Author: Gregory Paul

The religion factor is yet again getting insufficient attention when it comes to dark human affairs—in this case regarding the Russian assault on Ukraine. Early in the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure, set in Alaska, main character Dr. Joel Fleischman asks, “Why can’t the Russians find a way to govern themselves and let us off of …

These days, folks go on about how back in olden times American conservatives, who tend to be Christians, were much more reasonable than they are now. Many claim the religious Right and its Republican Party has gone radically, toxically authoritarian in its adoration for Norman Vincent Peale–adherent hyper-narcissistic Donald Trump. McCain, the Bushes, Reagan, and …

A woman I know who has attended Baltimore secular groups for years is a self-avowed pessimist. In 2016, she warned that Donald Trump might well win the presidency, and I poo-pooed what I thought were her politically naive concerns. She has never let me forget that. She despises Trump and his ilk so much that …

My June/July 2021 essay on how the little-noticed mass death of billions of immature humans, as well as the endless suffering of animals, rips away any pretense that a god and his earthly creation could be benign and moral spent nearly all its time denouncing worship of a creator as fatally depraved. I briefly noted …

Beyond Humanity was the title of a book I coauthored in 1996 with Earl Cox. It was an early look at the possibility, if not probability, that in the not too distant future, quite possibly in this century, self-aware devices of extreme intelligence will be developed. If such a thing happens, the book predicted, it …

It is the most important historical statistic that remains almost entirely unknown. Like nothing else, this terrible fact guts the moral claims of those speculators who proclaim to honorably worship a noble and righteous creator/power. It has untapped potential to accelerate the already rapid decline of the illusion that is theism. It is a figure …

Back during the Paleocene Epoch (we call it August/September 2020), in my FI column, I told you all to vote, dammit, because seculars have a long and sad history of voting at per capita rates way below those of theoconservatives. This is why the Republican minority has repeatedly won the presidency, houses of Congress, and …

For all the damage Donald Trump has done, he achieved something no one else has. He exposed for all time what many strongly suspected but had limited evidence of—the deep, cynical depravity of theism, especially of the right-wing flavor. For millennia, theists have claimed (without verification) that worshipping a righteous deity is necessary to give …

Remember how not so long ago—in the first decade of the 2000s—there were big court and PR battles over creationism versus evolutionary science? Some Darwin-deniers boasted that their “wedge strategy” would make intelligent design theory intellectually respectable in academe, even as they lost one court case after another. Concurrently, Ken Ham began building his Bible-Literalist …

It is tempting to blame Donald J. Trump for being an amazingly bad president as he promotes the agenda of the religious Right and its defective policies (including elevating the rights of theoconservatives over other theists and secularists). But that hyper-materialist devotee of the amoral Christian Prosperity proponent Norman Vincent Peale literally does not know …

It’s not actually about saving little preborn babies. Back when this Republic was formed, the founders held absolutely no discussion about women’s reproductive rights. The all-male, largely Protestant and deist team that wrote up the Constitution would not have imagined addressing what they considered to be mere women’s affairs. The female sex quietly did what …

It being 2020, this is the year to celebrate the decade that began to radically alter western societies toward the modern, highly secularized nations rich in personal liberties that we—despite constant challenges from the patriarchal, paternalistic religious Right—enjoy today: the 1920s. Think about it. In 1910, the religious Right pretty much owned this nation and …

Back in the late 1970s, the religious Right was embarking on social and political activism in a big way that would make it a major force in American life. To promote the effort, in 1979 Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and others did something as audacious as it was an unethical lie. They founded …

In the wake of the 2001 Boston Globe exposures that did the most to uncover the depth of the Catholic pedophile scandals, many imagined that the issue would recede with time. That is not happening. Instead, increasing numbers of governments are mounting large-scale investigations into incidents of abuse within their borders, and the Church of …

Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, and not much new has happened regarding humans in deep space. Yet with SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and talk of deep space tourism, moon bases, mining asteroids, and Mars colonization, it might look like Homo sapiens is about to become a space species. …

The recent dispute in Free Inquiry over whether or not humans are apes spotlights a very important controversy that keeps popping up in the secular and skeptical communities. As is usual, the dispute was between non-biologists. In the biological community, there is no disagreement on the matter. As an active paleozoologist who publishes in the …

As a young Royal Air Force officer, Arthur C. Clarke helped develop a radar landing system as part of a team with Louis Alvarez, who then aided the Manhattan project, later helped determine when the three shots were fired at president Kennedy, and then  proposed that a meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs. Shortly after …

The Human Instinct, by Kenneth Miller (Simon and Schuster, 2017, ISBN 978-1476790268). 304 pp. Hardcover, $26.00. Although Kenneth Miller, a pro-evolution cell and molecular biologist, is within the modern liberal, science-friendly wing of Roman Catholics, in the end he is a creationist in the sense that he believes there really is a supernatural creator deity. …

These days, many who are secular and/or on the center-left just don’t get why so many on the evangelical Right seem so darn dead-set on denying the threat of global climate change, to the point that they thrill in chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” Many may imagine that if duly educated about the science of CO2-driven …

There is no biological necessity for predators; a good God could have (and should have!) arranged the world differently.

The suffering of animals is an overwhelming, screamingly obvious contradiction to the ridiculous notion that there is a good god.

It’s important to understand that the “beautiful total eclipses should be seen as compelling evidence of God” thing is part of a greater cover-up conspiracy…

Secularization continues to make big gains. Those Americans who rank themselves as nonreligious and those who qualify as atheists (broadly defined as those who are not theists) each ballooned by a tenth of the total population in just ten years.

“For all we know, lots of Ice Age hunter-gatherers were not religious. The problem is that there’s no way to tell.”

The popular image of Jesus as a man of peace is not supported even by the Bible. Nontheists should stop paying it lip service.

American mainstream media have long criticized discrimination against Jews, African Americans, and Hispanics, yet they’ve been doing an excellent job of playing down, if not outright ignoring, chronic bigotry against atheists. The rarity of atheist-friendly op-eds on major papers’ opinion pages has been a reflection of this bias. Having conducted groundbreaking research on the links …

Advanced sociological research has determined that dysfunctional socioeconomic factors are responsible for the origin and historical popularity of religious faith and that sci ence, secure prosperity, and consumerism are radically undermining faith all across the first world. Contrary to naysayers, the so-called secularization hypothesis (which predicts that social and scientific advances will drive a gradual …