Author: Barbara Smoker
Barbara Smoker was hands-on president of the National Secular Society (U.K.) for twenty-five years (1971–1996).
The Eternity of Time
Editor’s Note: This essay by Britain’s longest-serving atheist activist harkens back to a time when most unbelievers assumed that the cosmos was eternal.
Why I Am Not an Agnostic
Since, by derivation, atheism means “without God” and agnosticism “without knowledge (of God),” there is really no difference in meaning between the two terms—so why not choose the one that has the less dogmatic tone?
Harold John Blackham, 1903–2009
H. J. Blackham—philosopher, writer, educationalist, lecturer, and doyen of the secular humanist movement—died peacefully on January 23, 2009, two months short of his 106th birthday. He is commonly known as the father of modern humanism. Although he left school at the end of the First World War to become a farm laborer, he never stopped …
Deliver Us from Evil
Belief in a perfect god-creator requires the balancing concept of demonic evil to account for the unsatisfactory conditions of life for sentient creatures. We who discard the first have no need of the second. Both concepts, in Judeo-Christian terms, are absolutes. The rationalist sees the conditions of life as a mix of good and bad …