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Drinking from a Fire Hose: What Was Your Pivot Point?
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 …
Church Did It
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 …
Faith Never Stuck
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 …
The Potential Power of the Citizenry
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 …
Police Brutality and the Role of Profit in Black Incarceration
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 …
Don’t Lecture Atheists on Pandemics
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 Some Real Good Will Come Out of COVID
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 …
Ethnographic Evidence for Unbelief in Non-Western Cultures: Unbelief in Latin America
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 …
Sixty Years Later: Appreciating Kennedy’s Houston Speech
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 …
Living Up to It
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: …