Author: Tom Flynn

A review of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

In the April/May 2013 issue, FREE INQUIRY invited readers to submit autobiographical essays describing the life-stance odysseys that had led them to their present positions of secular humanism or atheism.

Let’s look back at The Nine Demands of Liberalism and reflect on the differences between what freethinkers wanted circa 1870 and what many in our movement want today.

A review of Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist, with a foreword by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich.

Just a couple of years ago, an objective observer might be forgiven for concluding that religious Humanism was dying—or at least that it was in a very bad way.

Sidney Hook was among the earliest American intellectuals to break with Marxism. That’s saying a lot: Marxist revolutionary thought held enormous sway over American intellectuals during much of the twentieth century.

The Citizen Lobbyist teaches its reader how a private citizen can lobby effectively in the halls of government. Period. And it does so without a wasted word.

The year 2013 marks a noteworthy anniversary: it has been fifty years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the conjoined cases Abingdon School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett ended school-sponsored Bible reading in American public schools. This decision came on the heels of 1962’s Engel v. Vitale, which ended school-sponsored prayer. Those …

In case you missed it, Roman Catholics have a new pope. Pope Benedict XVI resigned, which no pope has done in almost six hundred years, and the College of Cardinals met in conclave and elected Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who chose the name Pope Francis. But of course, you didn’t miss it. No one …

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, by Jonathan V. Last (New York: Encounter Books, 2013, ISBN 978-159403-641-5). 230 pp. Hardcover, $23.99. The title of this book riffs archly on a current mega–best seller (What to Expect When You’re Expecting), which should give you a clue about author Jonathan V. Last’s …

“It’s Not About the Sex,” My Ass: Confessions of an Ex­Mormon Ex­Polygamist Ex­Wife, by Joanne Hanks as told to Steve Cuno (Self-published: 2012, ISBN 978-1-105-99740-2 paper) 171 pp. Paperback, $15.97. Available in paperback or Kindle on Amazon.com; available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, Nook, iBook, and eBook at www.itsnotaboutthesexmyass.com. We seldom review self-published books, so let’s …

Some Free Inquiry readers may find the articles in this special section controversial. Most of these articles share the view that the best solution to tensions posed by a growing nontheistic/nonreligious contingent within a U.S. military steeped in “Christian nation” ideology is to expand the scope of military chaplaincy to encompass nontheistic/nonreligious service members. Some …

Reader alert: the sentence that follows will include more slashes than I have ever penned—oops, I’m showing my age, keyboarded—in my life. If any topic in our movement has liberated more virtual ink than the current debate/flame war over feminism/misogyny in atheism/secular humanism/secularism/freethought, I don’t know what it is/might be. Phalanxes of words have been …

As I write, significant swaths of New York and New Jersey remain uninhabitable more than a month after Superstorm Sandy churned ashore. Sandy followed in the footsteps of Hurricane Irene, which savaged much of the same territory just fourteen months earlier. Sandy seems to have marked a turning point in the way most media commentators …

I may be reading too much into the November 2012 elections, but they seem to have genuinely altered the drift of American political discourse. Minority groups from Hispanics to the nonreligious played central roles in the reelection of President Barack Obama and in numerous congressional, state, and even local races. (Obama arguably owes his election …

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, by Susan Jacoby (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-300-18892-9). 256 pp. Hardcover, $25.00. The life of nineteenth-century freethought orator Robert Green Ingersoll has been chronicled by five previous biographers, the most recent previously being Frank Smith, whose Robert G. Ingersoll: A Life appeared in …

  The entire Muslim world . . . is agitating for the United Nations to pass an anti blasphemy law. The rest of the civilized world must oppose this at everytu rn. —Mahfooz Kanwar, Calgary Herald It seemed the whole world was marking International Blasphemy Rights Day (September 30). Debates about free speech and criticism …

Free Inquiry congratulates American Atheists as it nears its fiftieth anniversary year. The organization was founded by the activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair in 1963, soon after O’Hair’s victory in one of two consolidated U.S. Supreme Court cases that ended mandatory prayer in public schools. During most of its early years, American Atheists was the movement’s …

On Saturday, March 3, 2012, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry presented one of the feature events of their cosponsored conference, “Moving Secularism Forward,” held at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida. Four distinguished speakers from across the political spectrum addressed the question, “Does Secular Humanism Have a …

If there was a hell, it would be garlanded with icicles. According to recent survey data, two longtime dreams of American secularists have come true: Charitable giving by Americans to churches and religious organizations actually declined in 2011. What’s more, it fell in three of the last four years. For the first time in fifty-four …

I welcome Andy Norman’s riposte. Still, after several close readings I cannot escape three conclusions: With all good intentions, he underestimates the scope of the problem. He inadvertently makes my point that spirit-talk is corrosive of naturalism. He underestimates how easy spiritual language is to avoid. 1. The Scope of the Problem Norman argues that …

A Judeo-Islamic Nation: The Evolution of America’s Political Theology, by Thomas Mates (Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2011, ISBN13 978-1-936780-76-1) 239 pp. Paper, $14.95. Now and then a self-published book demands inclusion in Free Inquiry’s review section, even though we can’t find space to consider all the deserving works from mainstream publishers. With A Judeo-Islamic Nation, …

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .” That Dickensian chestnut sums up the state of traditional marriage today. Surveys confirm that Americans have less use for the institution than ever. More of us are now single than married. Few progressives get excited about weddings unless they are …

Letters from an Atheist Nation: Godless Voices of America in 1903, edited by Thomas Lawson (Langley, B.C.: Thomas Lawson Books, 2011, ISBN13 9781466397354) 347 pp. Paper, $16.95; e-book for Amazon Kindle only, $7.99. In 1903, the Blue Grass Blade—after The Truth Seeker and The Boston Investigator, perhaps America’s most successful national freethought newspaper during the …

For more than three decades—and notwithstanding its deep absurdity—the claim that “America is a Christian nation” has never gone undefended. Yet what does it mean to ascribe this or that religious identity to a nation? If America is a Christian nation, does it have a soul? Was that soul stained by original sin? Did Jesus …

It seems that it was just the issue before last when we devoted a cover feature to the demographics of unbelief—to what we know, statistically speaking, about America’s unbelievers and how we know it. Wait, that was the issue before last (“Bridging the Gulf: At Last, Social Science Measures Secularity,” FI, February/March 2012). Perhaps it …

Like philosopher Andy Norman, whose report on the recent Center for Inquiry–Transnational symposium celebrating Daniel Dennett’s 2006 book, Breaking the Spell, appears in this issue (available in the print edition), I was in attendance when psychiatrist James Thomson performed what Norman aptly calls “an unusual experiment: he had about one hundred ardent secularists link arms, …

John Emerson Roberts: Kansas City’s “Up-to-date” Freethought Preacher, by Ellen Roberts Young (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4628-7292-1) 244 pp. Cloth, $29.99. On rare occasions, vanity presses bring forth a noteworthy title. For students of the history of freethought, religious humanism, and Midwestern intellectual culture, this is one of those occasions. Independent scholar Ellen Roberts …

By any measure, the period since the mid-twentieth century has been a golden age for both the science of sociology and the discipline (or business) of opinion polling. Never before have so many Americans been surveyed, measured, and compared on so many indices and by so many specialists. Still, across the age of surveys, men …

We seem to be poised on the threshold of a bright new era in which nonreligious Americans will be properly studied by the social sciences. What better time to review what we know about the various flavors of religious nonaffiliation and nonbelief? And what better time to review the facts and fallacies that have shaped …

Most of what I have to say in response to these two articles is in my editorial starting on page 4 of this issue. Oddly, that editorial didn’t begin as a conscious rejoinder to these articles; only after I’d written it did I realize how it related to them. Still, I agree with Lawrence Rifkin …

  If a solar storm should burn off the peculiar damp that clings to this planet, this would be a very small change—no change at all in cosmic terms, which are apparently based on averages. The u niverse is lifeless now and will be lifeless then, so negligible is our presence in it. —Marilynne Robinson, …

According to the United Nations, the world’s population has passed seven billion. (The U.S. government says that milestone will occur early in 2012.) Just twelve years ago, the number reached six billion; twelve years before that, it passed five billion. By any reasonable criterion, such growth is unsustainable. Consider that 48 percent of the globe’s …

Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, eds., Sentinels In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke (Overland Park, Kansas: Hadley Rille Books, 2010, ISBN 978-0-9825140-7-8) 399 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Arthur C. Clarke was one of the three towering figures of science fiction’s Golden Age, standing alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. He is perhaps best loved in …

The Conspiracy against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-9844802-7-2) 246 pp. Paper, $15.00. Some secular humanists accept that the universe is unauthored and was unintended and that life taken as a whole is inherently meaningless (though human beings may attach to it rich, if contingent, meanings of their …

  Mormonism must be done away with by the thousand influences of civilization, by education, by the elevation of the people. —Robert Green Ingersoll, 1884* The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has come a long way since the “Great Agnostic” could recommend to a newspaper reporter that the “influences of civilization” should simply …

The story of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the eventual rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is one of the more colorful, even outlandish, tales American history has to offer. Yet one of its more fascinating postscripts is undeservedly overlooked: the story of a freethinking journalist who, albeit …

Sometimes the best is the enemy of the good. A new campaign sweep-ing the humanist/atheist/freethought movement exemplifies this dilemma. The campaign is well meant, but I fear it pursues a seductive short-term benefit at the expense of greater long-term goals. At the same time, it actively endangers principles that secular humanists value highly. Along the …

As sociologist and author Phil Zuckerman notes in this issue, the study of unbelievers as a demographic group in its own right is finally gathering steam. Until recently, everything social scientists and pollsters could tell us about nonreligious Americans was “by-catch”—tangential information acquired in the course of studying religious Americans.* This state of affairs could …

When the Council for Secular Humanism celebrated its thirtieth anniversary at last October’s gala conference in Los Angeles, one of the most-anticipated sessions was a panel discussion on freethinkers’ attitudes toward religion. Should secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, and others of our ilk approach religion from a presumption of confrontation—or one of accommodation? New York Times …