Author: Ophelia Benson

It’s hard not to get disgusted with human beings sometimes. We seem to have such a talent for destroying everything, and then doing it all over again a few years later. It’s not enough that we’ve trashed the climate we depend on for survival, or that we’ve laid waste to countless species and their habitats …

The trouble with humans is that we never know when to stop. We know how to invent things, but we seem to be completely unable to figure out how to uninvent them—or even just stop using them once we’ve invented them. We can commission like crazy but we can’t decommission. Like, for instance, cruise ships …

We’ve been having to say goodbye a lot lately. We’ve been having to say it to vast swaths of life that we took for granted and assumed would always be there. Political sanity, reasoned public discourse, longer life expectancies, and above all the sense of a future. Not just our own personal futures, but a …

The collapse seems to be speeding up alarmingly. I lived through one portent of the acceleration in late June, along with much of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, in the form of a heat wave that broke all records and jumped up and down on them. The peak here in Seattle was 108°, which frankly …

Congress is currently (as I write this) working on a voting-rights bill. It’s depressing having to say that, because we thought it was done already, years ago, back in 1965. It happened in the wake of a horror known as Bloody Sunday, when state troopers and local police brutally attacked a group of civil rights …

OK, we’re down. It was bumpy but we seem to be in one piece. Let’s take a deep breath and then check for damage. One big piece of good news right off the top: He didn’t launch the nukes. That was never a sure thing, and there were plenty of times when I, for one, …

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his notebook (titled Meditations by Victorian translators, but he never called it that): Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear … Things themselves touch not the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they admission to the soul, nor can …

We’ve always had this problem with freedom—this problem of what do we think we mean by it? Especially, what do we think we mean by it when we are slaveholders? It jumps right out at you, after all. It can’t help it. Right there at the beginning, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: …

Sir Thomas Browne wrote in “Urn Burial”: “The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.” It’s an aphorism I love, because it’s applicable to so much more than life and death. The long habit of (so many things) indisposeth us for (being unable to keep doing them). We love our habitual ways of doing …

In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that of the two great twentieth-century dystopian warnings, it wasn’t Orwell’s Stalinist Big Brother we had to worry about so much as the seductions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that …

It seems unfortunate that climate change is speeding up and pushing us toward the cliff with accelerating force at the same time we are also putting ruthless authoritarians in power all over the heating-up planet. Maybe the two are not coincidental but linked—I suspect there’s a hope that if the authoritarians are authoritarian enough, they …

It’s hard to believe we’re back to “Love It or Leave It” again—it seems so very embedded in the years of the Vietnam War, Johnson-Nixon, Jane Fonda, George Wallace. Where does Donald Trump fit into that? He wasn’t an anti-war protester, but he wasn’t an angry homecoming veteran either. He was Mister Medical Deferment because …

I’ve figured out who it is that President Trump really reminds me of—not Roy Cohn, not Hitler, not Bernie Madoff, though they all certainly resemble bits of him. The guy who all but shouts “Donald Trump” is the original Peak Narcissist himself, Mister God. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that’s a good thing. …

The literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in Sincerity and Authenticity: “The concerted effort of a culture or of a segment of a culture to achieve authenticity generates its own conventions, its generalities, its commonplaces, its maxims, what Sartre, taking the word from Heidegger, calls the ‘gabble.’” test Trilling said that in 1970, but it hasn’t …

It’s a funny thing that many people take amateur medical (or “wellness”) advice seriously if it comes from a shiny blonde movie star with a pleasing smile. The public doesn’t flock to buy health products promoted by car mechanics or dog groomers, but people who read lines in front of a camera—now that’s a whole …

The day after Scott Pruitt resigned as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Norman Eisen and Noah Bookbinder, of the watchdog organization Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, D.C., wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on the ethical trainwreck of Pruitt’s tenure. They recalled a long string of horrors, and then …

Trump’s inability to grasp the reality of other minds is so extreme it amounts to a handicap.

Why is it so hard to agree that sexual demands in the workplace are wrong, period?

Navel-gazing and explorations of the Self may lead the Left to destroy itself from within.

It’s been a cliché of political campaigns for decades that liberals are effete snobs, while conservatives are salt-of-the-earth workin’ folks constantly wounded by the scorn of the pointy-headed intellectuals (a.k.a. the Jews).

“We think of bullying as something children and adolescents do to each other, but really it’s pervasive.”

“It’s a humiliation for
the whole country and all of us in it to
ave an ignorant, dim-witted, narcissistic bully as head of state, one without even a façade of grown-up decent behavior.”

“What I would like to learn from Shriver’s critics is how cultural appropriation differs from what we call ‘education.’”

“Humans are not
so constituted as to be able to function in
 world of pure rtionality.”

Given human nature, genocide is always a possibility.

“Why were conditions in South Africa and East Germany treated as human-rights issues while those in Saudi Arabia were not?”

Identity is a far more complicated concept than it appears at first glance.

Destruction is the fanatic’s way of clearing away reality for a better view of the nonexistent divine.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia hide behind a Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which isn’t about human rights at all.

A review of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, by Mona Eltahawy.

Condemning the Charlie Hebdo assassins while praising Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah makes no sense—they’re on the same side.

It’s all obvious and predictable enough: of course high status tends to confer immunity from the social pressure and sanctions that keep the rest of us in line.

In an authoritarian Facebook post, one Catholic bishop reveals more than he might have meant to.

“A major battle the no-choice side has won is that of convincing a great many people, including many of those who support abortion rights, that abortion itself is tragic.”

If only more believers could recognize that their taboos apply to them, not to everyone.

Have you ever noticed how fundamentally boring God is? I think that’s a slightly neglected subhead under atheism and secular humanism.

Do people still talk about feminist epistemology? I haven’t kept up.

I’ve been unusually steeped in the history of atheism and freethought in the United States and the United Kingdom recently. Barry Duke, the editor of the UK magazine The Freethinker, sent me a history of the magazine published in 1982 to mark its hundredth year of publication (Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The …

Michael Shermer is very indignant about being criticized: he wrote a two-and-a-half-page article (“A Guy Thing? Secularism, Feminism, and a Response to Ophelia Benson,” FI, February/March 2013) for Free Inquiry in reaction to four paragraphs in an article of mine (“Nontheism and Feminism: Why the Disconnect?” FI, December 2012/January 2013) that criticized something he said …

Last October, Savita Halappanavar died at University Hospital Galway in Ireland. She was a dentist with a popular practice in Galway, thirty-one years old,and seventeen weeks pregnant. Hav­ing woken up with back pain on Sunday, October 21, Savita went to the hospital and was found to be miscarrying. Sherequested an abortion, but the fetus still …