Author: Dale DeBakcsy

When it comes to classical music, it’s hard to swing a dead Bach progeny without running into a sacred motet, a Magnificat, a Mass, or a Requiem. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Reformation, the greatest composers were firmly harnessed to the task of employing the massive machinery of compositional technique to extol the …

Back when Public Intellectuals still existed—and their tussles, splashed across the pages of a dozen different journals of note, were avidly consumed by a public not yet stultified by lower-hanging fruit—there lived a writer whose knife cut deeper than anybody’s in the field, wounding friend and foe alike with strokes of remorseless but profound psychological …

When talking about the meaning of modernity, there is a tendency to focus on the interplay between the products of the modern age and the psychological conditions those products give rise to: factories and nervous exhaustion, atomic bombs and existential anxiety, eight dozen different kinds of cereal and world-weary ennui. These products are all very …

A hunk of cheese. A glass of watered-down wine. The company of a good friend. That, according to the most influential philosopher of the Hellenistic Age, is pretty much the summit of human happiness. Epicurus of Samos (341 bce–270 bce) inherited an Athens that had been broken by the Macedonian might of Alexander the Great …

Bloomsbury. A century ago that word stood for everything loathsome to the dying Victorian Age. Homosexuality and impiety, infidelity and socialism, all were embraced at one time or another by the roughly dozen figures of the Bloomsbury Group while even the most freethinking of their Imperial elders scratched their heads, wondering what their small acts …

So, what does a purely humanist civilization look like? What do people do and need, when it is taken as given that life is material and beyond it lies nothing?” For decades, the best we could do in answering this question as to the lived-in feel of a prospective humanist society was to point toward …

Asimov dared to ask how humanity would be saved from enervation brought on by its own success.

From Plato to Kant to Russell, philosophy has been in the business of describing the mind in a way unavailable to the lesser disciplines.

Ambrose Bierce, the compleat cynic whose insights sear even as they sparkle.

“Darrow’s approach remained the same:
a full and frank determinism with a boundless empathy
t its core.”

“For pure, unadulterated, We-Are-Atheists-Hear-Us-Roar unity and
pride, there was one beginning and one place to be: Thursday evenings at Baron d’Holbach’s joint.”

Above all Robert Ingersoll demonstrated that an exuberant, joyful life without religion was possible.

“Paine would suffer for this book, but then he had suffered for every book he had ever written.”

“He was a cultural commentator who helped usher in a new era
of American thought, and then he arbitrarily dug in his heels against any further progress
nce he saw his gals achieved.”

A review of The Faith of a Heretic, by Walter Kaufmann.

Walter Kaufmann saved skepticism, almost singlehandedly, from McCarthyite repression and Eisenhoweresque torpor.

It would be a mistake to consider the works of Sinclair Lewis irrelevant to modern times and freethought’s role.

For believers, C. S. Lewis proves that a Christian commitment is intellectually defensible. But it turns out there is precious little that is intellectual about Lewis’s own journey to Christian belief.

The atheist’s understanding of death is only enriched by understanding the neurochemistry of attachment, loss, and mourning.

There are three things that we humans seem to really want to believe in: the existence of God, the soul, and free will.