Category: Op-Ed

“1517 is usually taken as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and this year is its five hundredth anniversary.”

“Conservatives yearn for the fixed, unchanging order that belongs to God or nature, but their actions often
precipitate radical disruptions.”

“UNFPA reduces
worldwide maternal mortality.”“More countries, including all of America’s traditional allies, contribute to UNFPA than to almost any other United Nations humanitarian agency.”

A sense of purpose is available to all, no faith required.

“The Democratic Party establishment is not innocent when it comes to prejudice against atheists.”

“The media should affirm the post-truth world as an antidote to the childishness of the feel-good propaganda in which they have basked for so long.”

“It’s a humiliation for
the whole country and all of us in it to
ave an ignorant, dim-witted, narcissistic bully as head of state, one without even a façade of grown-up decent behavior.”

“While I understand the shock and fear—and indeed, I feel some of it myself—we mustn’t allow it to cloud our thinking.”

“A hard-Right ideology ramps up gradually—and so does tolerance to it.”

Secular Bengali bloggers are hugely valuable, because they contribute intellectually to the war of ideas against jihadists.

There was another election remarkably similar to this one…

“In past centuries, religious wars, persecutions, and cruelties were common.”

“We are looking at the very real possibility—even the likelihood—of the rise of fascism in the United States.”

“The prospect of returning America to the ugly era of illegal back-alley butchers is horrifying. What made it possible?”

“Why did the majority of respondents who ‘just stopped believing’ do so?”

“Basic ideas of free speech require that people be at liberty to express their commitments in public.”

“Fox News legitimizes violent insurrection—and invites calamity. How did it come to this?”

By the time of Jesus, the commandment to “love thy neighbor” was already part of most religions and also Greco-Roman philosophy.

“What I would like to learn from Shriver’s critics is how cultural appropriation differs from what we call ‘education.’”

Humanists have a special obligation to defend the humanities, in education and in society.

If the Church wishes to honor a doctrinaire nun, let it do so without an affront to science and reason.

“Humans are not
so constituted as to be able to function in
 world of pure rtionality.”

Words such as tragic are inadequate to describe premeditated acts of murder motivated by religious or political fanaticism.

Fox News is fact-free. Yet some of its critiques—only some—cannot be dismissed.

Ritual and tradition: Are they supporting ribs for our lives, or more like prison bars? Sometimes the answer is unclear.

The idea of Hell encapsulates much that is contradictory and perverse in Christianity.

“What is starting to hurt me almost more than the continuous terrorist attacks—which make it seem as though the whole world is on fire—is seeing how we are becoming numb to these attacks.

“When you say the definition of atheism should be what it’s always been, you’re saying the old guard gets to define the language forever.”

Why should the kind of atheist one is incline anyone to adopt a specific, rather narrow set of values?

“Once formed by
making the last first, the Catholic Church then became dedicated to keeping the first first.”

Given human nature, genocide is always a possibility.

Shutting down speech is authoritarianism in action.

It’s a long shot, but Donald Trump might cut the GOP’s ties to a toxic neoconservatism.

In the context of New Testament theology, forgiveness is incoherent and ultimately contradictory.

Scalia, the great originalist, indulged in motivated reasoning at least as often as the justices and judges he ridiculed.

“As humanists and rationalists, how do we decide the
difference between selfishness and self-preservation?”

The term Islamophobia serves no unique purpose and tends to discourage any criticism of Islam whatever. It’s time to jettison it.

“Why were conditions in South Africa and East Germany treated as human-rights issues while those in Saudi Arabia were not?”

“Where does an egoistic faith such as Christianity take us? It leads to . . . a morality that is frozen in place as human experience accumulates.”

“. . . Being the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world is not an occasion for self-aggrandizement or self-congratulation. On the contrary, it means being the custodian of international peace and order”