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M Aman Ullah fights for the victims of blasphemy persecutions in Pakistan. It has cost him. I was putting out calls to secular and human rights activists in 2017, when I received a curious message on Facebook from a man who introduced himself as M Aman Ullah. This was not too uncommon. I had been …

Will the cowardly attack on Salman Rushdie help those in the West understand the stakes for free expression? I first heard news of writer Salman Rushdie’s attack in a cryptic text message sent to me by a close friend. My heart sank like a stone, and my stomach turned as I searched the internet and …

Confessions of a Recovering Conspiracy Theorist I was deep in the rabbit hole. For years, I was a true believer in conspiracy theories1 and alternative facts. I could offer several examples of wild claims that caught my attention at various formative moments, but the truth is that I was always intensely interested in conspiracy theories. I …

After the fall of Afghanistan, a former religious extremist struggles for freedom and hope.   In 1995, the year of my birth, Kabul was the main battlefield of Afghanistan’s civil war. The Mujahideen and other groups had been fighting with each other since the collapse of the communist government under President Mohammad Najibullah. The Taliban …

The Truth That Fictions Tell: In Defense of Blasphemous Literature Editor’s note: This is the third article in a limited series. The first appeared in the August/September 2022 issue. In the past two issues, we demonstrated how fiction has a unique, subversive ability to open minds and engender empathy for heterodox points of view, directly …

Amid rampant superstition and unrest, George Ongere represents the best of secular humanism in action The values and goals of secular humanism are noble and lofty ones. The Affirmations of Humanism—as written by this publication’s founder, Paul Kurtz, and published in every issue—establishes a set of principles and commitments that, taken as a whole, ask …

This past summer, my wife and I had the opportunity to witness humanism in action—in Kenya. We spent a couple days visiting with George Ongere, the executive director of CFI Kenya, one of the Center for Inquiry’s international branches. For over a decade, George has worked tirelessly to promote the humanist perspective in a country …

As far as we know, it was Sir Thomas More who first wrote about Utopia. Published in 1516, More’s Utopia described an intricate self-contained society placed safely on an island. The culture within this fantasized society, as well as its citizens’ way of life, was strongly held across its populace. In this book, a traveler …

Just about every culture and religion has an end-of-days story, often regarding destructive floods and stories of redemption. Christians, Hindus, and even a less mainstream culture as the Hopi people have their versions of a flood story. Science has its own end-of-days story, which, unlike the religious ones, has evidence to support it. An abbreviated …

There is nothing more essential to secular humanism than the truth. Secular humanists are the people who looked at thousands of years of received authority and said, “Yeah, sorry, no.” We needed more than ancient books and the near universal buy-in by everyone else to convince us that supernaturalism is real. We needed empirical evidence. …