Category: Op-Ed

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 …

In the first part of this essay (FI, August/September 2007), Richard Daw -kins offered responses to some of the criticisms of his “surprise best-seller,” The God Delusion, from reviewers. Here-with, his responses continue. — Eds. “You are just as much of a fundamentalist as those you criticize.” No, please, it is all too easy to …

Recently, our colleague and friend Matt Nisbet reopened an old wound by suggesting on his blog, Framing Science, that atheism is not a civil rights issue. Nisbet’s post referenced an article written by Austin Dacey and D.J. Grothe that appeared in the February/March 2004 issue of Free Inquiry, titled “Atheism Is Not a Civil Rights …

Even as a series of car-bomb attacks (apparently planned by Islamist members of the medical profession) were convulsing the United Kingdom, an outbreak of torrential rain in Yorkshire left thousands of people homeless across the northern part of the country. British weather is notoriously bad but seldom freakish, so another opportunity presented itself for speculation …

Can a public figure have a private life? In the United States, it seems the answer is no. But not all countries answer the question in the same way. In the French presidential run-off election last May, both candidates successfully kept their domestic lives separate from their appeals for votes. Although Ségolène Royal lost, no one …

Reporter Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize this year for revealing how George W. Bush has used “signing statements” as he signed certain bills into law. Those presidential signing statements absolve him from having to actually obey those laws. Acting on what he regards as his “unitary executive” power to bypass …

The television documentary A Brief  History of Disbelief, which originally aired on BBC Four in 2005, was premiered for the American public on May 4, 2007, on select PBS stations and subsequently shown nationwide through October. The three-part series, written and narrated by the distinguished British entertainer and intellectual Jonathan Miller, was brought to American television …