ALL ARTICLES

Hale-Bopp and Heaven’s Gate In early 1996, the astronomer Alan Hale submitted an article to FREE INQUIRY dealing with the comet he had recently co-discovered with Thomas Bopp. Although there was no way to be sure at that time if the comet would be as spectacular as it proved to be, Hale felt that there …

Taking Stock It is good to know that Paul Kurtz (“Surviving Bypass and Enjoying the Exuberant Life,” FI, Spring 1997) will be continuing the work of trying to wake up people to the values of humanism. During my recovery period I, too, did a lot of thinking about life, and I concluded that as a …

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), America’s leading agnostic, was a far more thoughtful, moral, and humane freethinker than most of his religious critics ever realized. He did indeed attack the fallacies of religion and supernaturalism at every turn—but also promoted reason, science, freedom, and humanism. In the following excerpt from his famous essay “The Gods,” he …

Today was the day! Billy Eaton was so excited! He had pre-pared all week. He had made long lists of things that he would do. He had asked questions of everyone on the ward to help him decide what to put on the lists without letting on what they were for. Yesterday he had asked …

Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest is a high point of the local cultural calendar. The traditional German festival is a secular celebration of art, culture, and cuisine. Tens of thousands of people enjoy its plays, art shows, concerts, and food and beer tastings. This year, Cincinnati’s festival-goers will also be able to enjoy “A Celebration of Freethought”—a national …

The world was stunned by the news in late February 1997 that a British embryologist named Ian Wilmut and his research team had successfully cloned a lamb named Dolly from an adult sheep. Dolly was created by replacing the DNA of one sheep’s egg with the DNA of another sheep’s udder. While plants and lower …

We, the undersigned, welcome announcements of major advances in the cloning of higher animals. Throughout this century, the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences have placed important new capabilities within human reach. On balance, these advances have contributed to enormous improvements in human welfare. Where novel technologies have raised legitimate ethical questions, the human community has …

Cloning already happens by accident; not particularly often, but often enough that we all know examples. Identical twins are true clones of each other, with the same genes. So the new discovery just announced from Edinburgh can’t be all that radical in its moral and ethical implications. Heaven’s foundations don’t quiver every time a pair …

The furor following the announcement of recent experiments in cloning, including the cloning of the sheep Dolly, has prompted representatives of various religious groups to inform us of God’s views on cloning. Thus, the Reverend Albert Moraczewski of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has announced that cloning is “intrinsically morally wrong” as it is …

My typical reaction to noteworthy scientific advances is amazement and joy: amazement at the complexity of scientific knowledge and its rate of expansion, joy at living in a time when there is so much promise offered by science for having a major impact on human destiny. As a humanist, I see the ability of my …

Whatever your opinion of the politics of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or Ralph Reed, generally they have done their political activism in plain view of the citizenry whose personal lives their policies if enacted, would alter dramatically. Not so with James Dobson. This year is the twentieth anniversary of the found-ing of his giant political …

Prayer has become a new cottage industry. Within the last five years the New York Times has listed as best- sellers at least a half-dozen books extolling the value of prayer in some form.1 Cover stories have appeared in pop-ular magazines like Newsweek, and television programs such as “Dateline NBC” have devoted entire shows to …

Although Plato demonstrated the logical independence of God and morality over 2,000 years ago in the Authyphro, the belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim. In particular, it serves as the basic assumption of the Christian fundamentalist’s social theory. Fundamentalists claim that all of society’s ills—everything from AIDS to out-of-wedlock pregnan-cies—are …

Albert Ellis is a long-time Contributing Editor of FREE INQUIRY and is one of this century’s leading figures in psychology. He is the originator of rational emotive behavior therapy, which seeks the personal development of the individual in harmony with society without recourse to supernatural aids. Ellis is President of the Albert Ellis Institute for …

The definition of a secular humanist as one whose foundations for living are reason and science can conjure visions of cold, emotionless intellectuals incapable of responding to art, much less creating it. But humanists are human, after all, and can lay as much claim to the creative sphere as their birthright as anyone else. Art, …

In that vast, peculiar terrain known as postmodernist thought, there are several deep holes. One of them has swallowed up some academics, a lot of New Agers, and—apparently—a whole generation of college students. Philosophers call it “relativism.” In its most radical form it’s the doctrine that truth depends—not on the way things are—but solely on …

By definition, secular humanists are more focused on life on Earth than religionists. They would do well to mark the milestones of that life by coming together to celebrate—or mourn—the milestones of life and thereby enrich and strengthen their community. FILLING A NEED Not long ago, a militant atheist declared to me, “A true atheist, …

The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century, by Alan M. Dershowitz (Boston, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997) 395 pp., $24.95 cloth. The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity, by Paul Wexler (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1993) 306 pp., $19.95 paper. In Defense …

Reincarnation: A Critical Examination by Paul Edwards (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996) 313 pp. $28.95. Religious insanity is very common in the United States. —Alexis de Tocqueville, as quoted by Paul Edwards Because reincarnation is a fundamental doctrine of Hindu religions and most forms of Buddhism, there are probably more people around the world who …

Blood on the Altar: Confessions of a Jehovah’s Witness Minister, by David A. Reed (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996) 285 pp., $24.95 cloth. Blood on the Altar focuses on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal to allow blood transfusions, even in the face of death. Much of the rest of the book deals with the 117-year history …

New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996 by Philip Appleman (Fayetteville, Ark: University of Arkansas Press, 1996) 264 pp., $38.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.T The University of Arkansas Press I has done the humanist community a great service by publishing Philip Appleman’s New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996. Appleman is an avowedly nontheistic poet who does not hesitate to …

Is Humanism a Religion? It seems obvious to me that humanism is not a religion. The trickier problem is whether humanism has any sort of faith dimension (“Defining Humanism,” FI, Fall 1996). Obviously, the answer depends on what one means by faith. In a study of New Zealand rationalists and humanists for a Ph.D. thesis, …

This past December 17, a customer entering the Seminole Finance Corporation building in Clearwater, Florida, mentioned to employees that she had just seen something extraordinary on the south wall’s exterior reflective-glass windows. Shortly thereafter, she telephoned a local television station with her report, and, by that night and for days to come, all the Tampa …

More and more frequently, we are seeing news reports of “weeping,” “bleeding,” and otherwise animated icons and effigies. Invariably, these are either in Orthodox churches or in Catholic Churches or shrines (often in private homes)—places where there is a special emphasis on religious images. It was a per-ceived overemphasis on icon veneration, felt to represent …

Sincere seekers of reliable knowledge lost a friend when Carl Sagan died too young at sixty-two. Like all good scientists, the brilliant Cornell astronomer spent his life pursuing secrets of nature, looking for facts that can be documented, tested, and retested. Like some maturing thinkers, he decided late in life to escalate his criticism of …

Open-Heart Surgery I recently underwent open-heart surgery. Although I am now rapidly recovering, this near-brush with death has enabled me to reflect on my condition; indeed, on the meaning of life. My recent heart problem was precipitated by a visit to Mexico City in mid-November. We at FREE INQUIRY magazine worked hard with our Mexican colleagues …

All too often a person seeking information is told not to ask questions, especially embarrassing ones. The power elites protect their stake in the game by suppressing inquiry that might challenge the status quo. This is especially ironic in a free society or in a religious organization that lauds freedom of choice only when adherents …

There has been a strong tendency among historians, including the present writer, to see the debate between religion and irreligion as one of conflict or “warfare,” especially as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet there is a more humane way of seeing it—at least from the side of the unbeliever—namely as therapy. …

Inquiry was one of the core concepts of John Dewey’s philosophy. A search of the new CD-ROM edition of Dewey’s Collected Works reveals that he used the term well over 2,000 times during his sev-enty-year writing career, which ended with his death in 1952. In books that he addressed primarily to teachers, such as How …

In 1966, I enrolled as a ministerial student at LIFE Bible College in Los Angeles. LIFE is an acronym for Light-house of International Foursquare Evangelism, an outreach of the Pentecostal church started by the late Aimee Semple McPherson. A handful of FREE INQUIRY readers are old enough to remember her. Aimee died in 1944, the …

Recall your childhood. Imagine trying to check out a book from your local library on the big bang or evolution. Suppose that you were told that a parent would have to check it out for you because it was from the adult section. (Say it was The Eyewitness Visual Dictionary of the Universe by Dorling …

Secular humanism is widely believed to be a purely negative doctrine that boils down to the denial of the supernatural. This is not so, as any fair sampling of the humanist literature will show (see, e.g., Kurtz, ed. 1973; Storer, ed. 1980; Lamont 1982; Kurtz 1988; Bunge 1989). Indeed, secular humanism is a positive worldview …

The following article was delivered as a paper at a conference sponsored by The Centre for Inquiry at Westminster College, Oxford, on July 27, 1996. It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” So wrote William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879) in his famous essay “The Ethics of Belief,” delivered …

Early in 1996, a young Harvard Government and Social Studies teacher published his dissertation. Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’ was touted as a groundbreaking work, shedding startling new light on the role of ordinary Germans in the mass murder of the Jews of Europe’ It received ecstatically favorable initial reviews. The cover kudos …

Questioning children’s innocence is not popular. In a world that agonizes over perennial betrayal, cruelty, war, mass slaughter, and other failures of humanity, we passionately long for exem-plars of unadulterated goodness—and the child, like some sacred icon, has been traditionally placed upon an imaginary altar so that we might revere virtues lacking in ourselves. This …

A lively and creative imagination in children has always been regarded as a sign of their good health, and throughout the world adults enrich children’s imaginations with magical folktales and encouragement of beliefs in supernatural beings, both good and evil. Imagination helps both cognitive and social/moral development in the child; for adult agents of socialization, …

From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end. —G. K. Chesterton, in The Illustrated London News (September 24, 1927) In the first …

2000 Years of Disbelief, by James A. Haught (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books) 334 pp., cloth $26.95.   The world is full of believers. Many are total believers, like the hundreds who travel each year to Villa Union, a tiny town in desolate, far-western Argentina, to touch the mummified body of an infant who died in …

From Stimulus To Science, by W.V. Quine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 114 pp., $22.95 cloth.   Willard van Orman Quine, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Harvard, is best known for his groundbreaking work in logic, linguistics, theory construction, epistemology, and empiricism. Quine’s work is often associated with American pragmatism, which may be …

Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion Appoints Executive Director Hector Avalos, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Iowa State University, is the new Executive Director of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER). CSER, a subcommittee of the Council for Secular Humanism, examines religious beliefs and claims in the light of scientific …