Author: Lawrence Rifkin

My son plays on a vintage baseball team. They play by 1861 rules, use 1860s language, wear 1860s uniforms, and sell soda pop and Cracker Jack. It is what they call a “gentleman’s game.” There is only one umpire, and he is asked for decisions only when the players cannot agree. The umpire will occasionally …

I was about to leave work for a few days to attend a humanist conference. I was standing around the watercooler talking with a coworker who asked, “So where are you going?” “To a conference,” I answered. “On what?” she asked. “Humanism,” I replied. “What’s that?” she asked. I thought I was ready for this …

Say you are a religious believer and you’ve just read The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. Let’s further say that you are persuaded by Harris’s characteristic clarity and forceful writing that there are right and wrong scientific answers in moral decision-making and that there are scientifically demonstrable better and worse ways of affecting the well-being …

At sunset, lie down outside, face up with your back against the earth. Try to feel viscerally what you know to be true: as the brilliant sun dips below the horizon, filling the sky with celestial color, it is actually the massive planet you feel on the back of your head, torso, and arms that …

As he performed the autopsy, Edward Curtis removed Abraham Lincoln’s brain. “We proceeded to remove the entire brain, when, as I was lifting the latter from the cavity of the skull, suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin …

While strolling on the boardwalk during a vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey, my family was approached by a well-dressed man with a charming smile who was carrying a Bible. When he tried sharing his beliefs about the glory of God, I just shook my head and walked on. But my friendly wife, with our young …

Let passion fill your sails, but let reason be your rudder,” Sherwin Wine wrote. With its rudder and sails working synergistically, this essay will explore an understanding of human meanings in the context of a naturalistic worldview. Human meanings, understood in a humanist framework, provide alternatives to supernatural narratives on one side and a sense …

Paul Kurtz once asked, “Can scientific naturalism, insofar as it undermines theism, provide an alternative, dramatic, poetic rendering of the human condition?” Years earlier, Julian Huxley (1887–1975) boldly set sail to meet a similar challenge and called his idea “evolutionary humanism.” No sooner had this ship left port than it came under attack from all …