Death: Thoughts on the Final Subject

“. . . People are now more likely than ever to bypass religion altogether and to look toward popular culture for guidance.”

Not only is death inevitable, life wouldn’t be possible without it.

A year working in a mortuary reshapes one atheist’s understanding of death.

Ancient Stoic philosophy has much to offer contemporary secular humanists.

What is a secular humanist to do under these circumstances? To pray or not to pray?

One on one with a keeper of the Doomsday Clock, which has been tracking existential risk since 1947.

Cremation’s popularity is swelling. One factor seems to be growth among the nonreligious.

Worried how your religious survivors will arrange your funeral? You can’t stop them, but you can set limits.

Rejection of religion began with this writer’s deep understanding of the story of Abraham.

If civilization lasts long enough, secularism might one day get another chance in Muslim countries. For now, it is dead.

“Those who deny that overpopulation is a problem say the poor don’t consume much. Yet the poor want nothing more than to consume more.”

Why what the pope says in airplanes may not matter—and why our efforts to stem climate disaster may not either.

Another Bangladeshi secularist is slaughtered in broad daylight.

Given human nature, genocide is always a possibility.

Shutting down speech is authoritarianism in action.

It’s a long shot, but Donald Trump might cut the GOP’s ties to a toxic neoconservatism.

In the context of New Testament theology, forgiveness is incoherent and ultimately contradictory.

Letters in response to Free Inquiry Vol. 36, Issue 3.

Machan will be most remembered for his role in publishing the libertarian magazine Reason and the establishment of the Reason Foundation.

When I retired to Arizona in 2008, I never imagined—given its proximity to very liberal California and its distance from the prototypical “South”—that I would be living in the heart of the Southwest Bible Belt. But that is where I, an atheist, took up residence and began my postretirement career. As I am hardly one …

Reflections on politics and the growing body of research on Nones.

ISIS’s worst atrocity merely echoes one committed by Moses in the Old Testament.

What a journey—from Lutheran to fundamentalist to atheist . . . to atheist minister!

A modest proposal to take corporate personhood to its illogical conclusion.

“Beneath Jacoby’s gaze, each conversion proves exp
licable without treating the
‘spiritual’ matters—often thought central to any conversion experience—as in any way causally significant.”

“We are afraid that science has shown, or will soon show, that we can’t be what we want to be.”—Daniel Dennett

“With measured tones and expert scholarship, Mary Ziegler demonstrates that almost everything most of us think we know about Roe and its consequences is incorrect.”

Brief reviews from Free Inquiry Vol. 36, No. 4.

Oh, what a difference an “O” makes / In this land where separation of church and / State