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Susan Sackett worked as the personal executive assistant to Gene Roddenberry, creator of the television legend Star Trek, for more than seventeen years. She was also his production assistant on the first Star Trek film and worked closely with him on the next five Star Trek movies. In addition, she served as production associate during …

Several months ago, a committee of Council for Secular Humanism and Center for Inquiry staff members collaborated on a list of twenty-nine conspicuous achievements from the Council for Secular Humanism’s first twenty-nine years. We compiled the original list (from which the below was gently adapted) for an online fund-raising effort, but after the work was …

Humanists and skeptics throughout the world are mourning the deaths of two leading freethought activists, Sibanye (aka Herbert Crimes) of the Center for Inquiry/Harlem Discussion Group, and Hope N. Tawiah, who led the Rational Centre headquartered in Accra, Ghana. Sibanye—whose name means “we as one” in Swahili—died after a long illness on Tuesday, September 29, …

Thirty years in, the question we still hear most often at the Council for Secular Humanism is “What is secular humanism?” A cynical observer might find that pathetic: “What, your Council has been at this for thirty years, and most people still don’t know what it stands for?” For my part, I actually find it …

The July 2009 arrest in New York of Izhak Rosenbaum, a gray-haired Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to act as a broker in a deal to buy a kidney for $160,000, coincided with the passage of a law in Singapore that some say will open the way for organ trading there. In 2008, Singapore …

The death of Irving Kristol on September 18, 2009, at the age of eighty-nine is a reminder of the long and tragic journey that American conservatism has taken. Kristol is the founder of American neoconservatism, which replaced the old-fashioned conservatism associated with the so-called Rockefeller Republicans. The latter was not ideological: its policies were not …

Movies made for young people in recent years tend to share a strong moralistic message: “We human beings are the scourge of the universe!” The 1993 Steven Spielberg blockbuster, Jurassic Park, was no exception. Although Michael Crichton, author of the book on which the movie was based, ended his life as a strong skeptic about …

In “Without Free Will” (Free Inquiry, August/September 2009), Tibor Machan paints a dire picture of what we lose if we don’t have free will. But his imaginings are unfounded. He’s right that most philosophers, many scientists, and even law professors doubt that we have contra-causal free will: that we transcend causality in some respect and …

Several months after Barack Obama’s inauguration as president of the United States, our giddy disbelief has yet to erode. And rightly so. This was an event we thought we might never see, some might say a milestone in our collective ethical trajectory. True, television might have given us the nudge we needed, a fortuitous wooing …

Basava Premanand, humanist, rationalist, and skeptic, died in September in Podanur, India, at the age of eighty. He was the founding president of the Federation of Rationalist, Humanist, and Atheist Associations of India and edited the monthly Indian Skeptic. Premanand dedicated his life to exposing fraudulent cult gurus, divine babas, and holy mathas in India …

Swedes R Us—NOT Sectarian and secular special interests promoting school-voucher plans (tax aid for faith-based and other private schools in the United States) are a long way from giving up their crusade despite overwhelming popular opposition in more than twenty-five statewide referenda; from liberal Massachusetts and California to conservative Utah; clear constitutional bans in three-fourths …

That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them—is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan. —Letter to Catherine Sweetser, 1878 When Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) died, she was virtually unknown to the public. Only seven of her poems had been published, a few without permission, and they attracted little …

Atheists agree on one point and one point only: there is no God. So-called new atheists can be said to agree on two points: (1) There is no God; and (2) We need to do a better job of getting this message into the mainstream. So far, the most popular approach, one advocated by Richard …

The Catholic Notre Dame University of South Bend, Indiana, does not eschew controversy. In 2004, the university offered the Swiss Muslim Islamicist Tariq Ramadan a tenured position at its Institute for International Peace Studies. To the disappointment of his many supporters, Ramadan never took up his position because his visa was revoked by the State …

Dear Lord, I hope you can appreciate a good joke. I’m praying on my back. I wanted be on my knees, which I understand is an ideal place to pray. The joke is that most of the time, that&rsquo ;s exactly where I am. Except that I just had surgery, as You probably know, to …

Agnosticism, Thomas Henry Huxley’s venerable coinage from Victorian England, has fallen on hard times. Over a century has passed since Huxley did battle with what he called the “ecclesiasticism” of his time, and the term he used to describe the process by which belief should be judged has suffered from widespread misunderstanding and debasement. Suspecting …

If you were asked to identify the most pervasive and influential secular institution in human affairs, what would you say? I suspect that most would reflexively think of civil government, but I don’t think that is the right answer. Governments, after all, range from substantially secular to theocratic with many gradations in between. Even in …

There are times when proper Christians simply can’t avoid interacting with homosexuals. For instance, if you decide to redecorate your home or hire a consultant for your daughter’s wedding, chances are good that you will be dealing with a gay man. If you are pulled over by a female police officer, don’t be surprised if …

Icons of Unbelief: Atheists, Agnostics, and Secularists, edited by S.T. Joshi (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-313-34759-7) 463 pp. Cloth $75.00.   The Faith of Scientists in Their Own Words, edited with commentary by Nancy K. Frankenberry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-691-13487-1) 523 pp. Cloth $29.95.   Here are two books …

Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, by Stuart A. Kauffman (New York: Basic Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-46500300-6) 320 pp. Cloth $27.00. Science and religion are bicameral lawmakers that mathematical biologist and philosopher Stuart Kauffman would prefer to harmonize. Science, despite its stunning successes, can never unify all laws of nature. …

What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays by Mark Twain, edited by S.T. Joshi (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59102-685-3) 230 pp. Paper $16.97. Many commentators have asserted that Mark Twain was essentially a theist who merely denounced elements of religion that failed to live up to its professed ideals. S.T. Joshi, editor of …

W.K. Clifford and “The Ethics of Belief,” by Timothy J. Madigan (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge, 2009, ISBN 1-84718-503-7) 202 pp. Cloth $29.99. “It is wrong, always and everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything for insufficient evidence.” Many secular humanists will recognize on sight the breathtakingly skeptical credo of William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879), short-lived wunderkind of …

1 In Argentina, this once, the tango dancers dance for me, who sees a tilt, a turn, a glance, a spin, a hiked-leg stance, and then the two are one, and their romance becomes the dancers as the dance. 2 Birds dance and sing in the sky over Buenos Aires. But I hear the cry …

Religions puzzle me with their power to subvert otherwise intelligent minds and turn them in directions that an outside observer (and under normal circumstances, the subverted mind itself) would instantly recognize as ridiculous. Francis Collins is an excellent scientist whose success in running the huge organization that was the official American Human Genome Project demonstrates …

On Monday, the eleventh of February, 2002, I apprehensively stepped through the doors of the local mosque to recite the profession of faith that would make me a Muslim. I was a ver y shy, naïve, young American woman with absolutely no direct personal experience of Islam, and I had no idea about what to …

From the 1920s until his death in 1952, John Dewey was more influential than any American philosopher has been, either before or since. For the last half-century, however, Dewey’s major works, once read and studied by philosophers and the broader public alike, have had little impact on American philosophy or on American intellectual culture. Although …

I’m twenty-two years old, and I proudly serve my country in the United States Navy. I have served since 2005, and in that short time I have striven to be nothing less than an outstanding sailor. Permanently stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, I have received Blue-Jacket of the Quarter twice as well as a Navy Achievement …

The reign in Spain, it’s plain, will strain and pain your brain. (Apologies to Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, and Bernard Shaw.) Spain’s perennial church-state problems are heating up again. The country’s Catholic bishops are trying to impede further liberalization of the country’s twenty-five-year-old law that legalizes abortion in certain circumstances. They oppose sexuality education in …

A few years ago, the word tolerance was out of fashion. It reeked of musty antiquity, reminiscent of the days before 1968. Yet today, tolerance enjoys new life in rhetoric regarding American attitudes toward Islam and Euro pean attitudes toward recent immigrants. What prompted this renaissance? After September 11, “tolerance” was supposed to pour healing …

Economics and Humanism Does secular humanism have anything significant to say about economic issues or about the controversy that continues to rage between economic libertarians and social democrats? Libertarians advocate unfettered capitalism; they believe fervently in governmental deregulation and lower tax rates. Social democrats, on the contrary, wish to use the government to ensure social …

In some magazines, the editor’s message restricts itself to “puffing” all the great articles in the current issue. Free Inquiry is not one of those magazines. But when was the last time you saw an editor’s message devoted to “puffing” an article from the previous issue? In our August/September 2009 issue, psychologist Luke Galen reported …

At the end of June, the New York City Council passed a nonbinding resolution that is sure to mark the beginning of a long and miserable dispute. The resolution called for the addition of two Muslim religious holidays to the number of days that the city’s schoolchildren already get to take as vacation. To this …

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, called himself a “matchmaker.” However, he was not arranging dates for his congregants. Rosenbaum is one of five rabbis indicted for brokering the sale of black-market kidneys and livers. He found poor, vulnerable people in Israel and allegedly paid them $10,000 to travel to …

I was startled to first see deeply buried in the June 13, 2009, New York Times that a federal district court judge in San Francisco had allowed the continuation of the trial of former senior Justice Department official John Yoo on charges of being a key enabler of the torture of American prisoners for the …

We know that doing away with gods and supernatural persons and powers is not an end. It is a means to an end: the real end being the happiness of man. —Robert Green Ingersoll On a small shelf above my desk sits a carving of wood in warm tones of brown and gold. It is …

On May 5 and 6, 2009, several hundred scholars, intellectuals, and interested members of the public attended a special conference on “The Religious-Secul ar Divide: The U.S. Case” at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research. Edited papers from the conference will appear in the Fall 2009 issue of Social Research. The conference was funded in …

Never Again? Nat Hentoff, you’re too late! In the last paragraph of “The Holocaust, Rwanda—Never, Ever Again!” (FI, August/September 2009), you say “Some years from now, at a memorial for the Darfur dead, some U.S. president will be swearing: ‘Never again!’” President Obama already did that on April 19, 2009. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum …

Peter Singer has been called “the world’s most influential living philosopher” by The New Yorker, and Time magazine included him in “The Time 100,” their annual listing of the world’s one hundred most influential people. He is DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public …

‘Family’ Values It’s a rather ordinary row house at 133 C Street SE—a short walk from the nation’s Capitol—but it has attracted attention of late because of its connection to Senator John Ensign (R–Nev.), Governor Mark Sanford (R–S.C.), and former Representative Chip Pickering (R–Miss.), whose well-publicized extramarital affairs piqued media interest. The C Street house …

The whole thing is unbelievable. You know what I mean—God. So why on Earth when I got cancer at age fifty did I quietly slip back into believing it? I developed a hunger for “somethi ng more,” a palpable conviction that the material universe isn’t all there is. I wanted to believe that there was …