Doctoring the Script
Have you ever noticed how fundamentally boring God is? I think that’s a slightly neglected subhead under atheism and secular humanism. God is boring because perfection is boring—especially in a lite...
View ArticleFaith: The Humanist Perspective
Pope Francis has been in the news lately in stories both about his lifestyle and his pronouncements on various topics. Many regard him as someone who represents a radical break with papal customs and...
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Cremation and Religiosity
Being diagnosed with severe emphysema, as I was recently, has a way of focusing one’s thoughts on the reality of personal mortality. To the extent that WebMD can be considered reliable, I have about a...
View ArticleJoseph Ratzinger and the Nativity Legends
While conceiving Siddhartha (the young Buddha), his mother Maya saw in a dream that he entered her womb in the shape of a little white elephant. All of nature rejoiced: trees and plants blossomed,...
View ArticleWhy Secular Humanism and Libertarianism Are Incompatible
For a short time, I called myself a “libertarian secular humanist.” I wasn’t completely comfortable with this designat ion: my innate pessimism about humanity made me doubt my qualifications as a...
View ArticleProgressive vs. Liberal
There is a critical and recurring tension between contributors to this magazine. It’s between those who trend toward a progressive/liberal view on the welfare state versus those much more on the...
View ArticleWhy I Am Not a Liberal, and You Shouldn’t Be Either
As I noted in my editorial in the October/November 2013 issue, “The Left Is Not Always Right,” secular humanists don’t always lean left on social issues—even though, on average, they skew further left...
View ArticleSexism and Religion: Can the Knot Be Untied?
Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? That was a que stion to which I had no ready answer, so I asked a random selection of...
View ArticleFeminism, Religion, and ‘Mattering’
I’ve probably agonized over this essay more than any other in my career. The source of my agony is this: Do I, for the first time in my life, publicly address the gender issue? My method has always...
View ArticleWomen’s History: A Core Secular Issue
On May 17–19, 2013, the Center for Inquiry (the Council for Secular Humanism’s supporting organization) presented the second “Women In Secularism” conference in Washington, D.C. FREE INQUIRY is...
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