Category: Op-Ed

Elections are like the trolley problem—and voting is like pulling the lever. If you’re not familiar with the trolley problem, it’s a philosophical thought experiment about ethical dilemmas. A trolley car has lost its brakes and is hurtling down a track where five people are stuck. You can pull a lever and divert the trolley …

These days, many who are secular and/or on the center-left just don’t get why so many on the evangelical Right seem so darn dead-set on denying the threat of global climate change, to the point that they thrill in chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” Many may imagine that if duly educated about the science of CO2-driven …

To those of us who wondered when, if ever, a significant majority of Americans would develop a shuddering loathing of the appalling gun violence that occurs daily in this country—rather than passing it off with callous indifference as some sort of inevitable, unavoidable by-product of the “price of freedom”—I can now say: The time is now. …

I arrived in the United States in March 2013 as a refugee from Iraq. I resettled in Houston, Texas, where two of my brothers lived at the time. A few days after I arrived in this country—of which I am now a permanent resident—I started searching for humanist and freethinking clubs in the local area. …

Far from freeing us, social media has made many more cautious about speaking their minds.

The recent cloning of macaque monkeys is impressive, but we’re still a long way from human reproductive cloning.

The cyclical view of history is not just a testament to human folly but to human limitations.

Trump’s inability to grasp the reality of other minds is so extreme it amounts to a handicap.

There is no biological necessity for predators; a good God could have (and should have!) arranged the world differently.

The West now is firmly in the Secular Era, when supernatural religion fades to a discredited fringe.

A dissenting view from Greta Christina’s on rationalist dogma.

It’s the Ingersoll Museum’s silver anniversary. Celebration will ensue.

How much nuance is too much? The answer is not a given; it’s up to us where to draw the lines.

Disputes about free will may reflect our fears about fatalism and moral responsibility.

Many GOP ideologies are profoundly illiberal or staunchly undemocratic—or both.

Why is it so hard to agree that sexual demands in the workplace are wrong, period?

Iraq needs a future beyond the dueling sectarians.

How much lower can the GOP’s current incarnation go?

When we replace nuance and context with absolutism, we turn ideas into dogma.

To defeat terrorist groups enduringly, we must overcome the conditions that let them to thrive.

The suffering of animals is an overwhelming, screamingly obvious contradiction to the ridiculous notion that there is a good god.

Do supporters of the “cake artist” understand the mischief that would follow if his argument for refusing service to same-sex couples became settled law?

Do church-run charities still have a place in a more secular future? If not, what about humanist charities?

A punch may hurt a Nazi, but it won’t change his or her mind.

Philosophy is under attack from many sides, but it is far too important to give up on it.

Navel-gazing and explorations of the Self may lead the Left to destroy itself from within.

Don’t lament the loss of the “free media.” On the contrary, embrace the post-truth world as a wake-up call.

The Arab world must return to the scholariship and cosmopolitanism of Bayt Al Hikma. The Internet may show the way.

Now there’s proof that supernatural claims of religion hardly suit.

It’s been a cliché of political campaigns for decades that liberals are effete snobs, while conservatives are salt-of-the-earth workin’ folks constantly wounded by the scorn of the pointy-headed intellectuals (a.k.a. the Jews).

On July 6, 2017, Donald Trump delivered a speech in Warsaw that was clearly intended as a landmark in the fog and swirl of geopolitical debate. The Warsaw speech evoked a vision of global politics, and it gave a suggestion of what Trump’s confusing presidency stands for.

Like other U.S. presidents before him, Donald Trump has vowed to defend Western civilization against the menace of Islam. Other presidents defined the values of the West as liberty, democracy, and the rule of law, but Trump has defined them as Christianity, culture, and tradition.

If we’re going to fight the rise of hard Right bigotry in the United States and around the world, we need to be willing to get uncomfortable.

Nothing is as destructive to a political ideology as a hypocrisy exposed. An accidental hypocrisy indicates ignorance, and ignorance, thankfully, can often be remedied with evidence and reason.

I recently made a joke on Facebook about both ISIS and the absurdity of New Age religions and positive-thinking cults by saying that “If you don’t like ISIS, join them because change comes from within.”

I’m not asking this question in a general skeptical sense. I’m not asking what we do when we suspect that we’re wrong, how we examine whether we’re wrong, or how we know when we’re wrong. I’m asking a very specific question.

Secularization continues to make big gains. Those Americans who rank themselves as nonreligious and those who qualify as atheists (broadly defined as those who are not theists) each ballooned by a tenth of the total population in just ten years.

The concept of privilege as used by the activist Left is problematic.

“For all we know, lots of Ice Age hunter-gatherers were not religious. The problem is that there’s no way to tell.”

“We think of bullying as something children and adolescents do to each other, but really it’s pervasive.”