Our Anthropocene Future

As I write, significant swaths of New York and New Jersey remain uninhabitable more than a month after Superstorm Sandy churned ashore. Sandy followed in the footsteps of Hurricane Irene, which savaged much of the same territory just fourteen months earlier. Sandy seems to have marked a turning point in the way most media commentators …

  Introduction: The Island Analogy This truly extraordinary point in Earth’s history has recently been categorized as a distinct geological time period–the Anthropocene–a period of significant human impact on the planet. Our species is unique relative to all other life-forms in that we have a developed sense of consciousness. Not only do our activities dominate …

When I covered Billy Graham’s Crusade in Flushing Meadows, Queens, back in 2005, I did not realize that I was reporting on the end of an era for the man dubbed “America’s pastor.” Still, given his frail health at that time, I was not surprised when the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) announced that Graham’s …

I received my religious education in Sunday school, as a Jew. It was shortly after the Holocaust, and the Jewish community was eager to ensure the perpetuation of Judaism. Intermarriage—even mere exposure to Christianity—were viewed as palpable threats. My religious education said nothing at all aboutChristianity. My parents’ understanding of Christianity was limited to a …

  One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.…You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been t he religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the …

Despite overwhelming historical and contemporary evidence providing testimony to the incendiary role of hatred in igniting fires of violence, murder, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and terrorism–to say nothing of demagoguery and political gridlock–relatively little sociological research has been conducted to date on the subject of hate as such. Sociologists, myself included, have studied hate as …

One major topic that impacts on the reliability of the Gospels is the rate at which myth or legend can grow and overcome the recollection of historical events, whether in the oral tradition or in the subsequent written record of that oral tra dition. Some argue that the Gospels cannot be mostly legend, as many …

I may be reading too much into the November 2012 elections, but they seem to have genuinely altered the drift of American political discourse. Minority groups from Hispanics to the nonreligious played central roles in the reelection of President Barack Obama and in numerous congressional, state, and even local races. (Obama arguably owes his election …

Let’s talk about a pleasant topic for once. The most pleasant topic of all, in fact. Let’s talk about pleasure. The atheist view of sensuality, of pure physical pleasure and joy in our bodies, is about eleven billion times better than any traditional religious view.Our view—or rather, our views—of physical pleasure are more coherent, more …

If there is any silver lining in the moronic, ignorant, and grossly offensive statements offered about rape by the failed candidates for Senate in the recently concluded election, Missouri’s Congressman Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, it is that they may have finally shown both the folly and the moral dodginess inherent in efforts by …

Last October, Savita Halappanavar died at University Hospital Galway in Ireland. She was a dentist with a popular practice in Galway, thirty-one years old,and seventeen weeks pregnant. Hav­ing woken up with back pain on Sunday, October 21, Savita went to the hospital and was found to be miscarrying. Sherequested an abortion, but the fetus still …

A frequent, though quite unjustified, charge against free markets is that they encourage what Karl Marx called the “cash nexus,” or what is also called “commodification”: treating people like items for sale. The claim is that when people engage in commerce, they are hardhearted, stingy, or (as movie director Oliver Stone and the Occupy Wall …

For sixty years, I’ve been reporting on the disabled and disability rights groups. In school systems like NewYork’s, kids “with special needs” (an administrative euphemism) are left far behind, along with English language-learners. In the nation’s continually overflowing prisons, the disabled serve heavily intensified sentences. My interest in this dark side of the Fourth Amendment’s …

In his new book, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (Beacon, 2012), Chris Stedman asks for kinder, gentler expressions of atheism. For Stedman, the current level of hostility among atheists toward religion and religious people is not only uncomfortable but also, more important, counterproductive to the achievement of shared humane goals. …

  Free Expression in Crisis In support of Tom Flynn’s call that “It’s Time to Stand Up for Free Expression” (FI, December 2012/January 2013), I propose the creation of a Free Expression Merit Badge to be awarded by the Council for Secu lar Humanism or by Free Inquiry. As you know, the Boy Scouts of …

November 6 was a good day for President Barack Obama. The Democrats increased their majority in the Senate and gained a few seats in the House. The popular vote for the House favored the Democrats, but the Republicans retained control thanks to gerrymandering in “red” states after the 2010 election. The percentage of women in …

It is astonishing how so many science popularizers are able to take a bit of scientific evidence and elevate it into an earth-shattering discovery–or at least a revolutionary principle. The “God gene” hypothesis is probably the best example of the practice: the notion that a specific part of the human anatomy, which may be genetically …

No, I’m not asking the old (but good) question of whether the New Testament gives Jews a bum rap. I want to make the argument that the process of unfairly condemning Jews, or Israelites, already begins in the Old Testament. We still read in Jewish as well as Christian writers, even ecumenically sensitive ones, about …

On May 13, 2012, Mother’s Day, I happened to glance at a paid obituary in the Redlands (California) Daily Facts for Mary Russo McCormick, born in 1934 and died on May 6, 2012. She had penned it herself. It read, in part, “Mary did not have a courageous battle with anything and did not pass …

When I got involved in the skeptical, atheist, and secular movements in the 1980s, one looked out over the audience and saw mostly old white guys. Today it is a different picture entirely. At the last Skeptics Society lecture at Caltech on December 16, for example, an audience of three hundred was roughly fifty-fifty men …

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, by Susan Jacoby (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-300-18892-9). 256 pp. Hardcover, $25.00. The life of nineteenth-century freethought orator Robert Green Ingersoll has been chronicled by five previous biographers, the most recent previously being Frank Smith, whose Robert G. Ingersoll: A Life appeared in …

Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor, by Eamon Duffy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780300152166) 249 pp. Paperback, $29.17. Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity in the University of Cambridge, is another of his informative studies of the …

Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!, by Penn Jillette (New York: Blue Rider Press, the Penguin Group, 2012, ISBN 978-0-399-16156-8). pp. Hardcover, $25.95. Golden Compass author Philip Pullman has written that “after nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Had Penn Jillette authored this sentiment, one could be …

  Rabbit Rabbit Joan Mazza On the first of every month, say it, first words as soon as you wake to guarantee good luck all month. Did you do it? It’s the first of another month of storms and fires across the country. Only one rabbit? You are to blame. Three rabbits are better or …