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Writing for a bimonthly magazine can be frustrating. As I wrote my first draft, the U.S. presidential campaign was still raging; conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court; and COVID-19 infection rates fluctuated while schools, colleges, and universities opened to varying degrees and as northerners began spending more time indoors. By …

While American secularists’ attention has been fixed on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions undermining church-state separation, there have been major developments on the international scene that warrant our concern and attention. In Turkey, the demagogic Islamist President Tayyip Erdoğan has continued his campaign to undermine the secular state established by Kemal Atatürk. On the regional …

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his notebook (titled Meditations by Victorian translators, but he never called it that): Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear … Things themselves touch not the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they admission to the soul, nor can …

Political realism beseeches us to accept the world as it is. It acknowledges the difficulties that human beings encounter in a world without established laws, a global policeman, or a preordained history. Nevertheless, realism eschews the project of defeating all evil, overthrowing all dictators, and transforming the world. Such conservative instincts are at odds with …

More often than not, cultural products such as novels, movies, paintings, photographs, and songs are open to multiple interpretations. At the same time, it’s not a case of anything goes. Intelligent, well-informed interpretation takes place against an understanding of artistic traditions and cultural contexts. Skilled interpreters of contemporary literature, for example, might disagree among themselves …

Passover is horrible. How could anyone celebrate because the Jewish tribal god massacred Egyptian children in a huge infanticide while sparing Hebrew tots? That’s sickening. But there’s little need to fret about it, because the Old Testament account of Exodus is mere fiction. Archeologists find no evidence that Jews ever suffered slavery in Egypt or …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “When I visited Europe this past summer I found our Western European friends and allies—humanist and nonhumanist alike—aghast at the growth of fundamentalist religion in the United States. … “[S]ecularist and humanist influences in many ways are far more advanced in the countries of Western Europe, and the influence …

The Christian Right and the Courts Re: “The Christian Right’s Destructive Courthouse Moment Has Arrived,” by Robyn E. Blumner (FI, August/September 2020). As Robyn Blumner wrote, Republicans’ packing of federal courts is undoubtedly bad news for secularists. But instead of clenching our teeth and “keeping the faith,” secularists must remember that a progressive Congress and …

As this issue goes to press, Christians throughout the world will be gearing up to retell one another the story of the first Christmas. I see no reason for Free Inquiry to be any different, so here goes. No, not that first Christmas. I’m well aware that, centuries before the Common Era, Saturnalia laid the …

Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly east to west across the Atlantic, was undoubtedly an atheist. Raised in colonial Kenya by her British expatriate father, Markham was a “wild child” who spent much of her youth hunting—half naked—with local African tribesmen. There is no evidence she ever received religious instruction or attended church. In …

I was flossing my teeth the other night when I had this thought: “I have four canines!” That’s how it fell out of my brain, exclamation mark and all (just not in quotes). And I thought, “Four canines … an animal … a dog … a monkey … that’s what I am.” Of course, I …

Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning, by Timothy Williamson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0198822516). 176 pp. Hardcover, $18.95. Philosophy and philosophers have always had their detractors. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined philosophy as “a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.” When Bertrand Russell decided to study …

At first she was alone with wings for hoppingAnd friendsEach had a branch in the tree Then she was starving, she and the othersCrowding the treeAnd grew wings for flying Swarming up with wings bigger than bodyFriend is enemyAll are hungry From above imagining silk in seeds of milletIf soil is dirtThe meal is sweet …

Sometimes I leave conversations, saymy mother is calling—although I have no mother—muscle memory of a lie that I have never quite been able to leave behind. It’sthe tap of a doctor’s hammer on my knee. Excuse meone moment, my mother’s calling. The phone not even ringing, just held limp in my hand.The way her hand …

an empty cicada shell12 feet aboveclinging to the tree bark like a velcro hook despite the windy rainfallthere is no movementa carefully chosen timeshare for the month in the spring, a girl climbscurious fingersfind another exoskeleton to keep among coins and beadsher forgotten collectionin a box.

In Free Inquiry’s February/March 2020 issue, I challenged readers to recount their “pivot-point” experiences—the exact moment when the scales fell from each reader’s eyes and he or she realized that his or her childhood religion was bankrupt. In asking that, I recognized that the average FI reader born prior to 1985 (trust me, most were …

Lightning Didn’t Strike J. P. Chasse   My pivot point came early! I was about twelve or thirteen, an altar boy, and quite rebellious. One morning in the early 1960s, I was serving at the convent across the street with our head priest. That morning, he got quite caught up in his sermon to the …

Is This All There Is? Kathleen Corcoran   I should have written this down years ago. Thanks for being the impetus! I was a Catholic school-child—a six-year-old first grader, I think—when I first thought, a bit like Peggy Lee, Is this all there is? I’m not sure what prompted that thought. I have a memory …

Cover Image Courtesy of United States Library of Congress   I am haunted these days by the sound, tone, and words of a song. They’re from a fifty-three-year-old protest ballad written and performed by the rock band Buffalo Springfield. Reaching hit status in the spring of 1967, the song became an anthem for the many …

Introduction: Police Brutality in America Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg Those who care about human rights have the duty to prevent crimes against humanity and the possibility of a genocide stemming from hate and racism. An overwhelming amount of data now shows that Black people in America are three times more likely to …

Sages and knaves, titans and clowns, all now find themselves rummaging for meaning amid the wreckage wrought by the coronavirus. That longing for meaning, an ancient, insistent impulse to discern order in chaos—or invent one where none seems apparent—is apt to be set afrenzy by a plague. Of all misfortunes, few rival a plague’s charnel …

Maybe this whole COVID-19 event will act as a sharp prod that fully awakens humanity to two fundamental realities: a) Despite what we like to think, we do not in fact exert strong control over our lives; and b) Despite all the suffering that each of us goes through in his or her life, there …

In the following examples gathered from anthropologists’ and travelers’ accounts of their sojourns among the Indians of the Amazon, one cannot really speak of “atheism” among the various tribes encountered—that is to say, there was no conscious denial of a deity. It is a more a question of their total lack of any concept of …

Cover Image Courtesy of NASA   On September 12, 1960—almost exactly sixty years before this issue’s publication—John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered the speech that opened his path to the White House. At that time, no Roman Catholic had been elected president. Four-time New York Governor Al Smith had won the Democratic nomination in 1928; though he …

We’ve always had this problem with freedom—this problem of what do we think we mean by it? Especially, what do we think we mean by it when we are slaveholders? It jumps right out at you, after all. It can’t help it. Right there at the beginning, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: …

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, first published in 1859, is a preeminent, almost unrivaled contribution to liberal thought. It is a splendid defense of our freedom to live in unconventional, perhaps eccentric, ways—provided we don’t thereby harm others or place them at risk. Most famously, Mill defended what he called our “liberty of thought and …

[Extract from A History of the United States (2401)] As we, at the dawn of the twenty-fifth century CE, look back upon the recent history of this great country, we are struck by the spectacular fall of what used to be called the “white race” in the early twenty-first century. It has long been known …

Representations and reputations of historical personages have been controversial across human civilizations. Political iconoclasm began when Egyptian pharaohs obliterated images of their predecessors. Mayan rulers in Central America adopted similar tactics. Religiously based iconoclasm across the Abrahamic faiths originated in the biblical prohibitions of graven images (Exodus 20:4) and idolatry. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Parliamentary …

Remember how not so long ago—in the first decade of the 2000s—there were big court and PR battles over creationism versus evolutionary science? Some Darwin-deniers boasted that their “wedge strategy” would make intelligent design theory intellectually respectable in academe, even as they lost one court case after another. Concurrently, Ken Ham began building his Bible-Literalist …

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to foreign policy: realism and liberalism. The realist view is generally associated with Thucydides (d. 400 BC), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Despite considerable variation, the realists believe that the domain of international relations is a lawless, violent, and unpredictable contest for power. The liberal view rejects …

I’ve been trying to write this article for two years. Clearly I’ve been resistant, perhaps because this is not a feel-good piece. I’m not even sure folks in the mainstream are familiar with the phrase “Respectability Politics.” So, let me catch you up. While Wikipedia has a robust explanation, I’ll share the much more concise …

Before leaving theism, I spent a good number of years in the church. I wasn’t simply a member of the gathered “faithful,” whose obligation to Christianity is defined by church attendance and the monetary offering placed in the collection plate. No, I was a minister, an office I entered fairly young. Much of my responsibility …

The Establishment Clause. Born: December 15, 1791, Richmond, Virginia. Died after a long period of neglect: June 30, 2020, Washington, D.C. The Establishment Clause is survived by its younger twin, the Free Exercise Clause. Birth and Childhood “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …” On a winter’s day in 1791, the …

Poet, author, editor, and Charles Darwin expert Philip Appleman passed away on April 11, 2020, at the age of ninety-four. Born in Indiana on February 8, 1926, Appleman served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and the Merchant Marine after the war. He received degrees from Northwestern University, the University of …

James Christopher, founder of Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), died July 9, 2020. He had been hospitalized after a stroke in late June. He was seventy-seven. Christopher’s article “Sobriety without Superstition” appeared in the Summer 1985 issue of Free Inquiry. In that article, Christopher told his story of addiction and sobriety. He also lamented that …

Marvin Kohl, PhD, died on July 8, 2020, in an assisted living facility in Massachusetts after surviving COVID-19 in April. Kohl, for more than thirty years a philosopher in the SUNY system, was the author of The Morality of Killing and the editor of Beneficient Euthanasia and Infanticide and the Value of Life. He was …

On August 10, 2020, Ed Brayton wrote a post on his Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog titled “Saying Goodbye for the Last Time.” The post was to inform his readers that he had decided, as he put it, “to end my battle to the death with death.” Brayton had long battled with his health …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Did Jesus offer a pattern of statecraft for future readers? On the basis of the evidence in the Gospels the answer must be negative. In spite of all the efforts by Christian interpreters to provide a clue to the meaning of the ‘Render to Caesar’ utterance, it remains an …

Personhood Re: “The Real Reason for the Anti-abortion Movement,” by Gregory S. Paul, and “The Human Soul and Life after Death,” by Jeremiah Bartlett, FI, June/July 2020. With belief, and in particular dogmatic belief, there does not have to be a basis in fact for the belief. Personhood at conception is one of these beliefs …

Christians, next time you invent a god, mind the omnis. An omnibenevolent, omnipotent god is just begging for some smarty-pants such as Epicurus to come along and point out that you’ve stepped in a big pile of the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil, as summarized by the above-referenced smarty-pants, is this: Is God …