Author: Hank Fox

In our earliest personal understandings of atheism, most of us tend to focus on religion as the sole target of unbelief, concentrating on whatever local god, holy book, or other anointed authority our home culture presents us with. But as we become more comfortable with basic atheism, we begin to understand that religion isn’t the …

I see these press releases from churches every week in the newspaper. One of them in particular caught my eye. A little shrine near where I live was having a special Adoration of the Virgin Mary event, and the description of it included a “procession in praise of the Sacred Virgin Mary,” followed by a …

There’s this thing deeply religious people do that always leaves me at a loss. Their basic approach to any mystery that confronts them—and mystery here can mean anything from well-known facts that they as individuals somehow failed to pick up to the complex unknowns of the larger universe—is “If I can’t explain it, if you …