Facing the Worst Without God

It has long been accepted as an article of faith that religion/spirituality (hereafter “R/S”) has a beneficial effect on both physical and mental health. Popular U.S. survey data appears to indicate a positive association between R/S and various indices of mental and physical well-being. However, this research is not without methodological controversies. Primary among them …

In America, a thoughtful parent must understand the foundation of ethics and morals to teach children. Similarly, in answering ethical and moral questions from medical students, residents, and patients over more than forty years as an academic physician and scientist, I have had to know ethical foundational principles. Before coming to the essence of the …

Reynold Spector has provided us with an ambitious and thought-provoking, if somewhat idiosyncratic, essay on ethics and the law. It makes for an interesting read, and he has several insightful observations. That said, I do have some areas of disagreement. More fundamentally, his argument as a whole is on my view inconsistent and self-defeating. To …

In this article, I am pursuing several objectives. First, I will address some of the problems with Sam Harris’s thesis concerning a science of morality that was introduced in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010). Specifically, I intend to demonstrate that Harris applies a not-so-carefully-developed language that …

Literalism can have serious problems. Difficulties set in after time has elapsed; vernaculars change, as do legal definitions, customs, and attitudes. The eighteenth century is sufficiently far away for issues to arise as to the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution (which, as a European, I find distinctly mystifying). This document has no …

Say that religious belief in general is irrational and often harmful, and few humanists will challenge you. Assert that some religions are more harmful than others, and there will be much less unanimity. Declare emphatically that among currently existing religions, Islam presents a clear and present danger in a way that other religions do not, …

Even in the religion’s infancy, Paul said that a man is not a Christian if he does not possess the spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9) and that “in the spirit” a man can “utter mysteries” (1 Cor. 14:2). How did the idea of “the spirit” develop? The Finnish New Testament scholar Heikki Räisänen explains in …

According to best estimates, the first Gospel recording the life of Jesus (Mark) was composed about forty years after his crucifixion and quickly became firmly believed by hundreds if not thousands of people. Surely this is too soon, and its success too stunning, for Mark’s account to be largely fabricated. Yet, we don’t have to …

The 2013–2014 term of the U.S. Supreme Court could be its most important in years with respect to church-state issues. We already know that the court will hear a case involving the constitutionality of invocations in local government settings such as city hall or county board meetings: Town of Greece v. Galloway (No. 12-696). By …

The year 2013 marks a noteworthy anniversary: it has been fifty years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the conjoined cases Abingdon School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett ended school-sponsored Bible reading in American public schools. This decision came on the heels of 1962’s Engel v. Vitale, which ended school-sponsored prayer. Those …

In those states that still have capital punishment, prisoners on death row often depend desperately on court appeals wielding the Brady Rule to keep them alive. This is Brady: “Evidence or information favorable to the defendant in criminal case that is known by the prosecution: under the Unties States Supreme Court case of Brady v. …

The newly revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychi-atric Association (APA)—DSM-5—was released this past May at the Association’s an nual meeting in San Francisco. Rarely has a new book met such a universal cacophony of critical reviews. Even before the tome had hit print, critics were falling over one another …

If we don’t speak up, the status quo wins. Yes, this fight can be painful. When we battle against deeply entrenched beliefs that people are emotionally attached to and are entangled with social and political and economic structures on every level, it can be difficult—more than difficult. We ask people to give up ideas that …

Many atheists, including myself, try to avoid the kind of god-talk that some people equate with belief in a deity. Although it’s reflexive in our society to say “God bless you” when someone sneezes, “Gesundheit” (“good health”) would be a more appropriate atheist response. Getting a wallet back from the lost and found with nothing …

Henry Morgentaler was born in Poland in 1923 and emigrated to Canada in 1950. All Morgentaler’s family members except for his brother had died in death camps. He became a physician and Canada’s best-known advocate for safe, legal abortion, and he detailed his activism in a feature article he wrote for Free Inquiry in the …

  Is Religion Dying? Tom Flynn’s admonition in “Is Religion Dying?” (Free Inquiry, June/July 2013) about the well-meaning but nonetheless complacent naiveté of many humanist young people should be taken very seriously. The Christian evangelicals have long since realized that they can no longer appeal to educated youth by portraying themselves as a culturally insular …

Australia and the United States have much in common. Both are English-speaking, continent-wide former British colonies. Both pretty much displaced their indigenous populations. Both are reasonably prosperous today. America’s founders, with fresh or not-so-fresh memories of Europe’s centuries of religious conflict, had the wisdom and foresight to put the concept of separation of church and …

There are no atheists in foxholes.” Attributed to World War II journalist Ernie Pyle and various other people, this gratingly smug (and of course factually inaccurate) dictum, often addressed to nonbelievers, seems on a practical level to mean something akin to “Sure, go ahead, be an atheist and sneer at religion, as long as you’re …

We will not easily recover from the tragedies in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. These tragedies successively became the worst mass shootings in American history. My sympathies go out to the survivors, and I urge support for them, especially from the secular humanist community. When any tragedy occurs by the hand of a human person, …

The so-called New Atheists have not fared well among scholars of religion. Generally, their work has been shrugged off as shoddy, unscholarly propaganda, or they have been taken to task for conjuring “straw man” caricatures of religious traditions, conveniently ignoring all the good that religious institutions have done, defining faith in a manner unrecognizable to …

Why Tolerate Religion?, by Brian Leiter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-691-15361-2) 187 pp. Hardcover, $24.95. Brian Leiter’s new book on secular­ism and religious freedom, Why Tol­erate Religion?, has received much attention. It is a useful contribution to the discussion of an important group of issues, and it was appropriately the topic of a …

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, by A.C. Grayling (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, ISBN 978-1-62040-190-3) 269 pp. Cloth, $26.00. British philosopher A.C. Grayling must certainly be familiar to many readers of Free Inquiry, for he has long been associated with the new atheism movement, and The God Argument might be read …

There Is No God: Atheists in America, by David A. Williamson and George Yancey (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013, ISBN 978-1-4422-1849-9) 150 pp. Hardcover, $36.00. There Is No God: Atheists in America offers very little that is new or noteworthy in the budding field of social scientific research on atheists in the …

Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom, by Marie Alena Castle (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-937276-47-8) 236 pp. Paperback, $14.95. Black Tuesday—March 26, 2013— made very clear the importance of books like Marie Alena Castle’s Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom. On that day, the Indiana …

Where have you come from? Far, from far. Where are you going? Tomorrow. It took forever. Now is never heard of but firsthand. The evidence of hours is ellipsis, ampersand. Of Course There’s a God Terese Coe Of course there’s a God but God has gone mad and got shot of the only mind he …