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There are two misconceptions about fascism that must be laid to rest. The first is that fascism is the name of German and Italian regimes that are part of the dark history of Europe in the twentieth century. The second is that the appeal of fascism is due to the evil in human nature. I …

Freedom of Thought When I started reading Ronald A. Lindsay’s “Freedom of Thought” (FI, February/March 2009), I was prepared for another crash course in secular humanism. I settled down for a comfortable, academic (if not a bit redundant, maybe even a bit boring)read. By the time I finished, I was embarrassedby my ho-hum attitude. I …

H. J. Blackham—philosopher, writer, educationalist, lecturer, and doyen of the secular humanist movement—died peacefully on January 23, 2009, two months short of his 106th birthday. He is commonly known as the father of modern humanism. Although he left school at the end of the First World War to become a farm laborer, he never stopped …

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of award-winning books of philosophy, history, and poetry, including Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth. She recently discussed the role of art and poetry in her doubt, in addition to her skepticism of science, with D.J. Grothe, associate editor of Free Inquiry. Free Inquiry: A couple years before …

  From Hither . . . The school voucher movement may well be collapsing. Century Foundation official Greg Anrig, writing in the January 27 Christian Century, observed that: The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio, voucher programs have shown no advance over local public schools. The idea that the existence of voucher schools would lead to …

I have been asked this question by friends: “Since you do things that are seemingly religious, which in all likelihood no respectable atheist would do, what kind of atheist are you?” What is it that I did, and do, to incite such consternation and make people question my atheism? And, should I still do such …

Why does God have an initial capital letter? Aside from the fatuity of recognizing the supposed ultimate force in the universe by a linguistic convention, past the absurdity of feeding the vanity of the most mighty and least needy of vanity, why provide God with the same artifactual honor as Parcheesi, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the …

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, by Ibn Warraq (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008, ISBN 9778-1-59102-484-2) 556 pp. Cloth $29.95. Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism offers not only a devastating critique of Edward Said’s flawed scholarship and illogical arguments found in his highly influential Orientalism (Vintage …

Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, by Phil Zuckerman (New York: New York University, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8147-3) 227 pp. Cloth $35. In the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Free Inquiry, Gregory Paul (“The Big Religion Questions Finally Solved”) exhaustively compared the high degree of religiosity in the United …

Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008, ISBN 13: 978-0-374-16685-4) 438 pp. Cloth $27.95. Standing on Al Gore’s shoulders, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded sounds a loud, clear tocsin regarding our nation’s and our planet’s pressing energy, resource, biodiversity, environmental, and …

Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists, by Dan Barker (Berkeley, California: Ulysses Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-5675-667-5) 392 pp. Paper $14.95. If anyone in cont emporary nonbelief has a more spectacular life story than Dan Barker, I’d like to meet that person. A teen evangelist, minister, and Christian songwriter whose youth …

  Nature’s Mathematics Elements, the smell of minerals Rinsing the sky, Crickets beginning their green monotony, An abducted child pressing nails into skin— Familiar landscapes unravel the ardor Of change, sunflowers weighed down by heat, Hothouse orchids opening In their dreamy lack of speech. Here, autumn arrives with temporal design As others deliver a world …

Charles Darwin had a big idea, arguably the most powerful idea ever. A powerful idea assumes little to explain much. It does a lot of explanatory “heavy lifting” while expending little in the way of assumption or postulation. It gives you plenty of bang for your explanatory buck. Its Explanation Ratio—what it explains divided by …

In the beginning . . . there was straight-up creationism. Six twenty-four-hour days of special creation by God of everything as we see it today& mdash;galaxies, solar systems, the Earth, plants and animals on Earth, and of course, human beings, created in God’s image. Advocates of creationism lobbied to ban evolution from the classroom and …

  “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.” —Ecclesiastes 1:9—10, New International Version Resistance to the …

Two centuries ago, two men, one an American and one an Englishman, turned their world—and ours—upside down. They were Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Astonishingly, both men were born on the exact same day, February 12, 1809. While this might seem the kind of coincidence that fills astrologers with glee, further reflection points to many …

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing effort to portray Darwin as a racist and to claim that Nazi racial ideology was based on evolutionary theory. The roots of this effort can be traced back to a book written by Daniel Gasman in 1971 called The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, but it …

If ever you find yourself in a debate with an evolutionist, be aware that your opponent might attempt to seduce you with “facts” and “science.” He will point toward a variety of “evidence,” and state that the community of “real” scientists around the globe overwhelmingly believes that the theory of evolution is a fact. You …

What does it mean to live without God today? Surely that has to do with responsibility: taking it and ascribing it. Yet here we are wrestling with the Sphinx’s riddle for the twenty-first century: What kind of being is it that is profoundly free and yet whose decisions and actions are profoundly affected by forces …

The planetary community faces a breathtaking economic crisis. It comes as a rude shock to many, particularly Baby Boomers who have little knowledge of the Great Depression of the 1930s, which I lived through and remember very well. Although I was only four when the 1929 crash occurred, I vividly recall its aftermath in the …

I must have a weak spot for quixotic undertakings. That, or a taste for ramming my head against the wall. Why else would I champion strict church-state separation in a country whose new Democratic president wants to modify, not abolish, his predecessor’s initiative to channel public funds to faith-based charities? Why else spend the last …

Please look at the back cover of this magazine. There you will find a list setting forth “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles.” Secular humanism is not a religion, nor is the Council for Secular Humanism a church. We have no dogma and no heretics. There is no humanist pope or hierarchy, nor is …

Twelve-year-old Motl Brody was diagnosed with a highly malignant brain tumor in February of 2008. In June of last year, his parents brought the boy from their home in Brooklyn, New York, to the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. At Children’s, Motl underwent highly invasive, last-ditch brain surgery. It did not work. Motl …

When former Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole launched a last-minute ad falsely accusing her Democratic opponent, now-Senator Kay Hagan, of palling around with atheists, taking their godless money, and attending a secret fund-raiser hosted by the Godless Americans Political Action Committee (PAC), she was sharp­ly criticized in the press for smearing the churchgoing, Sunday school-teaching, God-fearing …

“The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers’ document,” said Woodrow Wil­son before becoming president of the United States. “It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spir it of the age.” During the First World War, the spirit on the home front was fear, and President Wilson …

When I first published my book God Is Not Great, I asked my publishers to issue a challenge to the faithful and to try substituting a debate tour for the usual book tour. One of the first to pick up this gauntlet was Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior …

A seasoned meteorologist once told me that predicting the weather is like depositing a drop of ink in a swimming pool and projecting the drop’s future movements, dispersions, and flow . . . while thousands of hyperactive kids play Marco Polo in the water. Weather forecasting is famously and necessarily inexact in a way that …

P. Z. Myers, associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, focusing on developmental biology and neurobiology, is one of the most influential opinion leaders in the online atheist community. He is the author of Pharyngula, the most heavily trafficked science blog online, with over a million unique hits per month. He talked …

Obama and the Presidency I agree with the principles for guiding government listed by Paul Kurtz and Tom Flynn in “Bravo, President-Elect Obama!” (FI, December 2008/January 2009). However, I disagree with the two points in the Postscript, especially the first regarding changing the primary structure from a state-by-state to a regional basis. One of the …

Elections Reflections November 4, 2008, was a pretty good day for church-state separation. It marked the end of the eight-year reign of error of the incompetent, secretive, corrupt, faith-based Bush-Cheney administration. But it may not tally the end of agnostic (sic!) Karl Rove’s signal achievement, harnessing the power of the Religious Right, the “theocons,” to …

In America, in books on religion, atheism, and secularism, Europe and especially Scandinavia are often cited to prove that prosperity, solidarity, and high ethical standards are alive and we ll in societies where faith is all but absent, at least compared to the intense role it plays in the United States. “Why can’t we be …

Nauvoo Polygamy: “. . . but we called it celestial marriage,” by George D. Smith (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2008, ISBN 1-56085-201-10) 728 pp. Cloth $39.95. Many men are womanizers, addicted to ladies young and old, and some have pursued them with consummate skill. To propose to women in “the name of God” …

Bondage and the Bible, written and directed by D. Eric Harmon. DVD distributed by Raitan Multi-Media at www.bondageandthebible.com. 2008. 55 minutes. $19.95 for individuals; $250.00 for institutions. D. Eric Harmon is an African-American freethinker from Los Angeles, California. In Bondage and the Bible, he poses the question: does the Bible justify slavery? Just a cursory …

On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams, edited by James Calvin Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, ISBN 13-978-0674-02622) 288 pp. Cloth $49.95. The clear and informed “Introduction: Roger Williams and the Birth of an American Ideal” is worth the price of On Religious Liberty. Drawing from …

Nothing more ordinary, nothing more strange: lives beginning, others ending— commuters in or out the subway’s sliding doors, workers changing shifts. And no punishing or rewarding God. Bright-and-Dark Matter: it does not care for us, it does not not care for us. We are the caring part; also sometimes non-caring. Beehive Cluster, Barnard’s Loop, Large …

What is the future of religion? Is it even meaningful to speak of “religion” as an entity with a single future, or can we speak only of individual religions that wax and wane? For generations, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers (along with most sociologists) expected religion-as-a-whole to decline in the wake of expanding education and prosperity. …

Advanced sociological research has determined that dysfunctional socioeconomic factors are responsible for the origin and historical popularity of religious faith and that sci ence, secure prosperity, and consumerism are radically undermining faith all across the first world. Contrary to naysayers, the so-called secularization hypothesis (which predicts that social and scientific advances will drive a gradual …

The “Great God Debate” that ushered in the twenty-first century of our so-called Common Era brought atheism to the top of U.S. best-seller lists. This in itself i s historic: nothing quite like it has happened since the 1890s, when Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, and Jack London—world-class nonbelievers all—held mass audiences spellbound with their radical …

With the February 2009 bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth approaching, much commentary will appear about his accomplishments and character. We may hear about ambition, political skill, humor, compassion, and wisdom. We’ll probably hear little, though, about his religious unbelief. Lincoln’s cousin, Denny Hanks, said that when Lincoln was an Indiana teenager, “The Bible puzzled him, …

December 10, 2008, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is much to celebrate but even more to fight for, as Islamic states have repeatedly resisted human-rights inspections and proposed Islam-specific rights schemes that place unacceptable limits on fundamental human freedoms. The Center for Inquiry has issued a position paper, …