Category: Op-Ed

Movies made for young people in recent years tend to share a strong moralistic message: “We human beings are the scourge of the universe!” The 1993 Steven Spielberg blockbuster, Jurassic Park, was no exception. Although Michael Crichton, author of the book on which the movie was based, ended his life as a strong skeptic about …

In “Without Free Will” (Free Inquiry, August/September 2009), Tibor Machan paints a dire picture of what we lose if we don’t have free will. But his imaginings are unfounded. He’s right that most philosophers, many scientists, and even law professors doubt that we have contra-causal free will: that we transcend causality in some respect and …

Several months after Barack Obama’s inauguration as president of the United States, our giddy disbelief has yet to erode. And rightly so. This was an event we thought we might never see, some might say a milestone in our collective ethical trajectory. True, television might have given us the nudge we needed, a fortuitous wooing …

In some magazines, the editor’s message restricts itself to “puffing” all the great articles in the current issue. Free Inquiry is not one of those magazines. But when was the last time you saw an editor’s message devoted to “puffing” an article from the previous issue? In our August/September 2009 issue, psychologist Luke Galen reported …

At the end of June, the New York City Council passed a nonbinding resolution that is sure to mark the beginning of a long and miserable dispute. The resolution called for the addition of two Muslim religious holidays to the number of days that the city’s schoolchildren already get to take as vacation. To this …

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, called himself a “matchmaker.” However, he was not arranging dates for his congregants. Rosenbaum is one of five rabbis indicted for brokering the sale of black-market kidneys and livers. He found poor, vulnerable people in Israel and allegedly paid them $10,000 to travel to …

I was startled to first see deeply buried in the June 13, 2009, New York Times that a federal district court judge in San Francisco had allowed the continuation of the trial of former senior Justice Department official John Yoo on charges of being a key enabler of the torture of American prisoners for the …

We know that doing away with gods and supernatural persons and powers is not an end. It is a means to an end: the real end being the happiness of man. —Robert Green Ingersoll On a small shelf above my desk sits a carving of wood in warm tones of brown and gold. It is …

On May 5 and 6, 2009, several hundred scholars, intellectuals, and interested members of the public attended a special conference on “The Religious-Secul ar Divide: The U.S. Case” at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research. Edited papers from the conference will appear in the Fall 2009 issue of Social Research. The conference was funded in …

The setback at California’s Supreme Court is only a bump in the road. When same-sex marriage becomes legal in Iowa, you know the train has left the station. So irresistible has the momentum become that I predict that within a year, two at most, same-sex marriage will be legal nationwide. That’s a change that seemed …

In 1938, I was bar mitzvahed and also learned about Kristellnacht (the “Night of Glass”) in Berlin—the prelude to the Final Solution. As the Holocaust went on, I had a personal extra-parochial interest in Hitler’s extermination of the Jews because I was growing up in Boston, then the most anti-Semitic city in the country. A …

It’s hard to know if we should characterize as good or bad news a recent Pew Forum survey suggesting that public opinion is fairly evenly split over the legitimacy of torture. Support for torture was disproportionately low among people who do not attend religious services (which may reflect their political affiliations rather than any particular …

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops …

Lots of important people in the sciences and philosophy say that free will—the human capacity to think and do either this or do that—is a myth, a delusion. Some go so far as to recommend revamping the legal system and our ideas of ethics or morality so that concepts of guilt, innocence, responsibility, and so …

In the first part of this essay (Free Inquiry June/July 2009), I argued that the three main ideologies involved in World War II—liberalism, communism, and fascism—were secular grand narratives modeled on the so-called great religions. I focused on the concept of a grand narrative and on liberalism and how its progressive conception of history as …

Three years ago, I wrote an essay for Free Inquiry titled “Thank You, Science” (February/March 2006). I thanked science for orthodontia that straightened my crooked teeth and for antibiotics, without which I would have died of pylenophritis at thirty-three. On behalf of womankind generally, I thanked science for reliable birth control. This scientific innovation has …

In Wendy Kaminer’s op-ed and in this issue’s cover feature, we focus on public funding for faith-based charities. As several writers note, the practice of funneling government money to religious charities began during the Great Society years. Of course, those recipients (organizations such as Catholic Charities) were notably secularized. Incorporated independently of their sponsoring churches, …

When I published The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty earlier this year, I was frequently asked if this isn’t the wrong time to ask affluent people to increase their efforts to end poverty in other countries. Emphatically not, I reply. There is no doubt that the world’s economy is in …

Secularists had reason to be disappointed but not terribly surprised by President Barack Obama’s Bush-lite approach to government funding of sectarian religious groups. In establishing his own White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (the subject of this issue’s cover feature), Obama let stand George Bush’s executive order allowing federally funded religious organizations to …

Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx published the Preface to a Critique of Political Economy (all 1859). So, in 2009, we celebrate (or lament) the 150th anniversary of the roles played by these three big ideas in …

The Templeton Foundation recently announced the recipient of the 2009 Templeton Prize, a £1 million ($1.4 million) award founded by the late U.S. multimillionaire, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Sir John Templeton to honor scientists who make “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” For those not in the …

By now, the majority of you are familiar with the blasphemous theory known as “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) which is fancy talk for claiming that man* is responsible for changes in Earth’s climate. If you are a proper Christian, you are appalled at the very idea. Good news: there are a number of reasons why …

Whenever I hear the word spiritual, I reach for my revolver. Well, not really. But I’ve learned the hard way that on hearing spiritual, it’s good practice to reach for the question, “What precisely do you mean by that?” Philosopher/author Ophelia Benson offered a definition of spiritual as perceptive as any I’ve read: “a way …

As I watched the presidential inaugural address in the freezing but sunlit atmosphere on top of the Voice of America building in Wash­ington, D.C., where I was lucky enough to have secured a media perch, I was at first too impressed by the occasion itself to notice something possibly significant about the speech. It’s not …

How quickly the story shifted. Initially, the birth of eight children to thirty-three-year-old Nadya Suleman was greeted with gushing stories throughout the media. But the story soon went south, as it should have. For the birth of eight babies to a single woman who has six other young children under the age of eight, no …

Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned thirty in 2008. The birth of a “test-tube baby,” as the headlines described in vitro fertilization, was highly controversial at the time. Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of …

All too often in recent weeks, I have run across efforts by various political thinkers and activists to discredit individualism. Some argue that the idea of the individual is a myth created by our society. Others press the notion that the individual is a solitary being whose life is awful, lonely, and dangerous, and so …

Here I come again with an act of free inquiry into a life issue that will cause some readers to ask why the editor publishes this heretical contrarian. I have been an absolutist atheist for some seventy years, never looking back—nor to the heavens for guidance. I am also pro-life, obviously not for religious reasons …

There are two misconceptions about fascism that must be laid to rest. The first is that fascism is the name of German and Italian regimes that are part of the dark history of Europe in the twentieth century. The second is that the appeal of fascism is due to the evil in human nature. I …

I must have a weak spot for quixotic undertakings. That, or a taste for ramming my head against the wall. Why else would I champion strict church-state separation in a country whose new Democratic president wants to modify, not abolish, his predecessor’s initiative to channel public funds to faith-based charities? Why else spend the last …

Please look at the back cover of this magazine. There you will find a list setting forth “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles.” Secular humanism is not a religion, nor is the Council for Secular Humanism a church. We have no dogma and no heretics. There is no humanist pope or hierarchy, nor is …

Twelve-year-old Motl Brody was diagnosed with a highly malignant brain tumor in February of 2008. In June of last year, his parents brought the boy from their home in Brooklyn, New York, to the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. At Children’s, Motl underwent highly invasive, last-ditch brain surgery. It did not work. Motl …

When former Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole launched a last-minute ad falsely accusing her Democratic opponent, now-Senator Kay Hagan, of palling around with atheists, taking their godless money, and attending a secret fund-raiser hosted by the Godless Americans Political Action Committee (PAC), she was sharp­ly criticized in the press for smearing the churchgoing, Sunday school-teaching, God-fearing …

“The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers’ document,” said Woodrow Wil­son before becoming president of the United States. “It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spir it of the age.” During the First World War, the spirit on the home front was fear, and President Wilson …

When I first published my book God Is Not Great, I asked my publishers to issue a challenge to the faithful and to try substituting a debate tour for the usual book tour. One of the first to pick up this gauntlet was Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior …

A seasoned meteorologist once told me that predicting the weather is like depositing a drop of ink in a swimming pool and projecting the drop’s future movements, dispersions, and flow . . . while thousands of hyperactive kids play Marco Polo in the water. Weather forecasting is famously and necessarily inexact in a way that …

In his editorial (“The Two Imperatives of Planetary Ethics,” page 6) Paul Kurtz emphatically calls for secular humanists—and humans generally—to take action against oceanic dead zones and global poverty. Coastal-water eutrophication leads a grim lineup of ecological threats: global warming; freshwater depletion; and contamination by antibiotic residues, synthetic chemicals, and heavy metals, to name only …

A random observation: members and supporters of secular (humanist/atheist/freethought, etc.) organizations are seldom reluctant to voice their disagreement with a particular point of view. This is not necessarily bad. In fact, it can be a desirable trait, at least when contrasted with the submissiveness one sometimes finds among the religious. Nonetheless, a tendency to be …

When people say “Money is the root of all evil,” they don’t usually mean that it is money itself that is the root of evil. Like Paul, from whom the quote comes, they have in mind the love of money. Could money itself, whether we are greedy for it or not, be a problem? Karl …

“Some Americans question religion’s role in politics,” the Pew Forum announced in August 2008, citing new survey evidence that a “narrow majority” of the public agreed that “churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters.” Pew speculated that increased skepticism about church involvement in politics reflected “frustration and disillusionment among social …