Author: Tom Flynn

The Freethought Trail (www.freethought-trail.org) is the Council for Secular Humanism’s online tribute to some 185 radical-reform history sites. All are located in west-central New York State (between Rochester and Rome; very roughly, within 120 miles of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York). The Trail focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth …

Andy Norman, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, with a foreword by Steven Pinker. (New York, NY: HarperWave, 2021. ISBN 978-0-06-300298-2.) 397 pp. Hardcover, $29.99. Brian T. Watson, Headed into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time, and the Future We’ll Face. (Swampscott, MA: Anvilside Press, 2019. …

The Reality of Religious Violence, by Hector Avalos (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019, ISBN 9781910928585). xiv + 499 pp. Hardcover, $97.50. In his 2005 book Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence (Prometheus Books), the late secular humanist religious studies scholar Hector Avalos advanced a bold thesis. He argued that religious language and concepts …

Tom Flynn’s The Trouble with Christmas was originally published in 1993 (Prometheus Books) and republished in 2011. The following excerpt initially appeared in the Fall 1993 issue of Free Inquiry. Flynn went on to present his arguments against atheists celebrating Christmas in lectures and media appearances. As associate editor of Free Inquiry and coeditor of …

I write in mid-July, deep into yet another summer of our discontent. Wildfires that make their own weather, relentless heat waves, and murderous floods driven by “thousand-year” rain events abound. Under such conditions, it’s easy to wonder whether human civilization can survive our naive cleverness. Our relentless fecundity. When you get down to it, our …

Full disclosure: I admire the New York Times and its commitment to cover the world in depth when so many news outlets have abandoned that mission. Still, the Times has its blind spots, among them a relentless natalism. The paper seems glued to the notion that human numbers (to say nothing of the economy) must …

Cogento, by Thü, translated from German by Lena Blos and Thü; English editing and proofreading by Camille De Kok (Baar, Switzerland: Ecliptic Planetary Publishing, 2019, ISBN 978-3-033-07501-6). 493 pp. Hardcover, $28.00. Also available in e-book formats for all devices. One thing’s for sure: you’ve never read anything quite like Cogento. Author Thü (a.k.a. Thomas Hürlimann) …

Wayward: A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity, by Alice Greczyn. (Austin, Texas: River Grove Books, 2021, ISBN 1632993546). 366 pp. Softcover, $19.95.   This harrowing memoir (excerpted in Free Inquiry’s previous issue) offers the most disturbing picture yet of growing up in the purity-focused Christian fundamentalist subculture of the past three decades—and that’s …

In the February/March 2021 issue, I wrote a brief item noting the end of The Humanist, the longtime bimonthly journal of the American Humanist Association (AHA), as “a magazine of critical inquiry and social concern.” (Free Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz first came to prominence in the humanist movement as editor of The Humanist in the …

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism, by Stephen P. Weldon (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 9781421438580). 285 pp. Hardcover, $49.95. The discerning reader may cringe at the oxymoron scientific spirit in the title of this book—doesn’t a scientific outlook preclude belief in spirits?—but do not despair. In what may be considered a key coming-of-age …

The Case against Miracles, by John W. Loftus, ed. Foreword by Michael Shermer. (Aberdeen U.K.: Hypatia Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-83919-008-7). 564 pp. Softcover, $20.99. I’ll begin with a reminiscence, if only because I can. Years ago, after lecturing at a small university, I opened the floor to questions. A young man who seemed far too …

Even in this time of COVID-19 and economic dislocation, of social unrest and climate threats, it pays to consider the farther future. Assuming that humanity survives our admittedly staggering short-term challenges, what might await us in the long run—a utopia of technological and cultural promise? A dystopia of ever-further crushed illusions? After decades of being …

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and nonbelievers. —Barack Obama, January 20, 2009 Like many Free Inquiry readers, I greeted President Joe Biden’s inauguration with elation and relief. At last, after a four-year reign of error that on January 6 recrudesced into a spasm of genuine terror, the nation faced the …

As I write this, President-Elect Joe Biden has not received his first White House security briefing. When you read these words, Biden will be the president—which will leave many atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and freethinkers little short of ecstatic. But not so fast. For all that a Biden administration will mark a huge step toward …

Blip: Humanity’s 300 Year Self-Terminating Experiment with Industrialism, by Christopher O. Clugston. (Booklocker.com, 2019, ISBN 978-1644380680). 392 pp. Softcover, $19.95.   Free Inquiry prefers to review books from major publishers. Now and again, we make an exception. Readers who recall my review of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells (October/November 2019) know …

We continue presenting readers’ “Pivot Point” essays—brief recountings of the exact moment when the scales fell from each reader’s eyes and he or she realized that his or her childhood religion was bankrupt. More Pivot Points commentaries will appear in the February/March 2021 and April/May 2021 issues. Reader submissions fell into ten broad categories that …

In this feature, we conclude the Freethought Trail’s celebration of the seventeen sites in west-central New York State where nineteenth-century orator Robert Green Ingersoll delivered a lecture. Reactivation of the online Ingersoll Chronology (https://chronology.secularhumanism.org/) made it possible to identify every venue in the region at which Ingersoll was known to have spoken. Hornellsville/Shattuck Opera House …

Writing for a bimonthly magazine can be frustrating. As I wrote my first draft, the U.S. presidential campaign was still raging; conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court; and COVID-19 infection rates fluctuated while schools, colleges, and universities opened to varying degrees and as northerners began spending more time indoors. By …

In Free Inquiry’s February/March 2020 issue, I challenged readers to recount their “pivot-point” experiences—the exact moment when the scales fell from each reader’s eyes and he or she realized that his or her childhood religion was bankrupt. In asking that, I recognized that the average FI reader born prior to 1985 (trust me, most were …

Cover Image Courtesy of NASA   On September 12, 1960—almost exactly sixty years before this issue’s publication—John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered the speech that opened his path to the White House. At that time, no Roman Catholic had been elected president. Four-time New York Governor Al Smith had won the Democratic nomination in 1928; though he …

In this feature, we continue the Freethought Trail’s celebration of the centenary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established women’s right to vote. We present more of the new, site-specific pages devoted to annual suffrage conventions held in west-central New York state, the Trail’s coverage area. Nearly forty such …

August 2020 includes an enormously important centenary, one that too few Americans will recognize. August 26 marks the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, establishing the right to vote for women nationwide. Celebration of this milestone will be muted in large part because of the coronavirus pandemic. …

The Lost Song of Goliath, by Ronald A. Lindsay (Washington, D.C.: Nineteenth Street Publishers, 2019, ISBN 978-1-7337338-0-9). 289 pp. Softcover, $11.99.   Ronald A. Lindsay, former president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, whose nonfiction includes Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas (Prometheus Books, 2008) and The Necessity of Secularism (Pitchstone, 2014), here …

Longtime readers will recognize the name of independent scholar Ibn Warraq, author of the breakthrough work Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995) and nearly a dozen more technical scholarly books focused principally on the history and doctrines of Islam. He was also a Free Inquiry columnist from 2005 until 2011. He recently published a …

Full disclosure: One of these articles was accepted and the other commissioned before the coronavirus crisis. Nonetheless, the question these essays raise is vital: As we survey the existential challenges humanity confronts—however immediately pressing the pandemic may be, grave medium- and long-term threats still face us—are we focusing our ameliatory energy in the most effective …

In this feature, we continue the Freethought Trail’s celebration of the centenary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established women’s right to vote. We present more of the new, site-specific pages devoted to annual suffrage conventions held in west-central New York State, the Trail’s territory. Nearly forty such pages …

There’s change, and then there’s change. As Free Inquiry’s previous issue (April/May 2020) went to press, most Americans were focused on the juddering conclusion of President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment, followed by the rapid winnowing of candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Readers of this magazine might have been discussing the toxic Christian nationalism in …

Barbara Smoker (1923–2020), one of Britain’s most colorful and prolific voices for atheism and humanism, died in early April. She was the second-longest-serving president of the National Secular Society, an atheist organization; chair of an influential euthanasia society; a vice chair of Humanists UK, the country’s national humanist organization; and the author of a popular …

In its February/March 2018 issue, Free Inquiry presented a symposium by authors defending—and opposing—the Christ-myth theory: the contention that Jesus of Nazareth never existed in history and should be regarded as mythical. In the introduction to that feature, I wrote: Was there a historical Jesus of Nazareth? Or is he best understood as, pardon the …

In this feature, we continue the Freethought Trail’s celebration of the centenary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established women’s right to vote. The Trail is for anyone who wants to learn more about often-obscure radical reform history. But it’s especially for history buffs who yearn to visit the …

In this op-ed, I set aside my secular humanist hat. Today I write as a journalist and a concerned user of the English language. My opinions are my own. A growing movement seeks to repurpose the third-person plural personal pronouns they and them as singular (more accurately, number-agnostic). The goal behind it is laudable: to …

For the first time, a freethinkers’ meeting site has received an official historical marker. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation funds roadside historical markers in New York (the state no longer does so). Working with Town of Huron Historian Rosa Fox, in 2019 the Pomeroy Foundation delivered a marker for the James Madison Cosad farmstead, the …

Time Is Irreverent 2: Jesus Christ, Not Again, by Marty Essen (Victor, Montana: Encante Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-9778599-6-2). 236 pp. Softcover, $14.95.   Behold, born to us is a sequel to Marty Essen’s Time Is Irreverent, the madcap sci-fi metanovel that I reviewed favorably in these pages (FI, October/November 2018). As before, the book is …

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, establishing women’s right to vote, was adopted on August 26, 1920. The centenary of this event is being broadly celebrated throughout 2020. As its contribution, the Freethought Trail—the Council for Secular Humanism’s online commemoration of radical social-reform activism in west-central New York State—will unveil about forty new site-specific …

“If I had more time, I would have written less.” —Mark Twain Were you brought up in a traditional religion that you subsequently left? If so, you’re like most Free Inquiry readers. Research also suggests you’re like most unbelieving Americans born between the mid-1940s and the mid-1980s. Among these cohorts (the Boomers and Gen X-ers, …

In my previous essays on this subject (“Humanism’s Chasm,” FI, February/March 2019, and “Meanwhile, Back at the Chasm,” FI, August/September 2019), I probed the differences between older humanists, most of whom had cast off a traditional religious upbringing at measurable personal cost, and their younger counterparts for whom nonreligious identity often comes more easily. We …

One of the most powerful online tools for researching the career of Robert Green Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic,” is back—and more formidable than ever. The Robert Green Ingersoll Chronology recently went live at https://chronology.secularhumanism.org. The site permits interactive online searches of the life of Ingersoll. It comprises 1,345 public lectures, 113 political speeches, 344 letters, …

Atheism and Agnosticism, by Graham Oppy (Elements in the Philosophy of Religion Series, Cambridge University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1108454728). 67 pp. Softcover, $18.00.   The Cambridge Elements series aims to provide brief, authoritative introductions to subjects of interest. This volume delivers admirably. At sixty-seven pages, it’s nearly too short to stand alone as a book. …

Jon Guy has written an impassioned essay taking strong exception to a 2015 editorial in which we maintained, among other things, that the American Humanist Association (AHA) had employed an inadvisable legal strategy in its representation of an Oregon inmate, James Holden. AHA filed a lawsuit on Holden’s behalf when his federal correctional institution denied …

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see Saw a Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be … Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer and the battle-flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” (1842) The secular …