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In the spring of 2007, I attended a banquet at the University of Toronto honoring student and community leaders. A few days previously, I had been physically assaulted on campus while putting up posters for a speech by physicist Victor Stenger, making me something of a local atheist celebrity. So it was no surprise when, …

Some of us have enjoyed the luxury of an atheist upbringing. Unlike our brethren who “converted” to a nontheistic worldview as adolescents or adults, we never have to suffer the post-traumatic stress that comes from a religious childhood. There are no ghosts of dictatorial priests or despotic pastors that still make us squeamish about our …

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, selected and introduced by Christopher Hitchens (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6) xxvi + 499 pp. Paper $17.50. Voltaire, who does not appear in The Portable Atheist, remarked that revolutions are made of pocketbooks. This reasonably hefty volume will fit into few pockets and will …

Science And Nonbelief, by Taner Edis, with a new preface by the author (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59102-561-0) 304 pp. Paper $18.95. In this generally excellent book, Science and Nonbelief, physics professor Taner Edis offers a comprehensive review of modern science and gives cogent reasons why so many people still embrace views that …

The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-375-42374-1) 356 pp. Cloth $26.00. In this crucial election year with so much at stake, Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Reason should be on everyone’s must-read list. Jacoby, author of the important 2004 book Freethinkers and program director …

Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, by John Allen Paulos (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8090-5919-5) 158 pp. Cloth $20.00. I have certainly never learned how to fruitfully discuss religion with people who have beatific grins on their faces, strangely gleaming eyes, and an air of …

Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller (New York: Viking, 2008, ISBN 9870670018833) 244 pp. Cloth $29.95. The debate between evolution and intelligent design (ID) is again joined in Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul by Kenneth R. Miller. The author is, admittedly, a …

So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State, by Forrest Church (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007, ISBN 978-0-15-1011 85-8) 530 pp. Cloth $28.00. So Help Me God, by Larry D. Thompson (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2008, ISBN13:978-0-7653-5733-3) 465 pp. Paper $7.99. Two books with the same title? Yes, …

His mother, his father His sister, and I Took him to the garrison His head was shaved His face was pale His heart was fast Men with epaulets Took all the boys away And said if we waited a bit We would see them again In their uniforms I waited, standing by the door Then …

Want to start an argument among seculars? Launch a discussion, any discussion, about Islam. Is it a religion of peace or inherently violent? Should we respect the folkways of Muslim peoples or apply Western notions of universal human rights that would mandate treatment of females quite unlike that prescribed under sharia law? Must secular liberals …

In recent years, the bizarre term Islamofascism has begun making the rounds, usually emanating from the strange world of right-wing politics and neocon pundits and their acolytes. After a test run on the fringe, the term broke into the big leagues of political discourse in the fall of 2006, when President George W. Bush and …

It is curious how certain writers suddenly become semantically persnickety when the term fascism is applied to Islam. I doubt if the same writers would voice similar concerns for the followers of Rush Limbaugh if someone labeled him “fascist.” The fact is, the term fascist is now legitimately applicable to a range of movements on …

In 2007, United States Army Specialist Jeremy Hall decided to hold a meeting of atheists and agnostics at his base camp in Tikrit, Iraq. Hall, a military police soldier in Iraq at the time, was about to have his li fe changed in ways he could never have imagined. Three other people showed up for …

The Clockwork Universe In 1687, Isaac Newton published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, now referred to simply as Principia, which many scholars say is the greatest work of science ever produced. Newtonian mechanics provided the means for predicting the motion of every body in the universe with what appears to be unlimited precision. All …

The Failure of Swinburne’s Simplicity Recipe for Verisimilitudinous Theories In his books Simplicity as Evidence of Truth (1997) and Epistemic Justification (2001), Richard Swinburne argued strenuously that simplicity provides probabilistic evidence of truth by being a tie-breaker among conflicting theories as follows: greater simplicity is a criterion for “choosing among [competing] scientific theories of equal …

The West is often described as a secular society. But what does this mean? Does it mean that the Christian church is in its final, terminal decline? Have we reached the endgame of Christianity? Have myth and superstition been replace d by scientific method and secular reason? Or is the picture more complex than this? …

  The first speeches on secular humanism ever delivered in Romania were given in Bucharest on May 5 and 7, 2008, by Paul Kurtz and Norm Allen from the Center for Inquiry/Transnational and Stephen Law from CFI/London. The lectures’ importance is high: Romania is today a great battlefield, and at stake is the struggle to …

For those on the left of India’s political spectrum, “secularism” is a rhetorical icon, righteously wielded much as “social justice” or “workers’ rights” is elsewhere. But for those on the political Right, including a great many among India’s majority Hindu community, it is nothing more than a euphemism for reverse discrimination. To these Indians, secularism …

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that monumental and hopeful document that extends equal dignity to every member of the human family and relies on the rule of right as the only final recourse against violence and war. Since its inception, the United Nations has kept at its …

The secular humanist is often challenged thusly: “If you do not base your ethics on religious foundations, then in what sense can you be good?” The ethics of secularism has a long history in human culture. In the fol lowing, I wish to present four contemporary aspects of the ethics of secular humanism: liberation, enlightened …

“Big Bang of Words Follows Vatican’s OK to Believe in E.T.,” screamed the Chicago Tribune headline (May 18, 2008). “Just like there is an abundance of creatures on earth, there could also be other beings, even intelligent ones, that were created by God,” said Jesuit priest and astronomer Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican …

If Christians widen their world picture to include intelligent aliens, the next questions are unavoidable: Do the ETs have souls? Do they need salvation? Science-fiction writer James Blish (1921–1975) pondered those questions in A Case of Conscience, which won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel of 1959. In it, a Jesuit missionary to a …

  Opponents of gay rights often warn that legalizing same-sex marriage would inexorably lead to legalizing polygamy. Maybe it would, and maybe it should. Denying gay couples the right to marry violates state constitutional guarantees of equality, as the California and Massachusetts high courts have rightly ruled. (The Supreme Court of California also held that …

The sixtieth anniversary of the statehood of Israel is a useful occasion to review the relationship between Jewishness and secularism. It’s a noticeable fact that in the atheist and agnostic ranks of many countries, Jews are very much in the fore. It is so noticeable, indeed, that I was recently asked by the Spertus Institute …

During his recent visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a series of speeches that reverberated with a strange tone of unreality. He presented his church as a champion of religious freedom and tolerance as if his American audience, and the whole world, were in the grip of the most dreadful case of …

The news that a team of researchers in New York (led by Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center) had genetically altered a human embryo stirred up quite an ethical controversy. Commentators have warned that this experiment is the first step toward designer babies …

Journalist Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans and has reported from more than fifty countries. He is senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City, a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at …

Religion in the Public Square A dire consequence of humanists’failure to “speak up” in public life (“The Secular Conscience” by Austin Dacey, FI, June/July 2008) isthat our opponents have been allowed to portray us as self-serving intellectual libertines compulsively bent on “nay-saying” and “attacking” traditional public values to the point of reducing society to nihilism.The …

  Sanctified Genocide? In 2006, California politicians voted to place a statue of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. As each state is allowed only two statues, it was decided to remove the statue of Thomas Starr King (1824–1864) to make room. King, a heroic San Francisco Unitarian minister/orator, led the struggle …

Notwithstanding the online music video “Iraq: The Musical,” we may be a very long way from “Iraq On Ice.” A very long way, considering that even theatrical endeavors like movies with the theme “Iraq: You Were Right When You Said It Was a Bad Idea” do not seem to be working. An “I told you …

Two years before I was eligible to retire in 1980, I awoke one morning and said to my wife Maryllyn, “Why should I retire when I’m already tired enough? I’m all fired up do a lot more of the things I’ve been doing. Why not re-fire?” Then and there the concept of “refirement” was born. …

I am a musicologist who specializes in sacred music. I am also an atheist. For years, I treated these two aspects of my life separately: I could appreciate sacred music as a musicologist and dispute the existence of God as an atheist. There seemed no need to mix the two. But I have come to …

It is, I think, time we dealt with miracles. Once we posit an all-powerful Being, then miracles follow naturally; they’re only to be expected. Indeed, their absence would trouble us. It would be unnatural, and therefore something of a miracle, if miracles did not occur, one after the other or perhaps several strung together in …

A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0674026766) 896 pp. Cloth $39.95. It is Easter Sunday, I am sitting a café in New York City, an d the air is full of the sound of people not heralding the risen Christ. Around me, a room full of patrons joins …

The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, by Austin Dacey (Amherst, N.Y. Prometheus Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59102-604-4) 240 pp. Cloth $24.95. Books by past and present Center for Inquiry staff members threaten to form a literary subgenre. Chris Mooney’s 2005 The Republican War on Science and Susan Jacoby’s recent bestseller The Age of …

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, directed by Nathan Frankowski, starring Ben Stein, Distributed by Premise Media Corporation. 2008. 105 minutes. It was precisely one o’clock on Sunday, April 27, when I slid into my seat in the darkened AMC Rio Cinema multiplex in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to watch what is unquestionably one of the worst films to …

You had a vision of a serpent swallowing its own tail. You, a German working in Belgium in imperialist Europe of the nineteenth century, y ou had a vision of a serpent swallowing its own tail, and all you got from it was a lousy benzene ring.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was one of the greatest futurists and science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. He authored some one hundred books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey. He cowrote the screenplay for the film of the same name with Stanley Kubrick, who directed and produced the movie. Sir Arthur was a longtime secular humanist. …

This is the text of a video address recorded by Sir Arthur C. Clarke on December 5, 2007, and posted online on the occasion of his ninietieth birthday. It was one of his last public statements prior to his death on March 19, 2008. Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, speaking to you from my home …

A bone was hurled high into the air by a prehistoric hand. When it came down, it was a spaceship. All of human history was encapsulated between these two shots of that now-famous montage in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even more amazing: all of human history was also being discounted as nothing …