Author: James A. Haught

Behold the age-old antagonism toward all things sexual Christian endeavor,” H. L. Mencken wrote, “is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.” He was right, of course, and he should have included Jewish endeavor and Muslim endeavor in his observation. Western religions have spent millennia inflicting shame, guilt, repression, and punishment upon human sexuality—especially women’s sexuality. Asian …

Sincere seekers of reliable knowledge lost a friend when Carl Sagan died too young at sixty-two. Like all good scientists, the brilliant Cornell astronomer spent his life pursuing secrets of nature, looking for facts that can be documented, tested, and retested. Like some maturing thinkers, he decided late in life to escalate his criticism of …

Few Americans know that Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to John Adams: The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a vir-gin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.   Or that …