Category: The Freedom to Inquire

All too often a person seeking information is told not to ask questions, especially embarrassing ones. The power elites protect their stake in the game by suppressing inquiry that might challenge the status quo. This is especially ironic in a free society or in a religious organization that lauds freedom of choice only when adherents …

There has been a strong tendency among historians, including the present writer, to see the debate between religion and irreligion as one of conflict or “warfare,” especially as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet there is a more humane way of seeing it—at least from the side of the unbeliever—namely as therapy. …

Inquiry was one of the core concepts of John Dewey’s philosophy. A search of the new CD-ROM edition of Dewey’s Collected Works reveals that he used the term well over 2,000 times during his sev-enty-year writing career, which ended with his death in 1952. In books that he addressed primarily to teachers, such as How …

In 1966, I enrolled as a ministerial student at LIFE Bible College in Los Angeles. LIFE is an acronym for Light-house of International Foursquare Evangelism, an outreach of the Pentecostal church started by the late Aimee Semple McPherson. A handful of FREE INQUIRY readers are old enough to remember her. Aimee died in 1944, the …

Recall your childhood. Imagine trying to check out a book from your local library on the big bang or evolution. Suppose that you were told that a parent would have to check it out for you because it was from the adult section. (Say it was The Eyewitness Visual Dictionary of the Universe by Dorling …

Secular humanism is widely believed to be a purely negative doctrine that boils down to the denial of the supernatural. This is not so, as any fair sampling of the humanist literature will show (see, e.g., Kurtz, ed. 1973; Storer, ed. 1980; Lamont 1982; Kurtz 1988; Bunge 1989). Indeed, secular humanism is a positive worldview …