Category: Op-Ed

In my previous column (Free Inquiry, June/July 2004), I raised the question of the Darwinian survival value of religion. Why, given that natural selection abhors waste and extravagance, is religious behavior a human universal? I discussed various suggestions of direct advantages to religion, all more or less unconvincing, and promised to return to something more …

In the rising resistance against John Ashcroft’s USA Patriot Act and subsequent executive orders revising sections of the Bill of Rights, the attorney general has been particularly irritated by the attention the media are paying to the many librarians around the country who are expunging the records of borrowed books as soon as they are returned—in …

I once heard the late Abba Eban, formerly foreign minister of Israel, address a dovish Jewish audience in New York. In that rather plummy British-English accent of his, he began by saying that what struck the eye first, in any contemplation of the Israel-Palestine dispute, was the simplicity and ease of its solution. That was …

One of the major problems of cities with mild winter climates is the number of homeless people on the street. As social services are being curtailed, almost every large city in the United States has a major problem of dealing with the poor, the mentally ill, the long-term unemployed, the drug addicted, and others who …

“I should like particularly, to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act.”1 Those are the words of Pope John Paul II, speaking in March 2004 to an international congress held in Rome. The conference was on …

The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out. —Walt Whitman, “Carol of Words” On September 19, 2003, I joined Jeff Lowder and Jim Still—both board members of Internet Infidels—on a trek …

When the Supreme Court, 5 to 4, declared the McCain­Feingold campaign finance reform legislation constitutional on December 10, there were hosannas from Common Cause, New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, and other good­government enclaves. The Washington Post called it “one of [the Supreme Court’s] most important decisions in a generation.” The New York Times’ …

Eventually, the exclusion of gay people from the institution of civil marriage will seem as irrational and unjust as laws against interracial marriage; given the relative indifference of the young toward other people’s sexual orientations, time is on the side of gay rights. But, in the meantime, opposition to same­sex civil marriage seems a good …

This is the right historical moment to launch a national offensive against the degeneration of the United States into a theocracy. Pres­sures to subordinate democratic plural­ism to fundamentalist domination have converged into the presidency of George W. Bush. Bush identifies himself as a born­again Christian and continues to violate the Constitution by ladling out govern­ment …

Remember the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitu­tion (presented to the states in 1972, declared dead in 1982)? If you’re like most Americans, you don’t remember it very well. In a survey by the Opinion Research Corporation, 72 percent of respondents said they believed the Constitution already gives men and women equal rights. It …

In the October/November 2003 Free Inquiry, Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett introduced our readers to the Brights movement. Reactions were published in the Letters and Op-ed sections of subsequent issues. Below, Brights’ founders Mynga Futrell and Paul Geisert, Free Inquiry Editor Tom Flynn, and Council for Secular Humanism Executive Director David Koepsell comment on …