Category: Op-Ed

Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have adamantly opposed Turkey’s bid to join the European Union on the grounds that Turkey, a Muslim nation, does not belong in Christian Europe. They worry that the i nclusion of Turkey, coupled with Muslim migrations into Europe and the declining European birthrate, will undermine the Christian character …

I write these words in July, during a week in which the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Senator Barack Obama, has repeatedly emphasized his Christian faith. For example, Obama has declared that after he placed his “trust in Christ,” he learned that Christ “could set me on the path to eternal life when I submitted …

In the old days, politicians would slip preachers some hundreds under the table, and preachers would deliver the flock on election day. It was borderline illegal, but at least it left the Constitution alone. The same could not be said of the Bush administration’s faith-based initiative, a political bribe to the religious Right that put …

In the middle of July, just as I was about to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, I received a call from an Australian radio station asking if I would comment on the Roman Catholic Church’s sponsorship of World Youth Day. I couldn’t at first guess what this bizarre event in Sydney …

The conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza is on a mission to debate atheists on the topic of the existence of God. Challenging all the prominent ones he can find, he has debated Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. I accepted his invitation, and the debate took place at Biola University. The name “Biola” comes from …

Sometimes, I will go out of my way to visit one of those outlet malls. Not only do they have some pretty good deals, but often I can find clothing that actually fits me—slightly oversized sweaters or short-sleeve shirts seem to get dumped there for the likes of me. I was driving up I-85 in …

To some readers of Free Inquiry, this atheist’s most controversial columns have examined the growing culture of death—for example, my questioning of who will decide when our quality of life is defined by doctors and hospitals as so irreversibly dismal that termination will be a kindness to us. In this culture, doctor-assisted suicide has become …

“Big Bang of Words Follows Vatican’s OK to Believe in E.T.,” screamed the Chicago Tribune headline (May 18, 2008). “Just like there is an abundance of creatures on earth, there could also be other beings, even intelligent ones, that were created by God,” said Jesuit priest and astronomer Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican …

If Christians widen their world picture to include intelligent aliens, the next questions are unavoidable: Do the ETs have souls? Do they need salvation? Science-fiction writer James Blish (1921–1975) pondered those questions in A Case of Conscience, which won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel of 1959. In it, a Jesuit missionary to a …

  Opponents of gay rights often warn that legalizing same-sex marriage would inexorably lead to legalizing polygamy. Maybe it would, and maybe it should. Denying gay couples the right to marry violates state constitutional guarantees of equality, as the California and Massachusetts high courts have rightly ruled. (The Supreme Court of California also held that …

The sixtieth anniversary of the statehood of Israel is a useful occasion to review the relationship between Jewishness and secularism. It’s a noticeable fact that in the atheist and agnostic ranks of many countries, Jews are very much in the fore. It is so noticeable, indeed, that I was recently asked by the Spertus Institute …

During his recent visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a series of speeches that reverberated with a strange tone of unreality. He presented his church as a champion of religious freedom and tolerance as if his American audience, and the whole world, were in the grip of the most dreadful case of …

The news that a team of researchers in New York (led by Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center) had genetically altered a human embryo stirred up quite an ethical controversy. Commentators have warned that this experiment is the first step toward designer babies …

My last two op-eds generated unusually strong response, which I’ll acknowledge and answer here. Consider this my feedback to the feedback of others. The Why of Ponzi My December 2007/January 2008 essay, “Beyond Ponzi Economics,” focused on the population crisis (yes, there is one). I asked whether economic models exist that neither demand nor presume …

The most recently published findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life have been garnering attention for one principal reason, and receiving insufficient attention for a less evident one. To take the more obvious reason first, the latest research shows that religious allegiance in the United States is much weaker than most people …

  Pneumonia used to be called “the old man’s friend,” because it often brought a swift and relatively painless end to a life that was already of poor quality and would otherwise have continued to decline. Now a study of severely demented patients in U.S. nursing homes in the Boston, Massachusetts, area shows that the …

  We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know. —W.H. Auden (The Week, November 16, 2002) The most popular of ethical viewpoints clearly seems to be altruism. What does altruism amount to? As philosopher W. G. Maclagan put it in an article in The …

Below, the author concludes her examination, begun in the last issue of Free Inquiry, of the negative effect of religion on conscience. —EDS. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX established a system of “legal” investigations to stamp out heresy. The Dominicans (Domini Canes, or Hounds of the Lord) were granted the exclusive “privilege” of conducting the …

Below we present the conclusion to Richard Dawkins’s foreword to The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Free Inquiry editor Tom Flynn (the first part was published in the February/March 2008 issue of Free Inquiry). Dr. Dawkins composed this foreword before completing his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. Readers familiar with that work may recognize …

When I initially informed Tom Flynn of my desire to respond critically to his editorial in the last issue of Free Inquiry (“Why the ‘A’ Word Won’t Go Away,” February/March 2008), he shot back in jest, “Only if you begin your response with an admission that my logic is incontrovertible.” Flynn certainly weaves a seductive …

Insufficient attention has been given to the role of religion in helping to impose and reinforce the largest and fastest-growing dictatorial system in the modern world. I am referring to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is well on its way to becoming a one-party system to rival the former Communist one, with a police apparatus to …

Although the Japanese have called off plans to kill fifty humpback whales (at least for a year or two), their whaling fleet will still kill nearly one thousand whales of other species this year. In response to international protests, the Japanese have responded that the West is trying to impose its values on other countries. …

Americans are virtually unanimous in their professed support for free speech, according to the Freedom Forum’s 2007 report, “The State of the First Amendment.” Ninety-eight percent of survey respondents agreed that “the right to speak freely about whatever you want” is “essential” or, at least, “important.” But this strong expression of support for the idea …

In 1970, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned: “If we create today traditions of spying on people, the time may not be too far distant when a person can hardly speak his mind to any other person witho ut being afraid that the police or someone else will hear what he says and therefore know …

The voice of conscience is widely considered a noble guide to moral conduct, but not everyone agrees that it is reliable. Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor” whose philosophy became the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, did not totally trust conscience as a guide to action. He thought that conscience was intimately connected to the …

Culminating five years of development, Prometheus Books has released The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Free Inquiry editor Tom Flynn. Richard Dawkins provided the work’s foreword, reprinted in part below, which he composed before completing the manuscript of his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. Readers familiar with that work may recognize earlier versions of …

  Sam Harris dropped a bomb at a recent atheist convention by suggesting that those who embrace the label “atheist” “are consenting to be viewed as a cranky subculture.” In the last FREE INQUIRY, no lesser an authority than Paul Kurtz agreed (p. 8), warning secular humanists against “accepting the label of ‘atheist.’” But do …

Four years ago, I took the position of executive director here at the Council for Secular Humanism. The job intrigued me, faced as we were at the time with political and social challenges that seemed, frankly, insurmountable. President George W. Bush was at the height of his popularity, and his outrageous affronts to secularism, as …

I remember Professor Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great Polish intellectual dissidents from the Stalinist period, saying that when he debated with apologists for the system, he often found himself almost on the losing side. This was because the arguments of his opponents were so antiquated that he’d forgotten what the original refutations were. (Another …

When Dolly the cloned sheep’s existence was revealed to the world ten years ago, panic ensued. World leaders, including presidents Clinton and Bush, the pope, and numerous prime ministers, spent the next few months condemning Dolly’s creation and warning about the horror of human cloning. At the time, my view was that there was no …

In modern liberal democracies in which freedom of inquiry and discussion is widely respected, one issue is still difficult to discuss freely. Long after it has become commonplace to discuss previously taboo topics like the existence of God or sex outside marriage, the intersection of genetics and intelligence remains an intellectual minefield. Though I would …

An array of reports and studies—not to mention Jay Leno’s impromptu questioning of college students on NBC’s Tonight Show—make it alarmingly clear that from grammar school to graduate school, and across the country at large, many Americans are educationally left behind in their knowledge of the basic constitutional, individual liberties. You know—the liberties we are …

Does the First Amendment protect the right to make statements that might be construed falsely as solicitations or offers of child pornography? The Supreme Court confronts this question this term in U.S. v. Willia ms, a case that doesn’t bode well for free speech. In 2003, Congress passed a child pornography law (the PROTECT Act) …

Can we be good without God? That’s a very old question believers like to ask because, I suspect, the answer is very pleasing to them. No, they say, we cannot be good without believing in an invisible spirit who, like Santa Claus, knows when we’ve been bad or good. No invisible spirit, no reward or …

Though some religious activists keep claiming that America was “founded as a Christian nation,” the historical proofs are opposite and in writing. The activists say the Declaration of Independence proves the “Christian nation” claim because it cites our God and Creator; but the purpose of the Declaration was to cite the source of our right …

Few ideas serve more wicked purposes than “fairness.” In public policy, it is probably the most overused justification for increasing the power of some people over others, for meddling in others’ private lives, and for being guiltlessly resentful. Yes, there is some virtue to fairness, as when teachers grade and parents divide the dessert fairly. …

As I read Tibor Machan’s assault on fairness, I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. Surely he must be jesting; surely his tongue is in his cheek. He caricatures the moral principle of fairness, considering it a “minor virt ue,” while at the same time appealing to it in order to justify his opposition to the …

As modern cultures become more secular, celebrities seem to fill the roles once occupied by the gods of old. Sometimes the differences between the two start to blur. Some people insist Elvis never died. Or was that Jim Morrison? The recent tributes to Princess Diana ten years after her death show that she is starting …

We live in a culture of increasing alienation. We are estranged from our friends, families, and communities. Work may overwhelm and exhaust us, leaving us little time to commune with others. There are challenges to developing relationships with our coworkers—the average worker now entering the U.S. workforce can expect to have ten jobs by the …

Last year, during a panel on the judiciary in Washington sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation, Justice Antonin Scalia contemptuously expressed—as the The Washington Post reported—“disdain for the news media and general reading public [for] inaccurate portrayals of federal judges and courts”— including the highest court in the land, whose decisions can affect millions …