What Was Your Pivot Point?: Secular Humanists Describe the Moment They Lost Their Religion

In Free Inquiry’s February/March 2020 issue, I challenged readers to recount their “pivot-point” experiences—the exact moment when the scales fell from each reader’s eyes and he or she realized that his or her childhood religion was bankrupt. In asking that, I recognized that the average FI reader born prior to 1985 (trust me, most were …

Lightning Didn’t Strike J. P. Chasse   My pivot point came early! I was about twelve or thirteen, an altar boy, and quite rebellious. One morning in the early 1960s, I was serving at the convent across the street with our head priest. That morning, he got quite caught up in his sermon to the …

Is This All There Is? Kathleen Corcoran   I should have written this down years ago. Thanks for being the impetus! I was a Catholic school-child—a six-year-old first grader, I think—when I first thought, a bit like Peggy Lee, Is this all there is? I’m not sure what prompted that thought. I have a memory …

Cover Image Courtesy of United States Library of Congress   I am haunted these days by the sound, tone, and words of a song. They’re from a fifty-three-year-old protest ballad written and performed by the rock band Buffalo Springfield. Reaching hit status in the spring of 1967, the song became an anthem for the many …

Introduction: Police Brutality in America Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg Those who care about human rights have the duty to prevent crimes against humanity and the possibility of a genocide stemming from hate and racism. An overwhelming amount of data now shows that Black people in America are three times more likely to …

Sages and knaves, titans and clowns, all now find themselves rummaging for meaning amid the wreckage wrought by the coronavirus. That longing for meaning, an ancient, insistent impulse to discern order in chaos—or invent one where none seems apparent—is apt to be set afrenzy by a plague. Of all misfortunes, few rival a plague’s charnel …

Maybe this whole COVID-19 event will act as a sharp prod that fully awakens humanity to two fundamental realities: a) Despite what we like to think, we do not in fact exert strong control over our lives; and b) Despite all the suffering that each of us goes through in his or her life, there …

In the following examples gathered from anthropologists’ and travelers’ accounts of their sojourns among the Indians of the Amazon, one cannot really speak of “atheism” among the various tribes encountered—that is to say, there was no conscious denial of a deity. It is a more a question of their total lack of any concept of …

Cover Image Courtesy of NASA   On September 12, 1960—almost exactly sixty years before this issue’s publication—John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered the speech that opened his path to the White House. At that time, no Roman Catholic had been elected president. Four-time New York Governor Al Smith had won the Democratic nomination in 1928; though he …

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 …

Poet, author, editor, and Charles Darwin expert Philip Appleman passed away on April 11, 2020, at the age of ninety-four. Born in Indiana on February 8, 1926, Appleman served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and the Merchant Marine after the war. He received degrees from Northwestern University, the University of …

James Christopher, founder of Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), died July 9, 2020. He had been hospitalized after a stroke in late June. He was seventy-seven. Christopher’s article “Sobriety without Superstition” appeared in the Summer 1985 issue of Free Inquiry. In that article, Christopher told his story of addiction and sobriety. He also lamented that …

Marvin Kohl, PhD, died on July 8, 2020, in an assisted living facility in Massachusetts after surviving COVID-19 in April. Kohl, for more than thirty years a philosopher in the SUNY system, was the author of The Morality of Killing and the editor of Beneficient Euthanasia and Infanticide and the Value of Life. He was …

On August 10, 2020, Ed Brayton wrote a post on his Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog titled “Saying Goodbye for the Last Time.” The post was to inform his readers that he had decided, as he put it, “to end my battle to the death with death.” Brayton had long battled with his health …

35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Did Jesus offer a pattern of statecraft for future readers? On the basis of the evidence in the Gospels the answer must be negative. In spite of all the efforts by Christian interpreters to provide a clue to the meaning of the ‘Render to Caesar’ utterance, it remains an …

Personhood Re: “The Real Reason for the Anti-abortion Movement,” by Gregory S. Paul, and “The Human Soul and Life after Death,” by Jeremiah Bartlett, FI, June/July 2020. With belief, and in particular dogmatic belief, there does not have to be a basis in fact for the belief. Personhood at conception is one of these beliefs …

Christians, next time you invent a god, mind the omnis. An omnibenevolent, omnipotent god is just begging for some smarty-pants such as Epicurus to come along and point out that you’ve stepped in a big pile of the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil, as summarized by the above-referenced smarty-pants, is this: Is God …

When I learned I’d be teaching online for seven weeks, my first thought was one that Facebook and YouTube might censor. My second was: What to read while at home? My first answer was Camus’s classic The Plague. Would that be how COVID-19 plays out? Would rats be to blame? Would some atheist doctors eventually …

Sweden’s largest secular organization—Humanisterna (“the Humanists”)—is facing new challenges. Membership growth has stalled (at around 5,000 members), partly because the public perceives it as only an “anti-religion” organization. Within Humanisterna, members wonder how to integrate secular-humanist values into the lives of many Swedish secularists, especially young Nones. More pressing is the question of how to …

Unbelievers—an Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0674241824). 272 pp. Hardcover, $27.95.   If, like me, you were educated in a parochial system of any stripe, you likely came away with the notion that the human race was from the get-go unremittingly …

The White House ceremony: THE CORONATION OF THE PRESIDENT. Televised, no audio. The cello— Discordant. MYSELF: It happened. It happened here. It happened in our own time. FEMALE: Shame. CHORUS: It happened. It happened here. It happened in our own time. FEMALE: Shame. The cello— Discordant. MYSELF: You let it happen. You let it happen …

On August 10, 2020, Ed Brayton wrote a post on his Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog titled “Saying Goodbye for the Last Time.” The post was to inform his readers that he had decided, as he put it, “to end my battle to the death with death.” Brayton had long battled with his health …