Author: Tom Flynn

Review of Why I Left / Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son, by Tony Campolo and Bart Campolo.

Review of: Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation

“The subjective sense of mattering
may be the reality toward which all those sterile controversies about an objective meaning in life were
ointing all along.”

“Trump has been the ‘box of chocolates’ president-elect: you never know what you’re going to get.”

“Why did the majority of respondents who ‘just stopped believing’ do so?”

The editor responds to an author’s criticisms.

The memory of Robert Green Ingersoll is being preserved on many fronts.

“… Free Inquiry presents a large-scale
reappraisal of humanism’s outsized role in social-justice activism throughout
he twentieth century.”

Why should the kind of atheist one is incline anyone to adopt a specific, rather narrow set of values?

Why what the pope says in airplanes may not matter—and why our efforts to stem climate disaster may not either.

“Beneath Jacoby’s gaze, each conversion proves exp
licable without treating the
‘spiritual’ matters—often thought central to any conversion experience—as in any way causally significant.”

“With measured tones and expert scholarship, Mary Ziegler demonstrates that almost everything most of us think we know about Roe and its consequences is incorrect.”

Social scientists don’t use the word secular like we do—just one of the revelations in this far-ranging cover feature.

“. . . LeDrew’s attempts to weave a sweeping, if somewhat conspiratorial, analysis of it all too often founder, usually on
the rocks of his incomplete knowledge of the movement’s nineteenth- and twentieth-
century history.”

Opening a discussion of the problem of evil as a proof for God’s nonexistence.

The necessity of atheodicy—and why humanists and atheists who’ve been harmed by religion will see it most clearly.

Even China was unprepared to do what will be necessary to not just stop population growth but to reduce human numbers to a sustainable level.

“Unfortunately, most environmental-conservation charities want nothing to do with
overpopulation concerns.”

Humans created “God,” not the other way around. Better that we take that lesson before we finish wrecking the planet.

Still think of Turkey and India as secular democracies? Think again: both countries are close to theocracy.

A review of Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World, by David Silverman.

The arguments favoring the right to blaspheme have changed little in nine years. But they’re still right.

I expected to be frustrated when I searched Amazon.com’s Books department on the keyword afterlife. I wasn’t disappointed. (Or should I say that I was disappointed?)

Science settled the question whether altruism is real, and most of us never noticed.

A review of Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, by David S. Cohen and Krysten Connon.

Too often, experts on climate change, environmental depletion, and species loss go out of their way not to discuss population’s relevance to their concerns.

Today’s myriad ecological crises can never be solved without a major commitment not just to control but to reduce human numbers.

A review of How God Works: A Logical Inquiry on Faith, by Marshall Brain.

An invitation for readers to speak their minds on the enduring crises of the Middle East.

Israel may mean well, but it is—unavoidably—built on discriminatory principles that most secularists would abhor in any other context.

The recent merger into CFI marks a culmination of two movements’ histories.

Published before the Islamic attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo, this book takes on even greater relevance in the massacre’s wake.

Conceding from its opening move that humanism is a religion, the American Humanist Association damaged the movement while defending one prisoner’s rights.

A look back at thirty years of skipping Christmas and at how things are different now.

A review of Atheist Awakening: Secular Activism and Community in America, by Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith.

What is religion good for? For secular humanists on the atheist side of the spectrum, the reflexive answer is often ‘Nothing much.’

Winning future church-state lawsuits may require us to step away from the familiar arena of “religious freedom” and into the more inclusive arena of freedom of conscience.

Like spirit, words such as transcendence and reverence can’t help making us sound like we still believe in woo.

“Among today’s students, what does it mean to be secular—in other words, how do they understand that term?”

Spoiler alert: We’ll probably never really know what happened on Easter.