Author: Bill Cooke

How well situated is humanism to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? In particular, what solutions can humanism contribute to the global ecological crisis from which the climate emergency is emerging as the defining crisis of our times? The omens don’t look good, because for a long time, humanism has associated itself with a …

So-called Christ-myth theorizing has become an obstacle to genuine humanist scholarship.

Yes, the evidence for the theological Christ is weak. But it simply doesn’t follow that there is no historical person behind it. Were that the case, virtually no person in the ancient world would have existed.

When mainstream theologians admit the Resurrection might never have occurred, arguments that Jesus never existed miss the point.

A review of Philosophy for a Better World, by Floris van den Berg.

A review of The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God, by Peter Watson.

The key insight that comes from being an atheist is that this life is the only one we have. We don’t have religious people’s luxury of explaining away real-time misery as a test of eligibility for a comfortable afterlife or as just retribution for an ignoble previous incarnation. This life is all we have. From …

Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels, by Kerry Walters (Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus Books, 2011, ISBN 978-1-61614-190-5) 279 pp. Paper, $20.00 Most everyone who writes a book claims it fills a “gap in the literature.” So often is this claim made that it’s all the more surprising when one actually comes across a book where the …

The Book of Atheist Spirituality, by André Comte-Sponville (London: Bantam, 2008, ISBN 978-0-593-06139-8) 212 pp. Cloth $19.95. Alister McGrath must be so embarrassed. Within months of the appearance in 2004 of his book The Twilight of Atheism, where he exulted over the demise of atheism in the modern world, a major new wave of atheist …

Congress Win in India In what must be the most unexpected election victory of the decade, the Congress Party in India, led by Sonia Gandhi, fifty-seven, swept to power in May. And then, to circumvent the ongoing criticism of her foreign birth, Gandhi very magnanimously withdrew from contention as prime minister. With the return of …

What Is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live, by A.C. Grayling (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, ISBN 0-297–84132-7) 241 pp. Cloth $34. It is a good rule to try and read stuff you disagree with as often as you read stuff you agree with. It’s a good discipline. There are few better …

The most important church-state development of recent months, foreign or domestic, has been French President Jacques Chirac’s announcement of ambitious plans to limit the display of religious symbols throughout France’s public sector. In public schools, students would be barred from displaying conspicuous religious symbols, including headscarves, skullcaps, and large crosses. Neither public buildings nor civil …

Serbia: The Democratic Revolution, by Svetozar Stojanovi´c (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2003, ISBN 1-59102-052-2) 264 pp. Cloth $24.50. Svetozar Stojanovi´c is more than just a distinguished professor of philosophy. Over a long career, he has been influential in Yugoslav and, more recently, Serbian politics. He was a senior member of the Praxis group, a group …

The U.S.-led war on Iraq has resulted in a hardening of anti-Western attitudes and opinions among Muslims in the Middle East. While Western media trumpeted coalition efforts to spare civilian targets, the provision of humanitarian aid, and relief of the long-oppressed Iraqi people, Muslim media ran horrific images of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by …

Reassessing Madalyn Murray O’hair The visit of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, her son Jon, and adopted granddaughter Robyn to New Zealand in 1982 had an immediate effect on the humanist movement in that country. The three spoke at Rationalist House, headquarters of the New Zealand Rationalist Association, attracting the largest audience in the association’s history. Their …

In this new column, Bill Cooke comments on developments of concern to humanists worldwide. A longtime New Zealand humanist activist, Cooke is now a senior editor of Free Inquiry and director of the Center for Inquiry’s new Commission for Transnational Cooperation —eds. The death sentence against Hashem Aghajari, a reformist and an academic at Modarres …