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From Homo Religiosus to Homo Sapiens: Approaching Religion as Clinical Delusion
The term Homo sapiens was coined by the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus around 1758. The word Homo of course means human. The word sapiens is usually translated as intelligent or wise. If one is comparing humans to chimpanzees or lemurs, maybe the term sapiens is appropriate, relatively speaking. However, the term was coined …
The Occult Feats of Mystics and Saints
In various religious traditions, adherents have sought heightened states through experiences termed ecstasies. In the ancient Greek Dionysian mysteries, for instance, initiates employed intoxicants and intense dancing to achieve an ecstatic state. Today’s charismatic Christians practice “being slain in the spirit” whereby they may speak in tongues or engage in other unusual behaviors. In Roman …
This article is available for free to all.Pivot Point – Nuns Did It
The Animals Question Sam Bellotto Jr. Many decades ago when I was a child in grade school, my parents colluded with the local Catholic diocese to make sure I attended religious indoctrination classes regularly. They referred to them as religious instruction classes. It was a struggle. Every Tuesday afternoon, we Catholic kids got excused from …
Pivot Point – Praying Did It
I Put My Life on the Line Margaret Neate In the 1930s in my country town in Australia, most families professed allegiance to one of the several Protestant churches or the Catholic one. I attended the state primary school, where each class heard Bible stories once a week. We were not taught about non-Christian religions …
Pivot Point – Life Did It
From Mennonite to Atheist Gordon Martin I was born in 1943 to a Mennonite farm family in Waterloo County, Ontario, home to Canada’s biggest concentration of Mennonites, who moved from Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s. I was third in line after a brother who died at five months old. I remember from very early on being …
Pivot Point – Church Did It, Continued
The Reality of Pain Jerry D. Mackey In a small Baptist church in a small East Texas town, my three brothers, one sister, and our spouses sat with my mother in a pew near the front. My father had died of a massive heart attack a little over a year before, and the family had …
Pivot Point – Learning Did It
A Theological Radical Paul Heffron I describe my pivot point in my piece in Free Inquiry, “My Theological Quest Ended in Secular Humanism” (FI February/March 2018), an installment in the “Faith I Left Behind” column. Studying radical theological trends led to a pivotal moment in which I said over and over, “God ain’t doing a …
Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind, Part I
Atheism and Freethought in the Twentieth Century The Impact of Western Ideas The impact of modern, scientific ideas of the West in Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was immediate and changed the outlook of the intellectuals dramatically, and often resulted in a rejection of Islam: in anti-clericalism, agnosticism, Westernism, anti-imperialism, glorification …
Getting it Right: Darwin and Human Evolution, Part II
Evolution and Progress Are Not Synonyms As a result of our instinctive exceptionalist inclinations, we have long misinterpreted Charles Darwin. One of the most telling illustrations of this is our tendency to conflate evolution and progress. From religious literalism and creationist thinking to the more secular minds of scientists and atheists, most of us think …
Euclid: The Man Who Showed Us How to Think, Part II
Perhaps the earliest Greek mathematician who was fascinated by numbers was Pythagoras of Samos (circa 525 BCE). He was a highly eccentric man who started his own school in Croton in southern Italy and went on to become essentially a cult leader. He insisted that his students devote themselves not only to mathematics but also …