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When I learned I’d be teaching online for seven weeks, my first thought was one that Facebook and YouTube might censor. My second was: What to read while at home? My first answer was Camus’s classic The Plague. Would that be how COVID-19 plays out? Would rats be to blame? Would some atheist doctors eventually …

Sweden’s largest secular organization—Humanisterna (“the Humanists”)—is facing new challenges. Membership growth has stalled (at around 5,000 members), partly because the public perceives it as only an “anti-religion” organization. Within Humanisterna, members wonder how to integrate secular-humanist values into the lives of many Swedish secularists, especially young Nones. More pressing is the question of how to …

Unbelievers—an Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0674241824). 272 pp. Hardcover, $27.95.   If, like me, you were educated in a parochial system of any stripe, you likely came away with the notion that the human race was from the get-go unremittingly …

The White House ceremony: THE CORONATION OF THE PRESIDENT. Televised, no audio. The cello— Discordant. MYSELF: It happened. It happened here. It happened in our own time. FEMALE: Shame. CHORUS: It happened. It happened here. It happened in our own time. FEMALE: Shame. The cello— Discordant. MYSELF: You let it happen. You let it happen …

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 …

New York, then the nation’s most populous state, generated reform movements in the nineteenth century that swept across the country like whirlwinds, changing the face of America. Among them was the women’s rights movement. We all know the names of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Carrie Chapman Catt. The first …

I have relied on the published proceedings of the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, 1852, available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011539064, and have chosen for consistency to use “woman’s rights” and “woman suffrage,” as the suffragists of this time did. Nineteenth-century quotes are transcribed with their original spelling and punctuation. All Bible quotes are …

In the August/September 2019 FI, Adam Neiblum discussed what he refers to as “human exceptionalism” (“Gould’s Second Stage: Progress, Evolution, and Human Exceptionalism”). Most of us have also been made well aware of so-called “American exceptionalism,” which falls one taxonomic level below Neiblum’s (as exceptionalisms go). Our “exceptionalist” biases seem to extend a level higher …

In this feature, we continue the Freethought Trail’s celebration of the centenary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established women’s right to vote. We present more of the new, site-specific pages devoted to annual suffrage conventions held in west-central New York state, the Trail’s coverage area. Nearly forty such …

“My motto for the rest of the year is leave no vacancy behind,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt in late March. The Kentucky Republican was talking about filling vacant federal judgeships, of course. McConnell reconvened the U.S. Senate in May—while Washington, D.C., was still under shelter-at-home orders …

In a 5–4 ruling on the morning of June 30, 2020, the Supreme Court did incalculable damage to the separation of church and state in the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The decision forces American taxpayers to pay for religious indoctrination, gutting the protections in both the United States Constitution and in No …

August 2020 includes an enormously important centenary, one that too few Americans will recognize. August 26 marks the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, establishing the right to vote for women nationwide. Celebration of this milestone will be muted in large part because of the coronavirus pandemic. …

The one certainty that has emerged in the wake of this global pandemic is the utter moral collapse of the Republican Party. I refer to a moral collapse because, all apart from the appalling and inexcusable fecklessness of its leader in dealing with the medical issues of the outbreak, the party as a whole has …

It is tempting to blame Donald J. Trump for being an amazingly bad president as he promotes the agenda of the religious Right and its defective policies (including elevating the rights of theoconservatives over other theists and secularists). But that hyper-materialist devotee of the amoral Christian Prosperity proponent Norman Vincent Peale literally does not know …

Every city skyline is graced by stately steeples, spires, bell towers, domes, minarets, and other outlines of cathedrals, temples, mosques, synagogues, and sacred edifices of many sorts. The array seems majestic—until you realize that it represents an extravaganza of lies. The holy architecture proclaims a supernatural realm of gods, devils, heavens, hells, miracles, prophecies, angels, …

At the close of each year, those close to Barbara Smoker looked forward to receiving what Freethinker magazine Editor Barry Duke affectionately referred to as Smoker’s “‘egotistical’ year-end newsletter.” In Smoker’s 2018 missive, her correspondents learned that in May the beloved UK atheist activist had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. In disclosing her diagnosis, …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Since April 24, 1978, I have been sober—free from alcohol and all other mind-altering chemicals. … My only chance for continued survival is the maintenance of my personal sobriety. A well-accepted approach to curing addicts is to utilize the substitute addiction of reliance upon a mystical power ‘greater’ than …

Overall Instead of and contrary to some of the Principles of Humanism on the inside back cover of each issue of FI, hypocrisy and hate flow from the pages of the latest (April/May 2020) and the previous (February/March 2020) issues of FI like blood from a cut major artery. (As an aside: Before discarding, I …

The English muffin residing in my cupboard is no ordinary baked good. It accurately predicts the outcomes of major sporting events. I know, because I have jotted down its predictions and compared them against final scores for years. It has never missed. Its remarkable ability came to my attention one summer morning in 2004. I …

     After World War II, the French novelist Albert Camus published The Plague, a fictional account of a plague that hits a north African town. While Camus’s narrative is in part an allegory of the plague of world war and Nazism, it is fundamentally about the different psychological and ethical reactions to the suffering, …

When you think of famous past American atheists, who comes to mind? Robert Green Ingersoll? Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Mark Twain? Clarence Darrow? Carl Sagan? Madalyn Murray O’Hair? No matter who’s on your list, it’s a safe bet that most are white males. As Melanie Brewster notes in Atheists in America, “studies find almost unanimously that …

When it comes to classical music, it’s hard to swing a dead Bach progeny without running into a sacred motet, a Magnificat, a Mass, or a Requiem. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Reformation, the greatest composers were firmly harnessed to the task of employing the massive machinery of compositional technique to extol the …

I am a scientist. Perhaps because I am a scientist, I have always felt that changing a belief I hold is a cause for celebration. New information that causes a belief to become untenable is a reason for joy. I am now eighty years old. This means that of all the scientific, engineering, and medical …

To describe my favorite off-leash dog park as “picturesque” would be to understate. Nestled against a backdrop of majestic, often snowcapped mountain peaks, its many trails wind through sagebrush and thickets. A swift creek feeds two natural ponds where, on warmer days, dogs love to romp. This particular December afternoon was not what you would …

I am a devout atheist. I used to be a theist—perhaps not a devout theist but a theist nonetheless. I became a theist at a very young age as a result of people whom I trusted telling me that God exists and convincing me that the existence of God was necessary to explain the world …

The Lost Song of Goliath, by Ronald A. Lindsay (Washington, D.C.: Nineteenth Street Publishers, 2019, ISBN 978-1-7337338-0-9). 289 pp. Softcover, $11.99.   Ronald A. Lindsay, former president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, whose nonfiction includes Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas (Prometheus Books, 2008) and The Necessity of Secularism (Pitchstone, 2014), here …

God Is a Question, Not an Answer: Finding Common Ground in Our Uncertainty, by William Irwin (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, ISBN: 978-1538115886). 160 pp. Hardcover, $24.95. William Irwin has written a very clear and articulate argument in support of the special value of doubt. Modest and yet far-ranging, the book delves into both …

Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind: Atheism and Freethought in Islam, by Ibn Warraq (Berlin, Germany: Verlag Schiler, 2020, ISBN 9783899302561). 752 pp. Hardcover, €68.00.   Who has an illusion about Allah? Most obviously, Muslims hold an illusion about Allah, a delusion about the Arab god. They deem him real, but he isn’t. In a sense …

I say hello You smile and wave You come sit with me and we chat You tell me about the new things in your room The crafts that you’ve made The new people you’ve met And the whole time you’re talking I look around at the people with similar smiles And realize, like them, you …

Leaden days, stratus clouds gauze the sky. A sphere of hot plasma thaws the sky. Belief is a phase, I said and shrugged. Sans intervention, what could cause the sky? Constellatory creatures lure the gaze. When ursa shows up, canus paws the sky. July and October fall in love, wed. When crab appears, scorpion claws …

Longtime readers will recognize the name of independent scholar Ibn Warraq, author of the breakthrough work Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995) and nearly a dozen more technical scholarly books focused principally on the history and doctrines of Islam. He was also a Free Inquiry columnist from 2005 until 2011. He recently published a …

Full disclosure: One of these articles was accepted and the other commissioned before the coronavirus crisis. Nonetheless, the question these essays raise is vital: As we survey the existential challenges humanity confronts—however immediately pressing the pandemic may be, grave medium- and long-term threats still face us—are we focusing our ameliatory energy in the most effective …

As someone who has been exploring the world’s most isolated wilderness regions for nearly half a century, I have some insight into the state of the planet and the human race’s current environmental befuddlement. I’ve watched the condition of the earth plummet before my eyes within my own lifespan, to the extent that I no …

The coronavirus is the salient fact of life today, and I will address it in a minute. First, I want to talk about the internet and our inability as humans to simultaneously navigate it and display reason. For the mindset that permitted the establishment of such a fragile society as ours is the same mindset …

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899) has stumped historians. Biographer David Anderson states that Ingersoll was a “conservative and patriot … [not] versed in the social and economic controversies of the day.” He acknowledges that Ingersoll “taught men to question … the rationale behind the rise of nineteenth-century capitalism.” And he briefly mentions Ingersoll’s comparison of industrialists …

The iconoclastic Christopher Hitchens can be seen anytime on YouTube wryly advocating the teaching of religion in public schools: “I know of no other way to ensure a constant supply of atheists!” I laughed too, but he seemed unaware of how easily he could overshoot the mark on this one. Years ago, as a journalism …

After a lifetime spent reading great works of literature, I could not help finally facing the question of why religious topics were so frequently made the butt of jokes. Whether it was the works of Aristophanes or Homer, Ovid or Lucian, Boccaccio or Chaucer, Voltaire or Mark Twain, again and again I encountered great writers’ …

I defend atheism in my new book, Is A Good God Logically Possible? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). But I have not always been an atheist. In fact, I was in a religious order for twelve years, leaving only just before I would have had to take final vows at age twenty-six. And I only …

The conclusion of “He Is Risen” contained an assertion that I’ve often read and heard. However, it still never fails to offend me. The author facetiously mocks the Christian faith by asking, “Who in their right mind would worship a man who was put to death in such a humiliating way, and then who would …

According to an enduring legend, in 1686 while conquering Turks were praying in the Budapest mosque they had converted from a Catholic church, suddenly—in a great explosion—a figure of the Holy Virgin Mary appeared! The credulous soldiers were fear-stricken and fled, and the Christians began to reclaim their church and city, beginning a joyous procession …