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The simpler the society, the cruder the problems: we can imagine Neanderthals crouching in fear—of the tiger, of the dark, of thunder—but we do not suppose they had the leisure for exquisite neuro ses. We have changed all that. Replete with leisure time and creature comforts but nervously dependent on a network of unfathomable technologies, …

I came out of a blistering rainstorm and strode into the First Nazarene Church for the Upward Bound basketball program coaches’ orientation. After scribbling “Bado” on the sign-in sheet, I scooted into a pew far from the pulpit, like any good Christian attending services. With a Bible and hymnal just inches from my fingers, I …

How we compromise reason’s capacity to transform the human condition – Part 2: Recovering Reason Part 1 of this two-part essay identified a common assumption about reason and then traced its origin and uptake. Plato suggested that reason consists in a judgment’s being supported with sufficient evidence, and this idea went on to decisively shape …

When believers find out I’m an atheist, they occasionally ask me how I keep going if I don’t think my life has any ultimate significance. I tell them I’m not alone. I don’t think their lives have any ultimate significance either. Less facetiously, I admit that they’ve touched on an issue that’s age-old and deeply …

In the October/November 2010 issue, I offered a one-word definition of secular humanism-I suggested that it was emancipatory-and I challenged readers to offer their own one-word completion of the sentence “Secular humanism is…” backed by a brief essay setting forth the rationale. Not everyone embraced the challenge. An e-mail correspondent we know only as Transient …

Toward the end of a recent phone visit with my youngest brother, I asked him (totally out of context and with this essay in mind), “What is a secular humanist?” Now, he is an articulate and experienced man of the world with a very broad background, but he was at a loss for words for …

Secular humanism is one of the major “evangelistic” worldviews vying for the hearts and minds of the world. It is a religious worldview (like all other worldviews) because it has a theology-atheism. Its religious symbol is the Darwinian fish with feet. The fish is sold through the pages of Free Inquiry and advertised as “a …

Secular humanism is GE. True, General Electric hasn’t come up with one super-appliance that does everything, but combine its products and you’ll get an idea of what I mean. Secular humanism reduces the heat under my simmering annoyance at organized religion. It chops into manageable pieces the chunks of anxiety inherent in being human. It …

This statement may seem too simplistic, especially to humanist philosophers, but in contrast to the fraud and deception of religion as taught from pulpits worldwide, secular humanism is truth. My handy Webster’s says truth is “the property of being in accord with fact or reality.” My reasons for choosing this word above all others directly …

Salvation has a religious connotation, but I choose that word deliberately and with irony to describe what secular humanism has the capacity to do. Secular humanism has the capacity to not only “save” us individually but also to “save” the human race and allow for an unprecedented quality of existence. I grew up in a …

During my adolescence, I misspent several years as a devout Christian. I attended a church that relied solely on the Bible for answers to all questions but did not adhere to a literal interpretation of the text . This required a series of closed-door scripture interpretation meetings of our three male pastors before any decision …

Secular defines my narrative as based on my own reasoning, experience, and knowledge of science rather than someone else’s faith. Humanism defines the basis for my own beliefs. My narrative goes like this: Earth formed about four and a half billion years ago. Life began about a half billion years later, apparently as soon as …

Secular humanism is hope for the realization that within us-not in any of the many gods we’ve believed in throughout history-lies the key to meaning, purpose, better lives, and a better world. Within secular humanism lies hope that we can create doubt and actively begin to question what we’ve all been taught to believe about …

I used to call myself the world’s worst atheist. It seemed that whenever I would get comfortable with disbelief, the rationale for believing would begin stalking me again. “Life is pointless,” whispered my pursuer, “without a supernatural context to endow it with meaning and value, and to provide objective standards for right and wrong.” So …

It is the worst of times, it is the best of times-sometimes Dickensian clichés seem inescapable, even if Dickens gets slightly mangled along the way. The closing months of 2010 brought us one of the more heartbreaking church-state losses in recent memory, one whose full ghastliness secularists may need a long-term historical perspective in order …

Philosopher Stephen Law teaches at Heythrop College, University of London, and edits the philosophical journal Think, which is published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and is aimed at the general public. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, and in 2008 became the provost of the Centre for Inquiry …

  The Scope and Limits of Secular Humanism Ronald A. Lindsay, in his fine editorial, “Secular Humanism: Its Scope and Its Limits (FI, December 2010/January 2011) uses the phrase “reproductive freedom,” which I find ambiguous. Some people may use the phrase to mean the freedom to use birth control. But “reproductive freedom” can also mean …

One of the pleasures of trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the religious worldview is noticing the convolutions that this view keeps inflicting upon itself. Last November brought news of two small but significant developments of this kind, both tending to vindicate the essential atheist or materialist contention that religion is …

“The Catholic Church: More Sinned Against Than Sinner?” That was the question posed at a panel discussion in which I participated during the 2010 Battle of Ideas, an annual event in London. You might consider the question absurd because the answer is obvious, but in Britain, angry demonstrations against the 2010 papal visit and colorful …

The United States has been dragged kicking and screaming by the Obama administration into enacting health-reform legislation. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law on March 23, 2010; its status looked shaky, but it was amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which became law on March 30. The …

Over the past couple of decades, a colleague from a famous university has challenged my view that everyone has the inalienable right to private property. My position, derived from such sources as John Locke, the American founders, Ayn Rand, and many others in the classical liberal/libertarian political tradition, is that in a just human community, …

During the accusatory furor by Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers during the run-up to the midterm elections-which still continues, by the way-I am not aware that any recent partisan critic has called attention to a disturbing exercise of unilateral presidential powers by President Barack Obama. Far from being secret, the exercise of power in question …

Suppose you are a religious bully whose endgame is to stamp out a particular field of scientific inquiry and basically spoil everybody’s fun. Now suppose you’re not dealing with medieval peasantry but rather with a modern public at least superficially educated in science. Your plan would best be served by engaging in very “sciencey” talk …

November’s election results do not bode well for church-state separation and democratic, humanist values. Although “social issues” did not dominate the news coverage throughout 2010, the election outcomes seriously enhanced the political strength of the religious Right. We will see new pushes in Congress and state legislatures for a range of schemes to divert public …

Brain-machine interface technologies have opened up the possibility that the visually impaired will be able to see by virtue of digital-camera technologies interfacing directly with the visual regions of the cerebral cortex through electrode implants. People paralyzed due to central nervous system damage can look forward to the day when artificial limbs interfacing with motor …

In previous installments of this article, Ibn Warraq chronicled a series of seemingly disingenuous comments by Qur’anic scholars insisting that their findings regarding the history of the Qur’an and Islam itself have no bearing on the truth or falsity of the religion. He discussed the necessary role of autonomy if historical scholarship is to achieve …

The con man claimed to be a devout man of God: the title “visionary” figured prominently on his business card. Going door-to-door with promises of easy mortgage-refinancing deals and claiming to have a direct line to the Lord, Timothy Barnett wheedled his way into the houses of elderly homeowners in South Los Angeles. Scared, vulnerable, …

Say you are a religious believer and you’ve just read The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. Let’s further say that you are persuaded by Harris’s characteristic clarity and forceful writing that there are right and wrong scientific answers in moral decision-making and that there are scientifically demonstrable better and worse ways of affecting the well-being …

Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, by Bernard Schweizer (New York: Oxford Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-975138-9) 256 pp. Cloth $29.95. Modern theorists often pose a dichotomy of belief as “faith versus science,” but Bernard Schweizer’s book, Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, reminds us that the situation is really more complicated. Before reviewing …

Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism, by Jim DeMint (Nashville, Tenn.: Fidelis Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8054-4957-0) 304 pp. Cloth $26.99. To Save America: Stoping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, by Newt Gingrich (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2010, ISBN 978-1-59698-596-4) 356 pp. Cloth $18.95. If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, …

It was a great love-hate story, a truly grand narrative. Science and Religion, ever entangled yet estranged, always going in opposite directions yet returning to collide again and again. Somehow they just can’t stay away from each other. They have had a long history going on this way, and the drama won’t end any time …

Science studies nature, and our brains are part of nature. Brains naturally produce beliefs—lots of them. Some of those beliefs are about nature, and others are about God. God is unnatural, yet beliefs about God are natural. It’s a curious situation: why do natural brains produce beliefs about the supernatural? Brain scientists are working on …

  Si comprehendis, non est Deus. (If you can understand it, it is not God.) —St. Augustine It is easy these days to feel marginalized if you do not believe in an Abrahamic God. When among such believers who know of or suspect my unbelief, I find myself ignoring comments and innuendo. And, coward that …

My focus in this article is not on science and religion in the abstract but on scientists and their particular religious views. In secular circles, mention of sc ientists and religious faith typically calls to mind prominent scientists who have been critical of religion: Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, and Carl Sagan come to mind. Here …

How We Compromised Reason’s Capacity to Transform the Human Condition, Part I: How Rationalism Lost Its WayAndy Norman   One hundred generation s ago, a curious character from Athens, Greece, staked his life on a radical proposition: by cultivating reason, he argued, we can gain wisdom, promote moral development, and fashion more just and harmonious …

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and my eleventh-grade students are booting up the computers in my school’s computer lab to begin research for a recently assigned paper. They chat with one another casually as they log in and open their Internet browsers to begin work. I marvel as I watch them swiftly maneuvering through websites, online …

Secular humanism is a comprehensive, nonreligious lifestance. It is comprehensive because it touches every aspect of life, including issues of value, meaning, and identity. Presumably, th e two foregoing statements provide an accurate description of secular humanism because they appear on the website of the Council for Secular Humanism. But permit me to register a …

Investigative journalist Alexander Zaitchik is the author of the new book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010). A freelance journalist living in Brooklyn, New York, Zaitchik has contributed to Salon.com, The Nation, Wired, and many other distinguished publications. Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of …

  Ground Zero Mosque In his eagerness to bash Islam, Christopher Hitchens (“The Mosque at Ground Zero,” FI, October/November 2010) misses the point. Meaningless ritual and incantations—if they are OK at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—should be OK at 51 Park Place, which, by the way, is well out of sight of Ground Zero. This is in …

It’s probably old news by now, but as I write this, the one-man assault on Discovery Channel’s Maryland headquarters that ended in the killing by police of hostage-taker James Lee is literally yesterday’s news. It is a story rich in inconvenient truths, starting with the uncomfortable fact that Lee was apparently a Friend, or local …