Category: Op-Ed

I’m intrigued by Zen meditation as a supposed path to enlightenment. I’ve tried repeatedly—lying silent in bed, blanking out my mind, hearing nothing but the rhythm of my breathing, seeing nothing but dark blurs behind my eyelids. But all it does is put me to sleep. In the end, I never get a smidgen of …

For those unfamiliar with The Babylon Bee, the website bills itself as “the trusted news source for Christian satire.” During my twelve-year tenure with The Wittenburg Door, a now-defunct national religious satire magazine, I learned from my editor, Robert Darden, that the role of a religious satirist is to hold a mirror to the institutional …

The separation of church and state requires a government to be neutral in matters of religion. Such a government does not enact laws that are either overtly or historically traceable to concepts grounded only in religious beliefs, without any independent empirical verification. For those of us who are devoted to attaining this legal ideal, Justice …

Writing for a bimonthly magazine can be frustrating. As I wrote my first draft, the U.S. presidential campaign was still raging; conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court; and COVID-19 infection rates fluctuated while schools, colleges, and universities opened to varying degrees and as northerners began spending more time indoors. By …

While American secularists’ attention has been fixed on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions undermining church-state separation, there have been major developments on the international scene that warrant our concern and attention. In Turkey, the demagogic Islamist President Tayyip Erdoğan has continued his campaign to undermine the secular state established by Kemal Atatürk. On the regional …

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his notebook (titled Meditations by Victorian translators, but he never called it that): Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear … Things themselves touch not the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they admission to the soul, nor can …

Political realism beseeches us to accept the world as it is. It acknowledges the difficulties that human beings encounter in a world without established laws, a global policeman, or a preordained history. Nevertheless, realism eschews the project of defeating all evil, overthrowing all dictators, and transforming the world. Such conservative instincts are at odds with …

More often than not, cultural products such as novels, movies, paintings, photographs, and songs are open to multiple interpretations. At the same time, it’s not a case of anything goes. Intelligent, well-informed interpretation takes place against an understanding of artistic traditions and cultural contexts. Skilled interpreters of contemporary literature, for example, might disagree among themselves …

Passover is horrible. How could anyone celebrate because the Jewish tribal god massacred Egyptian children in a huge infanticide while sparing Hebrew tots? That’s sickening. But there’s little need to fret about it, because the Old Testament account of Exodus is mere fiction. Archeologists find no evidence that Jews ever suffered slavery in Egypt or …

We’ve always had this problem with freedom—this problem of what do we think we mean by it? Especially, what do we think we mean by it when we are slaveholders? It jumps right out at you, after all. It can’t help it. Right there at the beginning, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: …

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, first published in 1859, is a preeminent, almost unrivaled contribution to liberal thought. It is a splendid defense of our freedom to live in unconventional, perhaps eccentric, ways—provided we don’t thereby harm others or place them at risk. Most famously, Mill defended what he called our “liberty of thought and …

[Extract from A History of the United States (2401)] As we, at the dawn of the twenty-fifth century CE, look back upon the recent history of this great country, we are struck by the spectacular fall of what used to be called the “white race” in the early twenty-first century. It has long been known …

Representations and reputations of historical personages have been controversial across human civilizations. Political iconoclasm began when Egyptian pharaohs obliterated images of their predecessors. Mayan rulers in Central America adopted similar tactics. Religiously based iconoclasm across the Abrahamic faiths originated in the biblical prohibitions of graven images (Exodus 20:4) and idolatry. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Parliamentary …

Remember how not so long ago—in the first decade of the 2000s—there were big court and PR battles over creationism versus evolutionary science? Some Darwin-deniers boasted that their “wedge strategy” would make intelligent design theory intellectually respectable in academe, even as they lost one court case after another. Concurrently, Ken Ham began building his Bible-Literalist …

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to foreign policy: realism and liberalism. The realist view is generally associated with Thucydides (d. 400 BC), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Despite considerable variation, the realists believe that the domain of international relations is a lawless, violent, and unpredictable contest for power. The liberal view rejects …

I’ve been trying to write this article for two years. Clearly I’ve been resistant, perhaps because this is not a feel-good piece. I’m not even sure folks in the mainstream are familiar with the phrase “Respectability Politics.” So, let me catch you up. While Wikipedia has a robust explanation, I’ll share the much more concise …

Before leaving theism, I spent a good number of years in the church. I wasn’t simply a member of the gathered “faithful,” whose obligation to Christianity is defined by church attendance and the monetary offering placed in the collection plate. No, I was a minister, an office I entered fairly young. Much of my responsibility …

The Establishment Clause. Born: December 15, 1791, Richmond, Virginia. Died after a long period of neglect: June 30, 2020, Washington, D.C. The Establishment Clause is survived by its younger twin, the Free Exercise Clause. Birth and Childhood “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …” On a winter’s day in 1791, the …

August 2020 includes an enormously important centenary, one that too few Americans will recognize. August 26 marks the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, establishing the right to vote for women nationwide. Celebration of this milestone will be muted in large part because of the coronavirus pandemic. …

The one certainty that has emerged in the wake of this global pandemic is the utter moral collapse of the Republican Party. I refer to a moral collapse because, all apart from the appalling and inexcusable fecklessness of its leader in dealing with the medical issues of the outbreak, the party as a whole has …

It is tempting to blame Donald J. Trump for being an amazingly bad president as he promotes the agenda of the religious Right and its defective policies (including elevating the rights of theoconservatives over other theists and secularists). But that hyper-materialist devotee of the amoral Christian Prosperity proponent Norman Vincent Peale literally does not know …

I am writing this piece at the end of March 2020 for publication in the June/July 2020 issue of Free Inquiry, which means a two-month pipeline between completion/filing and publication. Normally, that is a short time, even if it spans events that are highly consequential in one domain of life, such as the outcome of …

Sir Thomas Browne wrote in “Urn Burial”: “The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.” It’s an aphorism I love, because it’s applicable to so much more than life and death. The long habit of (so many things) indisposeth us for (being unable to keep doing them). We love our habitual ways of doing …

We are at a pessimistic moment as the world faces the challenges and uncertainties posed by climate change and the coronavirus. The current crisis seems to provide a field day for purveyors of all types of irrationality, quackery, and superstition. With most places of religious worship in lockdown worldwide, the location for such ideas to …

The United States is not a democracy but rather an oligarchy in the classic sense of the term: rule of the rich in the interests of the rich. American ideals of equal liberty and equal opportunity have become a relic of the past. As economist Thomas Piketty has argued, inequality in the United States surpasses …

It’s not actually about saving little preborn babies. Back when this Republic was formed, the founders held absolutely no discussion about women’s reproductive rights. The all-male, largely Protestant and deist team that wrote up the Constitution would not have imagined addressing what they considered to be mere women’s affairs. The female sex quietly did what …

In this op-ed, I set aside my secular humanist hat. Today I write as a journalist and a concerned user of the English language. My opinions are my own. A growing movement seeks to repurpose the third-person plural personal pronouns they and them as singular (more accurately, number-agnostic). The goal behind it is laudable: to …

Since the rise of a recognizably modern form of science early in the seventeenth century—associated above all with Galileo—science has emerged as “our most authoritative source of knowledge about the natural world” (Heather E. Douglas, whose work partly inspired this column) within which I include knowledge of a general kind about ourselves. Almost everyone agrees …

The spineless corruption of the current Republican Party has led many liberals and Democrats to romanticize the good old days when the GOP was dominated by neoconservatives. Democrats picture the neoconservatives as men of principle, conviction, and intellect—patriots who cared about their country, unlike the pathetic crop of cowards eager to curry favor with a …

In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that of the two great twentieth-century dystopian warnings, it wasn’t Orwell’s Stalinist Big Brother we had to worry about so much as the seductions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that …

It being 2020, this is the year to celebrate the decade that began to radically alter western societies toward the modern, highly secularized nations rich in personal liberties that we—despite constant challenges from the patriarchal, paternalistic religious Right—enjoy today: the 1920s. Think about it. In 1910, the religious Right pretty much owned this nation and …

The wide array of current religions, plus the many that died in the past, are impossible to count. As a blind guess, I estimate the grand total at perhaps 50,000. Alongside major world faiths are hundreds of branches and thousands of small sects, cults, and tribal folk groups in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. “There are …

“If I had more time, I would have written less.” —Mark Twain Were you brought up in a traditional religion that you subsequently left? If so, you’re like most Free Inquiry readers. Research also suggests you’re like most unbelieving Americans born between the mid-1940s and the mid-1980s. Among these cohorts (the Boomers and Gen X-ers, …

All is not well with the autocrats of the world. I refer not only to the real McCoys but the seemingly innumerable half-tyrants, dictator wannabes, and other such riffraff who, in the past decade or more, have alarmingly populated certain otherwise sane countries around the world. Indeed, there are now so many of these pestiferous …

When I lecture about public opinion surveys, I always begin by reminding the audience that the respondents are under no obligation to be consistent or logical in their responses. This is especially necessary when dealing with surveys on religion, for the topic is rather vague in the minds of most people. This is because religion …

For much of my newspaper career, I was West Virginia’s only full-time investigative reporter. I wrote about political corruption. (Two of our governors and numerous top politicians went to prison.) I exposed consumer frauds. (Various roofers, exterminators, baldness-curers, weight-salon operators, and other fly-by-night entrepreneurs were jailed.) I revealed stock frauds. (Some local brokers were convicted …

It’s funny how a group of smart fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds using logic and cogent argument can one-up today’s U.S. Supreme Court. It happened in an Advanced Placement U.S. Government class at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. According to the Washington Post, teacher Tessa Guarracino assigned the Bladensburg Cross case as a moot-court …

In my previous essays on this subject (“Humanism’s Chasm,” FI, February/March 2019, and “Meanwhile, Back at the Chasm,” FI, August/September 2019), I probed the differences between older humanists, most of whom had cast off a traditional religious upbringing at measurable personal cost, and their younger counterparts for whom nonreligious identity often comes more easily. We …

It seems unfortunate that climate change is speeding up and pushing us toward the cliff with accelerating force at the same time we are also putting ruthless authoritarians in power all over the heating-up planet. Maybe the two are not coincidental but linked—I suspect there’s a hope that if the authoritarians are authoritarian enough, they …

We live in a sharply polarized political and cultural environment in which it has become increasingly difficult to discuss urgent issues across the divides. With the emergence of purity policing and call-out culture, amplified by social media, it is difficult enough to conduct honest, civil conversations even with people who share most of our own …