Category: Op-Ed

It’s probably old news by now, but as I write this, the one-man assault on Discovery Channel’s Maryland headquarters that ended in the killing by police of hostage-taker James Lee is literally yesterday’s news. It is a story rich in inconvenient truths, starting with the uncomfortable fact that Lee was apparently a Friend, or local …

In “Sen v. Bauer: On What Do Rights Stand?” (FI, June/July 2010), I examined the basis of so-called natural rights under various forms of political economy. Reader Stephen E. Silver responded with a letter in which he commented, in part: . . . Human rights do not stand on anything. These rights, when first promulgated …

Some defenders of religion have argued that religion is like sex—efforts to repress or eradicate it are futile, unrealistic, and inhuman because it’s part of human nature. Repressing religion is like repressing sex—it is not only impossible, it’s disastrous. Like sex, religion doesn’t go away; it comes back with a vengeance in the most outlandish …

I have been a vegetarian for almost as long as I have been an atheist. By age fourteen, I had made the conscious decision not to consume any animals, and I have not eaten meat since. For the most part, I have not made a habit of flaunting my decades-long vegetarianism or harassing others about …

If a pollster asked how much you give to charity, what would you say? Some pretty exhaustive analyses from Arthur Brooks (a professor of business and government policy at Syracuse University) suggest that if you’re nonreligious, the figure you’ll report to the pollster will likely be smaller, on average, than the numbers claimed by the …

Early in 2010, multiple news articles described how some Latinos are converting to Islam, apparently a new trend among Latinos in the United States. Because Latinos are an overwhelmingly Christian ethnic group, an increase in Latinos identifying with Islam is by itself an interesting subject. It is even more interesting because the media’s coverage of …

The argument about whether or not to have a memorial mosque in the vicinity of the Ground Zero of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on downtown New York City is currently being conducted on lines that are distressingly simplistic. As with some similar disputes in Europe, it seems to pit chauvinistic and xenophobic forces …

From the very moment of its invention by Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity has been in need of reinvention. So unpalatable was the religion of Jesus that the overwhelming success of Christianity could not have been possible had it not been for the ingenuity of the Catholic Church. To triumph, the Church had to obscure the …

What is going on in the drug and device industry? Hardly a month goes by without a medication or medical device being identified as having dangerous side-effects, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) holding hearings, lawyers taking out ads looking for victims, class-action suits getting filed, or patients being left to talk with their equally …

Last May, a team of scientists led by Craig Venter announced that they had created a synthetic form of life: a bacterium with a genome designed and created from chemicals in a laboratory. They thus brought us a step closer to an ancient alchemists’ dream: the artificial creation of life. The new bacterium, nicknamed “Synthia,” …

Since the 1950s, I’ve been reporting on education from the pre-kindergarten to college and university levels. But I’ve been remiss in not exploring law schools—though I’ve lectured at some of them. I will report on them from now on, however—after sixty-nine of the two hundred law school deans in the country wrote the Senate Judiciary …

What happens to the soul when the brain is split in half? Well, if you define the soul as a person’s essential personality, then science can give an answer. Remarkably, patients whose brain hemispheres have been surgically separated act as though they have two separate consciousnesses residing in the same body. What’s more, it seems …

  A lot of people say atheists don’t donate to charity, and that’s of course a load of bollocks. We just don’t do it in the name of atheism or in the hope of adding another sheeple to the herd. -A post on the U.K.-Skeptics blog Pardon the length of this essay: I’ll be tackling …

The sound of collapsing scenery from the general direction of the Vatican is deafening enough, but it is nothing compared with the screeching noises given off by the pope’s apologists. One gets the sense that some sort of desperate “line of the day” was promulgated around the time of Easter and that it was agreed …

If you type “genetic testing” into a search engine and take a quick trip around the Internet, you will be in for quite a journey. You will find companies offering to test your DNA so that you can trace your genealogy back across the eons of time. Some offer to find you a mate by …

Have facts ever been less relevant in political debates? Have fictions ever been harder to disprove? Contempt for what an aide to George W. Bush famously called the “reality-based community” is an old story by now, although, thanks partly to Fox News and leading propagandists on the Right (Palin and Limbaugh, among others), it’s a …

Having often walked up the marble steps to the massive bronze front doors of the Supreme Court while interviewing Justice William Brennan for a New Yorker profile and for my book Living the Bill of Rights, I was startled to see in the May 3 Washington Post that the doors have been permanently locked. We …

It looks like both the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish and the German neo-Marxist Jürgen Habermas have concluded that human communities cannot cut it without religion or—at least in Fish’s view—that something is missing from the view that human communities could do quite well without it, that a secular culture can be just fine all …

A few years ago, after reading an essay in The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) by a respected Pennsylvania State University professor of meteorology,* I felt that itchy-finger sensation common to every writer when a hot retort is in order. At the time, I was a practicing broadcast meteorologist with modest BA and …

Pedophilia among Catholic priests—and the stonewalling of same among church prelates—is back in the headlines. Now the allegations come not just from North America or Ireland but from across the first world. And now the pope himself is under scrutiny for his possible role (back in his salad days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in derailing …

Last year, we published a syndicated column on the development of robots and raised the question of whether robots could be conscious and, if so, whether they would have rights. The topic is evidently a sensitive one with some Christians because it seems to threaten the unique status of human beings. We will here review …

All through elementary school, I recited the mandatory New York State school prayer, every day. I can still remember my relief at its mysterious elimination. No one told us that the Supreme Court had invalidated the prayer (in Engel v. Vitale, in 1962); our teachers simply expunged it from our morning routine. I had always hated …

In an effort to distinguish his administration from the rhetoric of global tyranny characteristic of his predecessor’s, President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that America’s foreign policy is not bent on imposing American values and culture on the world. Instead, he says that the goal of American foreign policy is to defend universal values—values that …

A year ago, I published an essay in Free Inquiry in which I affirmed that porn is generally a healthy art form (yes, art form) that hurts no one and possibly even benefits society by providing safe outlets for the otherwise-frustrated sexual energy of the populace.* A letter from a female reader accused me of …

In February, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a report showing that although American youth have lost the church-going habits of their parents, they retain strong religious beliefs. In other words, they believe in God but don’t belong to a church—a pattern long associated with European society. Meanwhile in Europe, we’ve learned …

Secular humanists often assert that they offer something more than critiquing religion, that they have a “positive outlook” and offer affirmative alternatives to religion. When I encounter statements of this sort, I admit I am sometimes puzzled—particularly when what follows these words is some recitation of vague principles to which religious individuals can subscribe as …

In January 2010, I was a guest on the excellent national radio show hosted by the devout Christian Hugh Hewitt. The people of Port-au-Prince had just been buried in rubble, and his first question to me was rightly about the calamity that had overtaken an already miserable Haiti. I informed him that the former presidential …

When you think of hunger strikes, two images likely come to mind. In 1980, seven Northern Irish Republican prisoners launched a hunger strike in Belfast’s Maze prison. They were protesting the revocation of their prisoner-of-war status by the British government. This initial hunger strike led to a series of others, during which Bobbie Sands became …

In this issue, I turn my space over to a guest columnist, Dr. Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, who teaches ethics at the University of Lodz, in Poland. The column below first appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland’s leading newspapers. Dr. de Lazari-Radek, who also did the English translation, tells me that the article received an …

Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education (Rutgers University Press) is a new book that should be of interest to at least some public school students and their parents. Its publication performs a ne eded public service. In this anthology, editors Torin Monahan and Rodolfo Torres and other academics around the nation ask: …

As I write, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is threatening to suspend adoption, homeless-shelter, and health-care related services to some sixty-eight thousand beneficiaries, including about a third of the metro area’s homeless population. Why all the drama? A proposed local same-sex marriage law, partway through the process of enactment, would compel Catholic Charities …

A majority of Americans profess respect for science, according to a recent Pew Forum report: 84 percent of people surveyed agree that “science’s effect on society” is “mostly positive.” That’s a finding likely to be met with skepticism by many secularists, who blame religion for what they believe is widespread hostility to science. Considering religion’s …

The Code of Ethics of the American Nursing Association contains some stirring language when it comes to you and me. Provision 2.1 of the Code, entitled “Primacy of Patient’s Interests,” states unequivocally that the nurse’s “primary commitment is to the recipient of nursing and healthcare services.” The American Medical Association and other medical groups invoke …

Toward the end of a recent debate between myself and a believing Presbyterian fundamentalist, my opponent offered the following poem from C.S. Lewis: Lead us, Evolution, lead us Up the future’s endless stair; Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us For stagnation is despair: Groping, guessing, yet progressing, Lead us nobody knows where. The …

Years ago, while on the education beat, I was in the office of Tony Alvarado, then head of the New York City school system. The standardized test scores on reading had just come in, and they were collectively higher. But Alvarado looked glum. “When,” he asked me, “are we going to teach them how to …

The story goes like this: a woman wants a healthy, attractive baby, so she finds a man with the proper specifications and takes him home. The man, perhaps sensing his paramour’s ulterior motive, insists upon an alternative (read, oral) method of sexual congress in order to protect himself from undesired fatherhood. After the man completes …

It’s unlikely that we will ever know how many people were wrongly and summarily imprisoned, tortured, or otherwise abused in the aftermath of 9/11, but we do know that illegalities were systemic. A report by the Justice Department’s inspector general released back in 2003 documented the wrongful, abusive, extended detention of immigrants (often on minor …

Thirty years in, the question we still hear most often at the Council for Secular Humanism is “What is secular humanism?” A cynical observer might find that pathetic: “What, your Council has been at this for thirty years, and most people still don’t know what it stands for?” For my part, I actually find it …

The July 2009 arrest in New York of Izhak Rosenbaum, a gray-haired Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to act as a broker in a deal to buy a kidney for $160,000, coincided with the passage of a law in Singapore that some say will open the way for organ trading there. In 2008, Singapore …

The death of Irving Kristol on September 18, 2009, at the age of eighty-nine is a reminder of the long and tragic journey that American conservatism has taken. Kristol is the founder of American neoconservatism, which replaced the old-fashioned conservatism associated with the so-called Rockefeller Republicans. The latter was not ideological: its policies were not …