadsides of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, some have argued that the “new atheists” are liberals who are disturbingly unaware of the debt that their values owe to Christianity. In particular, John Gray and Terry Eagleton maintain that the celebration of liberty and individuality has its …

Let me introduce you to Mr. Smart and Heroman. Mr. Smart is really, really clever—so clever that he knows everything, like what’s inside a closed box. Heroman is not so smart, but he does have a special power: Heroman has X-ray vision—he can see inside the closed box. Mr. Smart and Heroman played a starring …

In my reporting on schools over the years, I’ve become aware that some students have hearing problems that have made them appear shy or uninvolved. One day, after a while spent wondering about the continually silent girl in the back of the room, I asked her to please come to the front of the room. …

In a college English class that I was teaching, filled mostly with African American and Hispanic students, a reading assignment prompted a discussion of ethnic minorities’ economic disadvantages in the United States. Assuming we were all on the same page, as a “liberal” I couldn’t resist weighing in and expressing my own professorial indignation on …

It has been nearly a decade since fanatics hijacked planes and crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. As this is being written, multiple political tsunamis guided by other fanatics are engulfing the U.S. Capitol and many state capitols. This column has space for dealing with only two of them: those aimed at forcing …

More than one hundred years have passed since the death of one of America’s finest wits, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). His characters still live on in the national imagination. They are stark images, as rough and ready as the everyman, and they shine light on the nature of what it means to be American. …

There is no escaping the accusation anymore: humanism, we hear over and over, can’t help the environmental movement. Sure, humanists can say that they love the environment, want to “go green,” and treasure their animal friends. Humanists can even script such devotion into their declarations and manifestos. Yet environmentalists frequently doubt that humanism can form …

Some politically minded Christians, having scoured the American Constitution and found neither the word God nor the word of God, have settled on the reference to a “ Creator” that appears in the Declaration of Independence as a wedge to drive home their larger point that the United States is a Christian nation. These Christians …

Multi-Secularism: A New Agenda, by Paul Kurtz (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2010, ISBN 9781412814195) 263 pp. Cloth $39.95. Humanism, like religion, is a human-made concept, and humanists are aware of and appreciate this fact. Books on humanism can be separated into three categories: (1) a descriptive (historical or systematic) outline of humanism (e.g., Richard …

Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States, edited by Warren J. Blumenfeld, Khyati Y. Joshi, and Ellen E. Fairchild (Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2009, I SBN 978-90-8790-677-1 [cloth], 978-90-8790-676-4 [paper]). 184 pp. Cloth $99; paper $39. Remember consciousness-raising? Dismissing it as a trapping of the 1960s is too glib. It is the tool …

An Enlightened Philosophy: Can an Atheist Believe Anything?, by Geoff Crocker (Hampshire, U.K.: O Books, 2011, ISBN 978-1-8-84694-424-6) 132 pp. Paper $13.95. Author Geoff Crocker is, like this reviewer, an atheist and former evangelical Christian. Perhaps as a result of religious nostalgia, Crocker wants to supplement reductionistic materialism with a depth derived from biblical mythology …

Fading Faith: The Rise of the Secular Age, by James A. Haught (Cranford, N.J.: Gustav Broukal Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-57884-009-0) 167 pp. Paper, $16.00. Jim Haught, no stranger to readers of this journal, is the longtime editor of the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, a former press aide to the late Senator Robert Byrd, and …

  Arts and Sciences: Finding Design After Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow, with gratitude.   The art of science, the science of art: both to perceive and to mastermind these scattered patterns we call design. Mapping the paths we’ve traveled thus far to see how they converge on this spot. Seeing ways of saying it …