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What Is Humanism? Hail to FREE INQUIRY for its Fall 1996 issue (“Defining Humanism: The Battle Continues”) on clarifying what secular humanism means to different people, and, above all, what it means to secular humanists. Paul Kurtz was absolutely right to take a separate, secular humanist stand in the 1980s, when those opposed to a …

In October 1996, the Supreme Court announced that it will review decisions by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Ninth Circuits that have held that a state’s blanket prohibition of assisted suicide for terminally ill patients is inconsistent with the Constitution. (The Second Circuit ruled on a New York statute; the Ninth …

In an opinion poll, carried out in 1993 in The Netherlands, one of the questions asked was: “Do you think that someone always has the right to have his life terminated when he is in an unacceptable position without any prospect?” The outcome was clear: 78% said “yes,” 10% said “no,” and 12% had no …

Surprisingly, on October 24, 1996, Pope John Paul II endorsed evolution as “more than just a theory” and thereby biblical fundamentalism as so-called scientific creationism was dealt yet another blow to its vacuous claims about the origin of this universe and the appearance of life-forms on the Earth. Biblical creationists continue to ignore the overwhelming …

John Paul II has recently admitted that biological evolution is for real. This is no news: Pius XII had admitted it in 1953. But he had warned that evolution, far from happening spontaneously (naturally), is guided from above. (How did he find out?) If evolution had been steered at a distance by God, then natural …

The Thirteenth World Humanist Congress, held in Mexico City from November 14 to 19, 1996, brought together 250 humanists from six continents to discuss the theme “Global Humanism for the Cyber Age.” The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) Congress, co-organized by FREE INQUIRY and the Asociación Mexicana Etica Racionalista, was a groundbreaking achievement in …

Last fall I had the pleasure of attending two conferences dealing with the need for humanism in Eastern Europe. The first, entitled “Humanist Visions of European Integration,” was held September 26 to 29, 1996, in Warsaw, Poland, and was hosted by the Federation of Polish Humanist Associations. Barbara Stanosz, editor of the journal Bez Dogmatu …

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published half a century ago, Karl Popper distinguished between two kinds of economic-political systems: closed societies and open societies. The former have a semi-organic nature and place submission to authority among the highest values; the latter are abstract and impersonal entities that, by their very nature, “set …

The Campaign to Overturn Felton v. Aguilar After last year’s Newsday reports on the assorted inequities of the New York City Board of Education’s deluxe remedial education program for religious schools, New York’s education authorities adopted a new media strategy: After years of stonewalling, the Board of Education, together with state and federal education officials, …

During the first weekend of November 1996 the Center for Inquiry hosted the first official meeting of the recently formed Campus Freethought Alliance. Students from several colleges across the United States and Canada convened to discuss plans for the future of the Alliance. The weekend conference, which marked the formal establishment of the CFA, was …

All traditional ideological/religious systems are, at present, in acute conflict, if not in collapse. We need a system of agreed values that rises above all these wrangles and can be agreed as a moral blueprint for mankind. . . . An International Declaration of Human Values should be prepared by the United Nations as a …

The Creation and Inauguration of the First Summer Camp for Children of Secular Humanist Families The idea for a camp for children of secular humanist families was taken on in late 1995 and taken on as a project by the Free Inquiry Group, Inc., of the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Ken-tucky area (FIG). In August …

Few Americans know that Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to John Adams: The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a vir-gin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.   Or that …

This article is adapted from Paul Kurtz’s keynote address to the Thirteenth Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union-in Mexico City in November 1996. The theme of the Congress was “Global Humanism and the CyberAge.” It was the first human-ist World Congress held outside of Europe or the United States, and was co-hosted by …

The eighteenth century in Scotland was a period that witnessed the blooming of new ideas in medicine, chemistry, geology, economics, engineering, and other fields of knowledge. It came to be known as the “Scottish Enlightenment.” Scotland then has been referred to as “a hotbed of genius.” Being a small country with a small population but …

Lucy Stone made history. Elizabeth Cady Stanton considered her “the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question,” and her biographer, Elinor Rice Hays, called her “Morning Star.” Independent in mind and spirit from her earliest years, she was the first woman in Massachusetts and one …

In the nineteenth century, he was recognized as Europe’s most famous and powerful atheist, the herald of a new anti- Christian and anti-idealist era. In the twentieth, he is men-tioned only in passing as one of the influences on the young Karl Marx and as a precursor of Sigmund Freud, who believed that the gods …

One day in January 1993, while researching a book on religious conversions and the evangelical revival, I was leafing through a back number of Numinus, the journal put out by the Alister Hardy Centre in Oxford (which collects and analyzes case histories of religious experience). In a footnote, I read the following: Members will be …

Many mistakenly think that if we could just catch Pat Robertson in bed with a cohost of the “700 Club”—either Ben or Terri—the religious right would self-destruct. Some think the Christian Coalition would sink if the Internal Revenue Service could nail it on tax violations or illegal political activity. However, the radical religious right is …

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) pp. 619, cloth $30.00. There is convincing scientific, historical, and psychological evidence of two basic facts regarding the fate of Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Ignoring them leads to sloppy thinking and worse. Adolf Hitler was paranoid (delusional) …

Feminism Under Fire, by Ellen R. Klein (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995) 258 pp., cloth $32.95. All who are involved with feminism, either in the academy and Women’s Studies departments as teachers or administrators or in the community at large as politicians and scientists, will find Feminism Under Fire of interest, if only as a …

Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example, by D. Michael Quinn. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996) 410 pp., 21 photographs, cloth $29.95. Outing historical individuals as homosexual or lesbian is a rather risky task, even more so if a strongly organized religion is involved. D. Michael Quinn, a former history professor at …

The End of Science, by John Horgan (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1996) 308 pp., cloth $24.00. Over the millennia countless hours of human time have been spent wondering what stars are. Then something weird happened. Science found out. Now we know what stars are made of, how big they are, how old they are, how …

Freethought Across the Centuries: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment by Gerald A. Larue. (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanist Press, 1996) y + 516 pp., index included, cloth $27.95. Those who would like to pronounce funeral rites over the Enlightenment that emerged in Europe and America in the days of Ben Franklin, David Hume, J. S. Bach, …

The First Man, by Albert Camus. ‘frans. by David Hapgood. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 325 pp., cloth $23.00. …. Struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, dis-cover at last, in order “to be,” just …

Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, by Frans de Waal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) 296 pp., cloth $24.95. This is an important book for secular humanists. The most telling objection to a secular view of reality and the absence of gods is this argument: why would any …