ALL ARTICLES

The landing of Pathfinder and Rover on Mars and the images transmitted back to Earth are fascinating. They reveal that the planet Mars is similar to our own planet and that analogous processes of evolutionary change have occurred on its surface. They remind us anew of the tremendous powers of science and technology in extending …

High Court Crushes the Religious Freedom Restoration Act In 1990, in Employment Division v. Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government bodies no longer had to show a compelling reason for refusing to allow an exemption for religious practices that violate laws applicable to everyone else. Smith involved a member of an American Indian …

Solar What? In my article “Thinking Clearly About Clones,” (FI, Summer 1997) I wrote, “I find it a personally riveting thought that I could watch a small copy of myself, 50 years younger and wear-ing a baseball hat instead of a solar topee, nurtured through the early decades of the twenty-first century.” You changed “solar …

Classic voices of freethought Mark Twain’s ‘Letters From the Earth’ America’s best-kept secret about Mark Twain (1835–1910) is that he was an agnostic with a strong contempt for religion. His critiques of supernatural-ism and religious dogma are scathing, as this selection shows. In “Letters From the Earth,” he asks us to imagine that Satan visits …

Picking apart ‘Pascal’s wager’ Trying the God hypothesis in the court of reason Subway Slim and Fast Eddie were trying to work the old horse race scam outta ’Frisco back in ’46 when they first met him. Things weren’t going good. The suckers weren’t biting and Slim was getting mighty discouraged. “Gee, Eddie, with the …

New SecularHumanist Bulletin The Council for Secular Humanism is relaunching its Associate Member newsletter, Secular Humanist Bulletin. The new-style, upbeat newsletter will keep Associate Members abreast of the latest secular humanist news, plans, and activities. It will also provide a forum for members to share ideas and explore the joys and challenges of life as …

Is There a God? by Richard Swinburne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-19-8235445-5) 144 pp., $19.95 cloth.   Is There a God? is a shorter and simpler version of Richard Swinburne’s The Existence of God (Oxford University Press, 1979). As such, it provides a useful introduction to theistic thought for readers with no background …

Sexuality and Catholicism, by Thomas C. Fox (New York: George Braziller, 1995, ISBN 0-8076-1396-7) 381 pp., $27.50 cloth.   Once upon a time (less than sixty years ago), there were mainly two categories of writings about the Catholic church, one by Catholics and one by all others. Works by Catholics were usually classified by the …

XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography, by Wendy McElroy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995, ISBN 0-312-13626-9) 256 pp., $12.95 paper.   At the first humanist conference I ever international event attended—an held in Buffalo ten years ago—I found myself asking a new acquaintance, “How did you get involved in humanism?” At first, I didn’t …

Tales from the Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography, edited by Cherie Matrix (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996 ISBN 1-873176-09-0) 144 pp., $10.95 paper.   The famed American anarchist Emma Goldman once declared that, if she couldn’t dance, she wouldn’t be part of the revolution. Thus did Goldman reject the notion that working toward a just …

Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition, by Richard C. Vitz thum (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995, ISBN 1-57392-027-4) 246 pp., $29.95 cloth. Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, ed. by Paul K. Moser and J.D. Trout (New York: Routledge, 1995, ISBN 0-415-10864-0) 378 pp., $22.95 paper.   In his clear, concise, and critical presentation of philosophical materialism, …

Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, by Frederick Clarkson (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1997, ISBN 1-56751-088-4) 277 pp., $15.95 paper.   On the farthest fringes of the Religious Right, beyond Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family, lurk some organizations so extreme they should send chills down the spine of any secular …

The humanist stance on choice and pleasure One of my most memorable experiences as an editor of FREE INQUIRY was strolling along the canals of Amsterdam with senior editors Vern and Bonnie Bullough during the 1992 World Humanist Congress. The two of them walked hand-in-hand throughout the famed Red Light District, reminiscing about the various …

What’s porn got to do with human well-being and freedom? Pornography benefits women, both personally and politically.” This sentence opens my book XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography, and it constitutes a more extreme defense of pornography than most feminists are comfortable with. I arrived at this position after years of interviewing hundreds of sex …

Why decriminalizing prostitution is the right thing to do Prostitution is a crime—or is it a business? Its practitioners are victims—or are they entrepreneurs? They’re oppressed—or are they rulers of their own destiny? So it goes—and has gone for centuries—in the debate over the status of prostitutes and their maligned profession. The Debate Nowadays, the …

Standing on a basic principle As of 1997, the homosexual rights movement has existed for a hundred years. From the very beginning it had close connections to humanism. Why? What does a movement advocating respect for a sexual orientation have in common with a philosophical life-stance promoting reason, science, and human happiness? Historical Links History …

Behold the age-old antagonism toward all things sexual Christian endeavor,” H. L. Mencken wrote, “is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.” He was right, of course, and he should have included Jewish endeavor and Muslim endeavor in his observation. Western religions have spent millennia inflicting shame, guilt, repression, and punishment upon human sexuality—especially women’s sexuality. Asian …

It’s not what it used to be—it’s better Women have been the driving force behind the radical changes in American sexual behavior in the last half of the twentieth century. Women’s attitudes toward sexuality and sexual behavior have changed and forced a response from males. The key element in the change has been a woman’s …

The Humanist Stance on Choice and Pleasure One of my most memorable experiences as an editor of FREE INQUIRY was strolling along the canals of Amsterdam with senior editors Vern and Bonnie Bullough during the 1992 World Humanist Congress. The two of them walked hand-in-hand throughout the famed Red Light District, reminiscing about the various …

Islam is deeply anti-woman. Islam is the fundamental cause of the repression of Muslim women and remains the major obstacle to the evolution of their position.1 Islam has always considered women as creatures inferior in every way: physically, intellectually, and morally. This negative vision is divinely sanctioned in the Koran, corroborated by the hadiths, and …

One of the world’s oldest religions is also one of the world’s most adaptable—even to a secularist society The question of whether Islam can be secularized has been on the agenda of modern Arab and Muslim thought and history since Bonaparte’s occupation of Egypt in 1798. Arabs have been attempting to settle the issue since at …

Hunted, isolated from her family and friends, forced to leave the country of her birth, Taslima Nasrin has lived under these circumstances since 1994, when the government of Bangla desh ordered her arrest. Her crime was the publication of Lajja! (Shame!), a book in which she protested against Muslim attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh after …

The Center for Inquiry Institute launches a three-year academic program A program of intensive education in humanism, skepticism, and rationalism has been successfully launched by the Center for Inquiry Institute, a nonprofit educational institution co-sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism. In addition to increasing public awareness of the need for critical thinking across the spectrum …

Examining whether unjustified beliefs are really the best medicine Shannon Nixon was a 16-year-old Pennsylvanian with highly treatable diabetes. Shannon, however, had parents who believed that faith alone could cure her. Shannon died in June 1996, and her parents, Dennis and Lorie Nixon, were convicted on April 22, 1997, of involuntary manslaughter. In 1991, Shannon’s …

As long as there have been dictatorial military regimes in Nigeria, writer Wole Soyinka has spoken out against them. Championing democracy over the last 30 years earned him a two-decade prison sentence. The current regime, under General Sani Abacha, has given Soyinka a death sentence that has forced him to flee his homeland. He now …

If you’ve been a long-time subscriber to FREE INQUIRY, you already know that secular humanism offers more than just a rational critique of religious, transcendental, and paranormal myths. Secular humanism entails positive ethical values that humankind desperately needs; it promotes reason and science as ways of solving human problems. You already know that the unexamined …