Author: James H. Dee
James H. Dee retired from the Classics Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999 and has been writing and lecturing on secular humanist topics since 2001.
The Disbeliefs of Ancient Days
An Archaeology of Disbelief: The Origin of Secular Philosophy, by Edward Jayne. Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2018. xx & 198 pages. 978-0-7618-6966-5 (cloth); 978-0-7618-6967-2 (electronic). Edward Jayne, an English professor emeritus in his eighty-third year at the time of publication of this book, offers in eight chapters a compact survey of skeptics and (more rarely) outright …
The Age of Theism Is Over
The subject of theism and its opposite, usually called “atheism,” has heated up in the past few years, thanks mostly to the New Atheists who have predictably inspired a counterwave of reassurances from the pro-God camp that all is still well and that age-old beliefs don’t have to be discarded just yet. The purpose of …
The Silver Bullet Question (Part 2)
In “The Silver Bullet Question that Kills the Immortal Soul,” FI, April/May 2004, I argued that souls cannot be infused into humans in today’s world, because there is no point in human or prehuman history where a putative “first ensoulment” can be ethically justified.1 In that essay, The Silver Bullet Question was: “Who first had …
This article is available for free to all.The Silver Bullet Question that Kills the Immortal Soul
Humans have believed for thousands of years in the immortality of a personal soul. People in preliterate societies and those in societies with highly articulate philosophers have cherished and defended the idea. Skeptics down the centuries have been a decided minority, with little that could serve as an effective counterargument until the sudden explosion of …