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The Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of Salazar v. Buono, an interesting church-state dispute—interesting in no small part because it may tell us much about the Obama administration’s approach to establishment-clause issues. For most of the past seventy years, there has been an eight-foot cross set atop Sunrise Rock in the Mojave …

I was born to a Muslim family in a small town called Mymensingh in what then was East Pakistan. Today, after gaining independence, this country is Bangladesh. It is a nation of more than 140 million people—one of the most populous countries in the world, where 70 percent of the people live below the poverty …

The planetary community today faces a grave economic crisis. Companies are faltering; unemployment, poverty, and deprivation are rising. Foreclosures are escalating, and the ranks of the jobless keep growing. People who have lost their homes or jobs are sleeping in their cars and spending their days at libraries. Librarians have reported an increase in the …

The following article was written by an inmate in a prison in New Jersey whose name is being withheld because of possible repercussions. The author is highly educated and a committed secular humanist, but his efforts to establish a secular humanist group in prison have encountered countless roadblocks. After much negotiation with the New Jersey …

In Wendy Kaminer’s op-ed and in this issue’s cover feature, we focus on public funding for faith-based charities. As several writers note, the practice of funneling government money to religious charities began during the Great Society years. Of course, those recipients (organizations such as Catholic Charities) were notably secularized. Incorporated independently of their sponsoring churches, …

When I published The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty earlier this year, I was frequently asked if this isn’t the wrong time to ask affluent people to increase their efforts to end poverty in other countries. Emphatically not, I reply. There is no doubt that the world’s economy is in …

Secularists had reason to be disappointed but not terribly surprised by President Barack Obama’s Bush-lite approach to government funding of sectarian religious groups. In establishing his own White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (the subject of this issue’s cover feature), Obama let stand George Bush’s executive order allowing federally funded religious organizations to …

Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx published the Preface to a Critique of Political Economy (all 1859). So, in 2009, we celebrate (or lament) the 150th anniversary of the roles played by these three big ideas in …

The Templeton Foundation recently announced the recipient of the 2009 Templeton Prize, a £1 million ($1.4 million) award founded by the late U.S. multimillionaire, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Sir John Templeton to honor scientists who make “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” For those not in the …

By now, the majority of you are familiar with the blasphemous theory known as “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) which is fancy talk for claiming that man* is responsible for changes in Earth’s climate. If you are a proper Christian, you are appalled at the very idea. Good news: there are a number of reasons why …

Moral Integrity for Humanists In my editorial “Personal Morality” in the April/May 2009 issue of Free Inquiry, I deplored the lack of moral integrity of many unbelievers. I asked for input from anyone who woul d like to be involved in a research project on developing secular ethical wisdom. Below is a small sample of …

Jerry A. Coyne has been a professor at the University of Chicago in the department of ecology and evolution for twenty years. He specializes in evolutionary genetics and works predominantly on the origin of new species. He is a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. His most recent …

Voucher Plan Dies On March 10, the U.S. Senate defeated a Republican effort to continue the District of Columbia’s controversial school voucher plan. This is a victory for church-state separation, religious liberty, and public education. In taking this action, the Democratic-controlled Congress was very much in line with the twenty-five statewide referenda from coast to …

Thomas Paine’s story is the story of America. To understand what happened to the revolutionary experiment that began at Lexington and Concord with the 1775 “sho t heard round the world”—to understand how we ended up in the present financial morass, the legacy of the so-called unitary executive—there is no better model than Paine’s life …

Stem-cell research aimed at regenerating nerve cells in the human brain is moving forward. Researchers have already isolated a particular gene that directs certain stem cells to turn into cerebral cortex cells. These are the cells comprising the outer layer of the cerebrum, the upper part of the brain largely responsible for cognition. Researchers have …

In the eighteen years that I have worked in higher education, including ten years as an academic program evaluator, I have never encountered a Catholic diploma mill. Well, I do know of one literally Byzantine e ntity in Minnesota, but broadly speaking, all bottom-feeder unaccredited colleges that issue substandard religious degrees are Protestant. They are …

In February of 2006, I consented to have my cheek swabbed, my finger pricked, and my picture taken. The scientific study in which I was participating, “The Genetics of Human Pigmentation, Ancestry, and Facial Features,” was somewhat unusual in that each participant would later be provided with his or her own genetic ancestry results and …

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace, by William Lobdell (New York: HarperCollins, 2009, ISBN 978-0-060-162681-4) 304 pp. Cloth $26.95. William Lobdell, a former religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has written an intensely personal spiritual memoir of his journey from God-seeker to born-again evangelical …

Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Secularism, by Paul Kurtz (Amherst: N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59102-666-2) 280 pp. Cloth $17.98. Paul Kurtz is professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author or editor of …

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by Kathryn Joyce (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009, ISBN-13/EAN: 978-0-8070-1070-9) 272 pp. Cloth $25.95. Remember Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives? Or the two films based on it from 1975 and 2004? If not, they are science-fiction horror stories about a town in which the guys in a local …

Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie, by Philip Appleman, illustrated by Arnold Roth (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-593720360) 96 pp. Cloth $24.95. Like any good secular humanist, I enjoy reading the latest jeremiads by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others. Tomes about the ongoing depredations of the Religious Right are also welcome, and …

The Book of Atheist Spirituality, by André Comte-Sponville (London: Bantam, 2008, ISBN 978-0-593-06139-8) 212 pp. Cloth $19.95. Alister McGrath must be so embarrassed. Within months of the appearance in 2004 of his book The Twilight of Atheism, where he exulted over the demise of atheism in the modern world, a major new wave of atheist …

Tomorrow’s Table, Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, by Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-530175-5) 199 pp. Cloth $29.95 The authors of Tomorrow’s Table, Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchack, are a plant geneticist and the manager of an experimental organic farm at …

My sweet-sixteen dress was yellow as the daffodils In the seamstress’s cramped but spotless living room, Yellow as the lemon bars she made each Christmas For the neighborhood children. Mrs. Mueller lived at the end of our block In a little stone cottage near a field of flowers, Like a grandmother in a fairy tale. …

  Yet we’ve had too much fecundity; it’s now no virtue; it’s eating us out of house and home. —Edward Hoagland The decision to develop this feature was taken before the economic meltdown, when prices for gasoline, agricultural products, and metals were at or near all-time highs. Food riots rocked the developing world, not because …

The quick answer to that question is “Yes.” But the finally requires qualification. The population bomb—the power of population size and its rapid growth to greatly darken the human future—has actually been exploding for many decades. It’s just that until recently people in general and the media in particular have not been paying attention. For …

The world’s population now exceeds 6.7 billion, and humankind’s consumption of fossil fuels, freshwater, crops, fish, and forests exceeds supply. These facts are connected. The annual increase in population of about 79 million means that every week an extra 1.5 million people need food and somewhere to live. This amounts to a huge new city …

About forty years ago, the world population was only 3.5 billion, or about half of the present population of 6.7 billion people. Most of us seem to ignore or be unaware of the magnitude of this rapid expansion and the vast changes that it is causing throughout the world. Indeed, the daily and even the …

“Human numbers are still rising in many countries. California’s population is growing faster than India’s; Americans born today will retire in a nation with more than half a billion inhabitants. This is frightening, given that even the present human population consumes 40 percent of Earth’s biological productivity.”* There seem to be some who still profess …

If you have had a serious drinking problem in the United States of America, you might also have had serious troubles connected with that problem. You might have a drunken driving conviction or landed in a hospital or detoxification facility by court order. If any of these things have happened to you, it is almost …

May 26, 2009, will be a day to reflect on the role played by organized religion in the making of public policy. It was on this date sixty-one years ago that the National Party swept to power in South Africa on a platform of strict apartheid between the black and white races—under the guiding spirit …

  The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. — Albert …

Little did I imagine two decades ago, when I first proposed plans for new Centers for Inquiry, that developing them would be such an arduous, even treacherous task. In my book Eupraxsophy: Living without Religion (Prometheus Books, 1989), I said that it is important to provide secular alternatives to religious institutions, especially for nonbelievers. These …

Increasingly, world civilization is becoming secular; that is, it emphasizes worldly rather than religious values. This is especially true of Europe, which is widely considered post-religious and post-Christian (though with a small Islamic minority). Secularist winds are also blowing strong in Asia, notably in Japan and China. The United States has been an anomaly in …

Whenever I hear the word spiritual, I reach for my revolver. Well, not really. But I’ve learned the hard way that on hearing spiritual, it’s good practice to reach for the question, “What precisely do you mean by that?” Philosopher/author Ophelia Benson offered a definition of spiritual as perceptive as any I’ve read: “a way …

As I watched the presidential inaugural address in the freezing but sunlit atmosphere on top of the Voice of America building in Wash­ington, D.C., where I was lucky enough to have secured a media perch, I was at first too impressed by the occasion itself to notice something possibly significant about the speech. It’s not …

How quickly the story shifted. Initially, the birth of eight children to thirty-three-year-old Nadya Suleman was greeted with gushing stories throughout the media. But the story soon went south, as it should have. For the birth of eight babies to a single woman who has six other young children under the age of eight, no …

Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned thirty in 2008. The birth of a “test-tube baby,” as the headlines described in vitro fertilization, was highly controversial at the time. Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of …

All too often in recent weeks, I have run across efforts by various political thinkers and activists to discredit individualism. Some argue that the idea of the individual is a myth created by our society. Others press the notion that the individual is a solitary being whose life is awful, lonely, and dangerous, and so …

Here I come again with an act of free inquiry into a life issue that will cause some readers to ask why the editor publishes this heretical contrarian. I have been an absolutist atheist for some seventy years, never looking back—nor to the heavens for guidance. I am also pro-life, obviously not for religious reasons …