Category: A Thoughtful Challenge to Objective Morality

To the degree that Free Inquiry has an intellectual platform, moral objectivity has been part of it. In his 1988 book Forbidden Fruit, Paul Kurtz influentially described a humanist morality that is neither the authoritative command of a divine law-giver nor a subjective matter of preference. “Secular humanists hold that ethics is consequential, to be …

This article begins with a critique of four propositions—one that is religious and three that are philosophical—that summarize many failed attempts to define and defend the existence of “objective morality.” After explaining the linguistic trap that objective morality presents for secular humanists, I will propose a replacement for the illusory goal of objective morality in …

Fundamentalism emerged from respectable traditions of revivalism and evangelicalism in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and quickly acquired a thoroughly independent identity. Specifically, fundamentalism was a reaction to liberal Protestant theology, which was attempting to accommodate Christianity to scientific, intellectual, and theological developments occurring at the time. The doctrinal foundation of fundamentalism was …

I very much appreciated Tom Flynn’s editorial “The Signature of Freedom” (Free Inquiry, October/November 2018), which refuted the unfounded presumption that, by definition, suicide results from mental illness. In exposing that intellectual cop-out for what it is, Flynn breaks the false, presumed-causal connection between mental illness and suicide. Building on that, I would like to …