Category: Op-Ed

It’s hard not to get disgusted with human beings sometimes. We seem to have such a talent for destroying everything, and then doing it all over again a few years later. It’s not enough that we’ve trashed the climate we depend on for survival, or that we’ve laid waste to countless species and their habitats …

When the Russians invaded Ukraine in February 2022, President Joe Biden offered to fly President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country to a safe haven. When Zelenskyy replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” he instantly became the hero of the West, fighting for freedom and democracy against the despotism of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. It …

The religion factor is yet again getting insufficient attention when it comes to dark human affairs—in this case regarding the Russian assault on Ukraine. Early in the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure, set in Alaska, main character Dr. Joel Fleischman asks, “Why can’t the Russians find a way to govern themselves and let us off of …

One of the goals of the Enlightenment that inspired the American and French revolutions was the rejection of exclusionary group privilege based on religion and aristocratic ancestry. This was epitomized by the French slogan “la carriere ouverte aux talents”—careers in public service and the professions open to men of talent irrespective of birth, faith, and …

The trouble with humans is that we never know when to stop. We know how to invent things, but we seem to be completely unable to figure out how to uninvent them—or even just stop using them once we’ve invented them. We can commission like crazy but we can’t decommission. Like, for instance, cruise ships …

These days, folks go on about how back in olden times American conservatives, who tend to be Christians, were much more reasonable than they are now. Many claim the religious Right and its Republican Party has gone radically, toxically authoritarian in its adoration for Norman Vincent Peale–adherent hyper-narcissistic Donald Trump. McCain, the Bushes, Reagan, and …

Criticizing the idea of human dignity is about as popular as attacking motherhood, apple pie, and cute puppies. In its current form, the idea is well-intentioned, and the phrase itself—“human dignity”—has a satisfying emotional ring. But I have serious misgivings about invoking human dignity as a consideration in political and legal contexts. Let me explain. …

A woman I know who has attended Baltimore secular groups for years is a self-avowed pessimist. In 2016, she warned that Donald Trump might well win the presidency, and I poo-pooed what I thought were her politically naive concerns. She has never let me forget that. She despises Trump and his ilk so much that …

Certain advocates of the rights of transgender individuals are becoming increasingly aggressive in demanding that the pronoun they be used in reference to those who wish it; others, who maintain that they do not conform to the “binary” use of the male or female singular pronoun, have also been making such claims. (Some advocates now …

As humanity faces immense global challenges, such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the increasingly visible effects of global warming, a new school of thought has emerged. Its essence is that we should investigate possibilities for “moral enhancement”: that is, we should consider how to alter human nature so that it becomes …

Tom Flynn was a moralist and a pragmatist. He rejected religion on moral grounds. He knew that the alliance of religion with morality was spurious. But in light of the power and intensity of the anti-abortion movement, he was pragmatic enough to side with those who defended abortion in ways that would circumvent monotheistic furor. …

We’ve been having to say goodbye a lot lately. We’ve been having to say it to vast swaths of life that we took for granted and assumed would always be there. Political sanity, reasoned public discourse, longer life expectancies, and above all the sense of a future. Not just our own personal futures, but a …

Movements need a sense of history and tradition to inspire respect and loyalty in their members. Tom Flynn’s enthusiasm and research in creating the Freethought Trail and establishing the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum reflected his keen awareness of the importance of educational and public relations in maintaining the heritage of secularism and valorizing its …

The collapse seems to be speeding up alarmingly. I lived through one portent of the acceleration in late June, along with much of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, in the form of a heat wave that broke all records and jumped up and down on them. The peak here in Seattle was 108°, which frankly …

In 1894, French historian and educator Count Pierre De Coubertin conceived of an inclusive worldwide youth movement and great sports festival. It would emulate the pre-Christian tradition of Ancient Greece but be rooted in universal fundamental Enlightenment principles. The ethos was to be an alternative to the aristocratic British imperialist sporting ethos of “muscular Christianity” …

Christianism—like Islamism—refers to the determination of religious ideologues to use the coercive power of the state to enforce religious morality. This is not supposed to happen in the West, where Enlightenment rationalism and its secular legacy have established a rigid separation between church and state. On the other hand, there is no English or French …

Studies by University of Melbourne researcher Nick Haslam and his collaborators have demonstrated a trend, beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s, for concepts related to harm to expand their meanings and applications. For the past forty years or so, many people have contributed, deliberately or otherwise, to concept creep for such words as …

Am I the only one to notice that religions across the world have been even more of a nuisance—and, in a distressing number of cases, far more than a nuisance—than usual lately? At this point, it is hardly worth noting how Buddhists (yes, Buddhists) in Myanmar continue to persecute the Muslim Rohingya or how Israelis …

My June/July 2021 essay on how the little-noticed mass death of billions of immature humans, as well as the endless suffering of animals, rips away any pretense that a god and his earthly creation could be benign and moral spent nearly all its time denouncing worship of a creator as fatally depraved. I briefly noted …

Thinking is like playing tennis, driving a car, giving a talk, dieting, or speaking a foreign language. It can be done well or badly. In the jargon of modern education, good thinkers are called critical thinkers. Critical thinkers have a mix of attitudes, skills, and habits that set them apart from sloppy thinkers. Are you …

Few people realize it, but secular humanism—the progressive crusade to improve life for all—may be the chief driving force of western civilization. Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. The movement soared three centuries ago in the Enlightenment, when bold thinkers sought to end the divine right of kings and …

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 …

Beyond Humanity was the title of a book I coauthored in 1996 with Earl Cox. It was an early look at the possibility, if not probability, that in the not too distant future, quite possibly in this century, self-aware devices of extreme intelligence will be developed. If such a thing happens, the book predicted, it …

There has been much loose talk of late about an impending civil war in the United States. For some desperate individuals, our stark political differences—compounded or, indeed, caused by differences in education, socioeconomic status, and religious (or nonreligious) belief—are so extreme that one’s opponents are not regarded merely as antagonists to be defeated at the …

For the past four years, secular folks have been concerned with the threat posed by White Christian Nationalism and the Trump Administration’s subservience to the religious Right, particularly regarding the appointment of conservatives to the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. The new president is a pious Catholic and regular Mass-attender, so we can …

Congress is currently (as I write this) working on a voting-rights bill. It’s depressing having to say that, because we thought it was done already, years ago, back in 1965. It happened in the wake of a horror known as Bloody Sunday, when state troopers and local police brutally attacked a group of civil rights …

Questions about religious toleration have arisen in many great civilizations, including those of China, India, and the Islamic world. In Western Christendom, however, they became most salient after the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation triggered persecutions and wars across Europe, with such highlights (or lowlights) as the burning of Michael Servetus at the stake in Calvinist Geneva, …

In the Christian imagination, the hardship and suffering that human beings endure is seldom the result of bad luck, natural calamity, ignorance, or the folly of imperfect human beings. It is a function of intentionally malign forces and diabolical conspiracies inspired by the Devil. The only consolation is that Satan is destined to be defeated …

I was ten years old and on the verge of theft. We were at Toys “R” Us, and my brother and I both wanted the same action figure. I considered this wasteful, because our trips to the store were incredibly rare, and we shared all the toys we had at home. The problem was that …

In his 2015 book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom, Michael Shermer makes a well-supported argument that the secular domain has done more good for the world than the domain of religion. He writes: “The scientific revolution led to the Age of Reason and to the Enlightenment …

It is the most important historical statistic that remains almost entirely unknown. Like nothing else, this terrible fact guts the moral claims of those speculators who proclaim to honorably worship a noble and righteous creator/power. It has untapped potential to accelerate the already rapid decline of the illusion that is theism. It is a figure …

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 …

On January 20, on his blog Ask the Atheist, CFI Los Angeles Executive Director Jim Underdown was asked the following question: What did you think of the inauguration? Kind of godly, wasn’t it? William G., Wheaton, Illinois Here’s Underdown’s answer: (sigh) Look, overall, I thought it was great. The themes of unification, truth, resolve, equality—all …

Josh Lyman in The West Wing described Friday as “take out the trash day.” On Friday, the fictional White House would release as many of its bad news stories as possible in the knowledge that they would be reported in Saturday’s newspapers, because (so the thinking went) no one reads Saturday’s papers. For the past …

OK, we’re down. It was bumpy but we seem to be in one piece. Let’s take a deep breath and then check for damage. One big piece of good news right off the top: He didn’t launch the nukes. That was never a sure thing, and there were plenty of times when I, for one, …

Back during the Paleocene Epoch (we call it August/September 2020), in my FI column, I told you all to vote, dammit, because seculars have a long and sad history of voting at per capita rates way below those of theoconservatives. This is why the Republican minority has repeatedly won the presidency, houses of Congress, and …

Humanists who read magazines such as this one might be puzzled by the existence of something called “posthumanism,” sometimes called “critical posthumanism,” and by its hostility toward what posthumanists call “humanism.” So, why do posthumanists have a beef with whatever they understand humanism to be? Posthumanism is grounded in traditions of continental philosophy that have …

Why did supernatural religion decline rapidly in western democracies, especially in America, in the past quarter-century? Many sociologists attribute the transformation to prosperity, good health, and the governmental safety net. Affluent, secure, comfortable people have less urge to seek divine help, they contend. In contrast, religion remains strong in poor, unhealthy, less-developed places where life …

For all the damage Donald Trump has done, he achieved something no one else has. He exposed for all time what many strongly suspected but had limited evidence of—the deep, cynical depravity of theism, especially of the right-wing flavor. For millennia, theists have claimed (without verification) that worshipping a righteous deity is necessary to give …

Our elation at the humiliating defeat of Donald Trump is tempered by our disgust at the contemptible and hypocritical appointment of the extreme Catholic Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court by the Republican-controlled Senate, only weeks before the election. During the theater of the absurd that passed for confirmation hearings, Democrats missed the opportunity …