Category: Op-Ed

Society is better off when exposed to arguments against the existence of a supernatural being and against the supernatural generally.

Here’s the conundrum: on the one hand, as rationalists, we’re striving to be rational to the best of our ability. On the other hand, as rationalists, we’re striving to accept reality to the best of our ability. And the reality is that our brains are not rational.

Can the United States ration health care? This question looms large as the nation moves to expand access to health insurance.

Do people still talk about feminist epistemology? I haven’t kept up.

Surely today’s explosive disclosures of the NSA’s ceaselessly growing invasions of the Fourth Amendment—as revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—will not fade away amid the floods of distractions in this digital age. Or will they?

In a desperate effort to whitewash the Christian burning of witches, C. S. Lewis argued that the triumph of reason over the Dark Ages is not necessarily a triumph of a superior morality over an inferior one.

I am quite aware that my turn is approaching. The realization hovers in my mind like a frequent companion.

On April 1, 2013, several bloggers were put behind bars in Bangladesh on the sole basis that they were openly atheist.

The year 2013 marks a noteworthy anniversary: it has been fifty years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the conjoined cases Abingdon School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett ended school-sponsored Bible reading in American public schools. This decision came on the heels of 1962’s Engel v. Vitale, which ended school-sponsored prayer. Those …

In those states that still have capital punishment, prisoners on death row often depend desperately on court appeals wielding the Brady Rule to keep them alive. This is Brady: “Evidence or information favorable to the defendant in criminal case that is known by the prosecution: under the Unties States Supreme Court case of Brady v. …

The newly revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychi-atric Association (APA)—DSM-5—was released this past May at the Association’s an nual meeting in San Francisco. Rarely has a new book met such a universal cacophony of critical reviews. Even before the tome had hit print, critics were falling over one another …

If we don’t speak up, the status quo wins. Yes, this fight can be painful. When we battle against deeply entrenched beliefs that people are emotionally attached to and are entangled with social and political and economic structures on every level, it can be difficult—more than difficult. We ask people to give up ideas that …

Many atheists, including myself, try to avoid the kind of god-talk that some people equate with belief in a deity. Although it’s reflexive in our society to say “God bless you” when someone sneezes, “Gesundheit” (“good health”) would be a more appropriate atheist response. Getting a wallet back from the lost and found with nothing …

I’ve been unusually steeped in the history of atheism and freethought in the United States and the United Kingdom recently. Barry Duke, the editor of the UK magazine The Freethinker, sent me a history of the magazine published in 1982 to mark its hundredth year of publication (Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The …

The central achievement of the American Revolution was to demote government to the role of a cop on the beat. The citizen became sovereign instead of the monarch. Self-government became an aspiration for all people, not just for rulers. The idea became prominent, at least for a while, that government’s proper role was to secure …

It is no exaggeration to say that the invention of monotheism has been the greatest misfortune of humanity. In the polytheistic world, every city had its gods, who were deemed to be its protectors against very real threats such as floods, famines, crop failure, volcanoes, military defeat, and other disasters. Even when a city was …

When I came of age in the 1950s, deep in Appalachia’s Bible Belt, narrow-minded sanctimony prevailed. It was a crime for stores to open on the Sabbath. It was a crime to buy a cocktail or a lottery ticket any day. Boot­leggers and “numbers” runners were nailed by cops. You could be jailed for looking …

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, popes have become the focus of heightened religious emotion. Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge and a staunch Catholic, has said that the Polish Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, spent his final years of physical and mental decline “acting out a …

Reader alert: the sentence that follows will include more slashes than I have ever penned—oops, I’m showing my age, keyboarded—in my life. If any topic in our movement has liberated more virtual ink than the current debate/flame war over feminism/misogyny in atheism/secular humanism/secularism/freethought, I don’t know what it is/might be. Phalanxes of words have been …

This is a question a lot of atheists and humanists have been asking themselves: What does religion provide to people? What do people get out of it? Why do they like it? Why do they stay with it even when they don’t like it? And how can atheists and humanists provide some or all of …

Should We Abolish Morality? Prominent philosopher Joel Marks has published a new book on the topic of moral skepticism: Ethics without Morals: In Defense of Amorality (Routledge, 2013). Marks was formerly a moral realist with essentially Kantian intuitions, but in recent times he has had something of a (de)conversion experience, coming to the view that …

The Decay of American Democracy, Part 2 In the first part of this essay (FI, October/November 2012), I argued against the American inclination to think that democracy is the best form of governmen t and that all good things come with democracy. Instead, I maintained that like any other form of government, democracy needs at …

Ariel Sharon has been in the news over the past few months even though he has not moved a muscle, uttered a word, or showed any sign of consciousness since 2006. The fact that he is able to make headlines while in a permanent vegetative state shows both the impact the “Lion of Israel” had …

News you may have missed: in July 2012, Congress passed—and President Barack Obama went on to sign—the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act, which authorized the domestic use of pilotless drones by units of government, including intelligence agencies and local police. A number of police agencies had already been using drones for surveillance (that is, without …

Newly elected Arizona Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema isn’t a believer in God, which is not news. But now it seems that she’s not a nonbeliever either. Intellectuals prick up their ears when informed that a logical dichotomy, such as “believer or nonbeliever,” is in fact a false dichotomy. Let philosophers rethink where logic fails. We need …

Nowhere is the European crisis that followed the Wall Street crash of 2008—and especially the subsequent effort to combat it—felt more sharply than in Greece. The country is suffering an economic depression after five years of rapidly declining output with no end in sight as it fails to meet the demands of the European Union …

When I came of age in the 1950s and slowly began to think about life, I developed a strange feeling that the world is senseless, irrational, and chaotic. Forty million people had just been killed in World War II, and everyone said how noble and heroic it was. The “Big One” was only the latest …

Tracing ‘Secular Humanism’ Since the mid-1970s, “secular humanism” has been the bête noire, scapegoat, and whipping boy of the religious Right. Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and their legions of followers and imitators blamed the world’s troubles on “secular humanists,” whom they claimed control the government, courts, media, public schools and universities, and the …

Let’s talk about a pleasant topic for once. The most pleasant topic of all, in fact. Let’s talk about pleasure. The atheist view of sensuality, of pure physical pleasure and joy in our bodies, is about eleven billion times better than any traditional religious view.Our view—or rather, our views—of physical pleasure are more coherent, more …

If there is any silver lining in the moronic, ignorant, and grossly offensive statements offered about rape by the failed candidates for Senate in the recently concluded election, Missouri’s Congressman Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, it is that they may have finally shown both the folly and the moral dodginess inherent in efforts by …

Last October, Savita Halappanavar died at University Hospital Galway in Ireland. She was a dentist with a popular practice in Galway, thirty-one years old,and seventeen weeks pregnant. Hav­ing woken up with back pain on Sunday, October 21, Savita went to the hospital and was found to be miscarrying. Sherequested an abortion, but the fetus still …

A frequent, though quite unjustified, charge against free markets is that they encourage what Karl Marx called the “cash nexus,” or what is also called “commodification”: treating people like items for sale. The claim is that when people engage in commerce, they are hardhearted, stingy, or (as movie director Oliver Stone and the Occupy Wall …

For sixty years, I’ve been reporting on the disabled and disability rights groups. In school systems like NewYork’s, kids “with special needs” (an administrative euphemism) are left far behind, along with English language-learners. In the nation’s continually overflowing prisons, the disabled serve heavily intensified sentences. My interest in this dark side of the Fourth Amendment’s …

In his new book, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (Beacon, 2012), Chris Stedman asks for kinder, gentler expressions of atheism. For Stedman, the current level of hostility among atheists toward religion and religious people is not only uncomfortable but also, more important, counterproductive to the achievement of shared humane goals. …

  The entire Muslim world . . . is agitating for the United Nations to pass an anti blasphemy law. The rest of the civilized world must oppose this at everytu rn. —Mahfooz Kanwar, Calgary Herald It seemed the whole world was marking International Blasphemy Rights Day (September 30). Debates about free speech and criticism …

Questions have arisen over whether the Internet film Innocence of Muslims (or its fourteen-minute trailer) should be considered protected by the First Amendment.1 The very core of free speech would be nullified if the film were denied constitutional protection. Some may assert that this film meets the standard of “a clear and present danger” in …

In the discourse of human rights, impiety is no longer understood as an affront to a sacred entity but to a human entity. Blasphemy is personal. Under existing human rights treaties, the prevailing legal model of personal blasphemy is “religious hatred.” Roughly speaking, laws against religious hatred or religious hate speech tend to draw from …

Shadia Drury’s two-part column “The Decay of American Democracy,” Part I of which appeared in the October/November issue, will be concluded in a future issue – Eds. The display of Muslim rage in over twenty countries that was triggered by an American-made video insulting the prophet Muhammad has once again turned the conflict between religion …

Sanal Edamaruku has been campaigning for critical thinking in India for more than three decades. As head of the Indian Rationalist Association, he travels throughout India showing how gurus or “godmen” perform supposedly science-defying miracles by means of simple stage magic. In a country where superstition is backed by poverty and illiteracy, rural Indians often …

A big error has haunted humanity for centuries: it’s the equivocation between generosity and altruism. Generosity is a virtue any decent human being will practice: it asks that one reach out to deserving others in times of dire need. Altruism is a policy of devoting oneself to benefiting others above all. The former is admirable; …