Category: Op-Ed

So what is this atheism that upsets so many people? It is really just the refusal to believe in God because of the absence of sufficient reasons. It is a nonbelief—not something believed to be the case. Thus there can be atheists with a great variety of different outlooks on innumerable topics. They are all …

Does God hate Texas? As I write this in early September 2011, the state is being ravaged by wildfires after suffering through a devastating drought during the historic heat wave of the spring and summer . Is God laughing at Texas? The fires have been fueled by the winds of tropical storm Lee, which is …

If God is powerful enough to stop earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis, then why doesn’t he? In the first part of this essay (FI, October/November 2011), I argued that C.S. Lewis, in his efforts to resolve this “problem of evil,” ends up defending a hideous God who purposely inflicts gruesome suffering and death on innocent …

The putative link between religion and happiness is fiercely contested. Richard Dawkins is on record as calling it “dangerous nonsense,” while Christopher Hitchens opines that religion does “not make its adherents happy.” And yet if you take a broad cross section of Americans and ask them if they are satisfied with their lives, you’ll find …

In the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, billboards boasted that the end of the world as we know it—the “Rapture,” to be exact—was upon us. Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster and self-proclaimed eschatologist who previously had predicted judgment days on May 21, 1988, and September 7, 1994, had decreed the new 2011 …

Apparently, this is all the rage among the cool kids nowadays: condense a subject down to such a short summary that you could explain it during a short elevator ride. On the one hand, it shortchanges ideas that take years to even adequately grasp and panders to short attention spans. On the other hand, it’s …

Thirty-four-year-old Bei Bei Shuai came to Indianapolis from China ten years ago. She opened a restaurant, met a guy, and planned to get married. But last year she found out that the man was already married and was unwilling to leave his wife for her. She was so depressed that just before Christmas, on December …

It seems to me nothing short of extraordinary and embarrassing that a well-advertised white-supremacist lunatic should have had the time to assemble the ingredients of what seem like two possible fertilizer detonations—the most commonplace type, that is to say—and then to explode them in a vulnerable part of the capital city of a Scandinavian democracy. …

The so-called problem of evil belongs to Christianity in a way that it does not belong to Judaism or Islam. In Judaism and Islam, God’s power is fundamental, but his goodness is questionable. When the God of the Old Testament behaves badly, the Israelites usually talk back. Every time God decides to slay the Israelites …

Since leaving the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor has been devoting much of her time and passion to spurring the education of our young as to what it means to be American—even while civics classes continue to diminish with results, she says, that are “predictably dismal.” (See also my column, “Our Constitution: How Many of …

The typical American really does not like atheists—and is not afraid to say so. According to a Gallup poll in June of this year, only 49 percent of Americans would vote for an atheist for president. Atheists are at the bottom of the pile, below gays and Mormons, and so it’s hardly surprising that few …

Editors’ Note: Jason Torpy, president of Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, was invited to reply to Tom Flynn’s editorial in this issue. Humanist chaplains can afford the humanist movement a high-visibility stamp of approval from the government. When President Barack Obama mentioned “nonbelievers” in his inaugural address, nonbelievers spent months patting themselves on the …

On Friday, July 22, I had the amazing opportunity to stand up at a nationally televised town hall meeting at the University of Maryland and tell President Barack Obama that I am an atheist—with a smile on my face. Then I asked him why he was still allowing faith-based organizations that receive taxpayer funding to …

American mainstream media have long criticized discrimination against Jews, African Americans, and Hispanics, yet they’ve been doing an excellent job of playing down, if not outright ignoring, chronic bigotry against atheists. The rarity of atheist-friendly op-eds on major papers’ opinion pages has been a reflection of this bias. Having conducted groundbreaking research on the links …

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 …

Reporting on the capture of the mass-murdering General Ratko Mladic by the Serbian government on Memorial Day, the New York Times summarized the newly created political situation like this: “Critical questions remain about precisely who protected Mr. Mladic. The pro-Western government of President Boris Tadic says it will investigate, a politically delicate examination that could …

Fifty years after the onset of the modern feminist movement, sexual violence remains a primary issue, especially for young women asserting their right to dress or undress as they choose. The “slut walk” is the latest protest gimmick, inspired by the stupidity of a Toronto police officer who advised women (rather unoriginally) to “avoid dressing …

Why has there been so much hype in the ongoing debate about public funding for stem cell research in the United States? The answer is simple and can be summarized in one word: abortion. Some forms of stem cell research involving the use of embryos require embryo destruction to extract a stem cell. Others, involving …

One of the pleasanter changes in morals and manners over the last few decades has been the marginalization of ugly talk about “the Xs”—the Jews, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the queers. Thoughtful people don’t talk like that anymore, and what a relief that is, grumbles about political correctness notwithstanding. The old style now reeks of …

On May 4, Bob Barr, a conservative Republican constitutionalist, wrote a blog post whose headline should define a fundamental issue in the 2012 elections: “With Bin Laden Dead, It’s Time to Restore the Bill of Rights” (The Barr Code, May 4, 2011). I was not surprised at the source of this call. When President Bill …

Although this article was written prior to the political unrest in Egypt and the fall of the government of Hosni Mubarak, we are assured by the author that the situation described here has not materially changed. —Eds. Many middle-class women in Egypt, who entered the work force after being granted the right to equal employment …

Students can now study secularity. They can even get a degree in it. Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, has formally approved the formation of a secular studies department – the first such department in the United States, and I think, the world. I’m very proud to be a part of …

Like many writers, I suspect, I have long been in love with the sound of my own sentences. But lately, even on a good day they provide at best a guilty pleasure; with everybody incessantly talking about everything, silence seems the better part of valor. (“Too much is sufficient,” my grandfather once said, and we …

A theme that often comes up in commentaries about contemporary American culture is the absence of firmly grounded and widely embraced basic values among the citizenry. While Americans have a coherent and stable enough legal tradition—albeit always a bit flawed and now in the process of gradual erosion—they seem to lack a basic ethics by …

Although exaggerated and flawed, the “Orientalist discourse” contains an undeniable kernel of truth. What is the Orientalist discourse? What are its flaws? And has it been dealt a death blow by the revolutions in the Arab world? The Orientalist discourse is a fancy term that was popularized by Edward Said in his celebrated book, Orientalism …

Ten years ago, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote a book that had the rare distinction—for a book by a sociologist—of causing shock waves in the mainstream media. In the book, Bowling Alone, he described how all the little social interactions that define a community—meeting with friends, knowing our neighbors, belonging to active organizations, and discussing local …

On the day the 112th Congress was seated, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life reported on its religious composition. Pew’s press release reported that “the 112th Congress, like the U.S. public, is majority Protestant and about a quarter Catholic. Baptists and Methodists are the largest Protestant denominations in the new Congress, …

I don’t think that a single newspaper or magazine article on Egypt has ever failed to mention the presence, in the wings of Egyptian politics, of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s one of those learned references that is de rigueur for every commentator and analyst. Yet it was notable, as both the Egyptian and the Tunisian …

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced a plan to create a new program to jump-start the development of new drugs and therapies. The new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences will have the mission of trying to bring promising basic NIH research closer to clinical trials. To make this …

A humanist friend of mine recently learned that his reputation had been unfairly tarnished many years ago when he was in medical school. Somehow, his name had become associated with a bizarre and infamous prank. The incident featured several of his male classmates, who, drunk on at least testosterone, sneaked into the morgue one night, …

In an effort to defend religion against the well-aimed broadsides of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, some have argued that the “new atheists” are liberals who are disturbingly unaware of the debt that their values owe to Christianity. In particular, John Gray and Terry Eagleton maintain that the celebration of liberty and individuality has its …

Let me introduce you to Mr. Smart and Heroman. Mr. Smart is really, really clever—so clever that he knows everything, like what’s inside a closed box. Heroman is not so smart, but he does have a special power: Heroman has X-ray vision—he can see inside the closed box. Mr. Smart and Heroman played a starring …

In my reporting on schools over the years, I’ve become aware that some students have hearing problems that have made them appear shy or uninvolved. One day, after a while spent wondering about the continually silent girl in the back of the room, I asked her to please come to the front of the room. …

In a college English class that I was teaching, filled mostly with African American and Hispanic students, a reading assignment prompted a discussion of ethnic minorities’ economic disadvantages in the United States. Assuming we were all on the same page, as a “liberal” I couldn’t resist weighing in and expressing my own professorial indignation on …

One of the pleasures of trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the religious worldview is noticing the convolutions that this view keeps inflicting upon itself. Last November brought news of two small but significant developments of this kind, both tending to vindicate the essential atheist or materialist contention that religion is …

“The Catholic Church: More Sinned Against Than Sinner?” That was the question posed at a panel discussion in which I participated during the 2010 Battle of Ideas, an annual event in London. You might consider the question absurd because the answer is obvious, but in Britain, angry demonstrations against the 2010 papal visit and colorful …

The United States has been dragged kicking and screaming by the Obama administration into enacting health-reform legislation. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law on March 23, 2010; its status looked shaky, but it was amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which became law on March 30. The …

Over the past couple of decades, a colleague from a famous university has challenged my view that everyone has the inalienable right to private property. My position, derived from such sources as John Locke, the American founders, Ayn Rand, and many others in the classical liberal/libertarian political tradition, is that in a just human community, …

During the accusatory furor by Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers during the run-up to the midterm elections-which still continues, by the way-I am not aware that any recent partisan critic has called attention to a disturbing exercise of unilateral presidential powers by President Barack Obama. Far from being secret, the exercise of power in question …

Suppose you are a religious bully whose endgame is to stamp out a particular field of scientific inquiry and basically spoil everybody’s fun. Now suppose you’re not dealing with medieval peasantry but rather with a modern public at least superficially educated in science. Your plan would best be served by engaging in very “sciencey” talk …