Author: Austin Dacey
Austin Dacey is an associate editor for Free Inquiry and a representative to the United Nations for the Center for Inquiry. He is the author of the book A Secular Conscience (Prometheus Books, 2007).
The Trouble with Religious Hatred
In the discourse of human rights, impiety is no longer understood as an affront to a sacred entity but to a human entity. Blasphemy is personal. Under existing human rights treaties, the prevailing legal model of personal blasphemy is “religious hatred.” Roughly speaking, laws against religious hatred or religious hate speech tend to draw from …
Decomposing Humanism
Meet the latest critics of the New Atheists: the old humanists. It is not enough, they say, to take a stand against religionwe must stand up something in its place. Humanists are right to think that there is more to life than denying God but wrong to think that they are the ones to provide …
The Importance of What It’s Like
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (New York: Random House, 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-3-37890-x) 400 pp. Cloth $27.95. There’s an old joke about two behaviorist psychologists in bed. After sex, one turns to the other and asks, “Was it as good for me as it was for …
Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations
December 10, 2008, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is much to celebrate but even more to fight for, as Islamic states have repeatedly resisted human-rights inspections and proposed Islam-specific rights schemes that place unacceptable limits on fundamental human freedoms. The Center for Inquiry has issued a position paper, …
Whose Democracy?
Is democracy the gift of Western civilization? Some commentators, among them enthusiasts of the Bernard Lewis–Samuel Huntington thesis of a “clash of civilizations,” proudly answer yes. Others, anxious to avoid such a clash, say no. One way to support a negative answer is to question the construct of Western civilization itself. In a world becoming …
One Damned Thing After Another
A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0674026766) 896 pp. Cloth $39.95. It is Easter Sunday, I am sitting a café in New York City, an d the air is full of the sound of people not heralding the risen Christ. Around me, a room full of patrons joins …
The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
On the streets of London, the placards scream, “FREE SPEECH, GO TO HELL,” an unintentional masterpiece of British irony. In Beirut, twenty thousand mass at the Danish embassy with signs reading , “Damn your beliefs and your liberty.” In Damascus, the embassy is burned. In Pakistan, the national parliament unanimously passes a resolution of condemnation, …
Atheism and Civil Rights A Reply to Tabash and Downey
We would like to thank Edward Tabash and Margaret Downey for their thoughtful comments on our article “Atheism Is Not a Civil Rights Issue.”1 We are gratified that our article has stimulated such interest. Tabash objects to our characterization of atheism as a matter of public awareness and education rather than of civil rights, and …