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The Parable of the Fair-Weather Believer
Once there was a man who had been taught to believe something that didn’t really make sense. The man kind of knew that it didn’t really make sense, but he had also been taught that believing it—even if it didn’t make sense—made him a better person. He was a good man, and he wanted to …
This article is available for free to all.What Is Faith?
Religionists often say: “What about faith? Shouldn’t there be a place for faith? Why do we have this ability if it is not intended to have some useful purpose? Where did it come from?” “Are not most if not many things taken on faith? Atheism is a faith. Believing in science is a faith. Evolution …
The Myth of Christian Morality
Today many nonbelievers accept as a matter of course the presumption of atheism, the position that the idea of a creating god is so fantastical that the burden of proof lies with those who believe in such a being. This position has elicited some aggressive responses. The American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, for example, has claimed …
This article is available for free to all.Ethnographic Evidence for Unbelief in Non-Western Cultures: Unbelief in Medieval Europe—The Age of Faith
As Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), French philosopher and historian of philosophy, once observed of Medieval Europe: It is often said, and not without good reasons, that the civilization of the Middle Ages was an essentially religious one. Yet even in times of the Cathedrals and of the Crusades, not everybody was a saint; it would not …
Examining Miracle Claims: Philosophical and Investigative Approaches
A miracle is usually defined as an event supposedly unexplainable by nature. But such a definition is predicated on a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance—that is, from a lack of knowledge. It is like saying, “We don’t know; therefore, we do know.” Anglican writer C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) succinctly defined a miracle as “an …
This article is available for free to all.Must Humanism Be Optimistic?
How well situated is humanism to face the challenges of the twenty-first century? In particular, what solutions can humanism contribute to the global ecological crisis from which the climate emergency is emerging as the defining crisis of our times? The omens don’t look good, because for a long time, humanism has associated itself with a …
A Dozen Ways a Smaller, Older Population Might Be Awesome
While many of us fret about unaffordable housing or traffic jams caused in part by population pressures, a trending chorus of depopulation doomsaying laments that there are too few people—or will be shortly. Underneath this lament lies something that is factually true. Birthrates are dropping, and people are living longer.1 Human population ballooned in the twentieth …
This article is available for free to all.Clinical Notes on Atheism and Self-Reliance
There were many times when Gail1 thought she’d hit rock-bottom, only to fall even further and land with an even harder thud. Her childhood was rough. Her mother was encumbered with undiagnosed and untreated depression, and her father was bipolar—also undiagnosed and untreated. Part of his mania manifested in his packing up the family to move …
Letters to the Editor – October/November 2021
Race Relations In the October/November 2020 issue of Free Inquiry is the article “Farewell to the Pink Race!” by S. T. Joshi. The article celebrates the death of the European race, claiming that “no one need lament their obliteration from the earth.” I want us to live in a society where there is no hate …
Is Collapse Imminent?
I write in mid-July, deep into yet another summer of our discontent. Wildfires that make their own weather, relentless heat waves, and murderous floods driven by “thousand-year” rain events abound. Under such conditions, it’s easy to wonder whether human civilization can survive our naive cleverness. Our relentless fecundity. When you get down to it, our …
This article is available for free to all.What We Owe Each Other
The collapse seems to be speeding up alarmingly. I lived through one portent of the acceleration in late June, along with much of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, in the form of a heat wave that broke all records and jumped up and down on them. The peak here in Seattle was 108°, which frankly …
The Olympic Movement: A Secular Humanist Initiative Gone Astray
In 1894, French historian and educator Count Pierre De Coubertin conceived of an inclusive worldwide youth movement and great sports festival. It would emulate the pre-Christian tradition of Ancient Greece but be rooted in universal fundamental Enlightenment principles. The ethos was to be an alternative to the aristocratic British imperialist sporting ethos of “muscular Christianity” …
American Christianism
Christianism—like Islamism—refers to the determination of religious ideologues to use the coercive power of the state to enforce religious morality. This is not supposed to happen in the West, where Enlightenment rationalism and its secular legacy have established a rigid separation between church and state. On the other hand, there is no English or French …
As Concepts Creep, Freedoms Retreat
Studies by University of Melbourne researcher Nick Haslam and his collaborators have demonstrated a trend, beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s, for concepts related to harm to expand their meanings and applications. For the past forty years or so, many people have contributed, deliberately or otherwise, to concept creep for such words as …
Religions Behaving Badly
Am I the only one to notice that religions across the world have been even more of a nuisance—and, in a distressing number of cases, far more than a nuisance—than usual lately? At this point, it is hardly worth noting how Buddhists (yes, Buddhists) in Myanmar continue to persecute the Muslim Rohingya or how Israelis …
This article is available for free to all.Not in Awe of Aweism
My June/July 2021 essay on how the little-noticed mass death of billions of immature humans, as well as the endless suffering of animals, rips away any pretense that a god and his earthly creation could be benign and moral spent nearly all its time denouncing worship of a creator as fatally depraved. I briefly noted …
Are You a Critical Thinker? A Test
Thinking is like playing tennis, driving a car, giving a talk, dieting, or speaking a foreign language. It can be done well or badly. In the jargon of modern education, good thinkers are called critical thinkers. Critical thinkers have a mix of attitudes, skills, and habits that set them apart from sloppy thinkers. Are you …
Nine Decades of Secular Humanism
Few people realize it, but secular humanism—the progressive crusade to improve life for all—may be the chief driving force of western civilization. Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. The movement soared three centuries ago in the Enlightenment, when bold thinkers sought to end the divine right of kings and …
Looking Back – October/November 2021
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Modernization is brought about by taking seriously (1) the cognitive claims of scientific knowledge and the scientific method, and (2) the moral claims of secular life and its quality. It is because traditional religions are often inimical to these claims that they need to be combated and their authority …
Stephen P. Weldon Responds to Tom Flynn’s Review:
I appreciate Tom Flynn’s close attention to my book The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism. To have such a long review by the editor himself is satisfying, even when he and I disagree. I’m also flattered to have the book characterized with a reference to the venerable Walt Whitman. Flynn recognizes that my book breaks …
The Divine Contract
From time to time in this space, I have alluded to the Abrahamic god’s contract. In response to incessant, nonexistent reader demand, I obtained the most recent version of said contract and secured exclusive permission to publish it in Free Inquiry. Aren’t you glad you subscribe? * * * Preamble 1. The purpose of this …
On Kuhn and COVID-19
Philosopher Reginald Williams uses Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to flog COVID-19 research and policy as being stifled by authoritarian politics suppressing all but the establishment view (“Thomas Kuhn and COVID-19,” FI, October/November 2020). Kuhn’s book was a wildfire hit among nonscientists. Among scientists, not so much. The failings in Kuhn’s understanding …
Ten Years Have Passed, but the Memory Is Clear: A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens
At age seventy, my episodic memory can rarely replay events I have witnessed. But every detail of October 8, 2011, is engraved in my mind. On that evening, at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, Christopher Hitchens received the Richard Dawkins Atheist of the Year Award. Five hundred atheists and onlookers attended the awards banquet, …
Nihil Is Not Just a River in Egypt
“You accuse me of being a nihilist? Of course, I’m a nihilist. You say that like it’s something bad.” When I think of nihilists, I usually think of Russian anarchists trying to overthrow the Czarist monarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to my ever-handy Google dictionary, an anarchist is a person who …
The Disbeliefs of Ancient Days
An Archaeology of Disbelief: The Origin of Secular Philosophy, by Edward Jayne. Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2018. xx & 198 pages. 978-0-7618-6966-5 (cloth); 978-0-7618-6967-2 (electronic). Edward Jayne, an English professor emeritus in his eighty-third year at the time of publication of this book, offers in eight chapters a compact survey of skeptics and (more rarely) outright …
Our Ancestors Are the Stories We Tell
While we await our Sybil and she denies us entrance Demanding the bough of a tree which in our youth Cried out to us—the one of many looked upon— And when received she shows us in Anchises lures us with the dream we dream at dawn Though he was sworn to secrecy, he welcomes us …
Myth and Method
The human heart cannot love; it is the mind that learns to move. The sun does not really set; we simply turn away from it. The sky may blaze a deep azure, but only to one standing here. We wish upon a falling star, a piece of dusty meteor. A child may be invincible; a …
The Power Worshippers
The following is adapted by the author from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing). Stewart is the recipient of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Morris D. Forkosch Award for best humanist book of 2020. —Eds. Most of us are by now familiar with the public face of Christian nationalism. …
This article is available for free to all.Avoiding a ‘Ghastly Future’: Hard Truths on the State of the Planet
A group of the world’s top ecologists have issued a stark warning about the snowballing crisis caused by climate change, population growth, and unchecked development.[1] Their assessment is grim, but big-picture societal changes on a global scale can still avert a disastrous future. Within the lifetime of anyone born at the start of the Baby …
Exploring the Connection between Cambridge Analytica and Conservative Christianity
In the documentary People You May Know, Charles Kriel, special adviser to the U.K. Parliament on disinformation, and filmmaker Katharina Gellein Viken unpacked the political connections between religious fundamentalists, oligarchs, and the company Cambridge Analytica, whose infamous mishandling of the personal data of millions of Facebook users was revealed in 2008. Even though Donald J. …
Does Prayer Work?
Even though about 84 percent of the world population is religiously affiliated, the question of whether praying for someone can give that person some health benefits is still relatively understudied. This likely is because the topic is controversial: for religious people, applying quantified measures to the effects of prayer sounds blasphemous. Similarly, for secular ones, …
This article is available for free to all.Shadow Gosplan and Other Lies
Edward Tesler lived in the USSR until he moved to the United States in 1980. —Eds. “I love boxing. You are sitting in a comfortable chair, looking at the ring, and somebody else gets hit in the face.” This joke sounds apolitical, but it too reflects big politics. Everybody knows about the centralized planning of …
Ethnographic Evidence for Unbelief in Non-Western Cultures: Unbelief in China and Siam
Chinese thinking is a history of a gradual distancing of man from supernatural beings and their influence, ending in an essentially humanistic approach to life. From the Ch’un Ch’iu period (722–481 BCE) onward, there is a progressively more humanistic interpretation of laws and statutes, regarded previously as being of divine origin. Confucius (551–479 BCE Kǒng …
On the Fact-Theory Issue
Most scientists consider evolution a firmly supported theory. This article does not challenge these scientists. But do scientists generally agree that evolution is a fact? Some scientists and philosophers of science maintain that a very well-supported theory deserves to be called a fact. Others maintain that a theory never becomes a fact even if it …
Courting Disaster: Public Safety vs. Religion
At this point, we all know claims of religious freedom can work like magic words. Say “religious freedom,” and you can demand tax money for your school or social service program even if you proselytize and discriminate, and you can ignore inconvenient employment laws. Just say that your religion demands it, and even public health …
This article is available for free to all.Will World Population Drop Far Enough, Fast Enough?
Full disclosure: I admire the New York Times and its commitment to cover the world in depth when so many news outlets have abandoned that mission. Still, the Times has its blind spots, among them a relentless natalism. The paper seems glued to the notion that human numbers (to say nothing of the economy) must …
This article is available for free to all.Beyond Humanity
Beyond Humanity was the title of a book I coauthored in 1996 with Earl Cox. It was an early look at the possibility, if not probability, that in the not too distant future, quite possibly in this century, self-aware devices of extreme intelligence will be developed. If such a thing happens, the book predicted, it …
Civil War, Anyone?
There has been much loose talk of late about an impending civil war in the United States. For some desperate individuals, our stark political differences—compounded or, indeed, caused by differences in education, socioeconomic status, and religious (or nonreligious) belief—are so extreme that one’s opponents are not regarded merely as antagonists to be defeated at the …
Ingersoll Museum Endowment Appeal Exceeds Target
The campaign to complete the endowment fund of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum exceeded its ambitious target following unprecedented donor response to a spring fundraising campaign. In early March, an email appeal announced a seed gift of $40,000 by Museum Director Tom Flynn, which would be used to match the first $40,000 in donor …
Richard Thompson Hull, Philosopher and Author, Dies at Eighty-One
Philosophy professor and ethics collaborator Richard Thompson Hull died on March 15, 2021, in Tallahassee, Florida, after several years of health problems. Born December 29, 1939, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Hull served in the U.S. Army after high school for six months and then served in the Army Reserve for six years before attending undergraduate …