Reading Time: 6 minutes The 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes opens with an eight-minute tracking shot of a Chinese factory floor, seemingly endless rows of machinery in a city-sized complex of 17,000 employees. Revisited in Factory City (2012), this industrial zone played into the idea that Asian cultures were more willing than the West to trade humanity for advancement. Yet […]
History
Exploring history and prehistory from a secular, nonreligious perspective.
Posted inPhilosophy
The art of conversion
Reading Time: 5 minutes Like most Afghans, Rahim was born a Muslim. Not that he cared much about religion. What he did care about was flying. And being a bright adventurous young man, he became a pilot. With Aryana, the Afghan Airlines, that flew, among other routes, from Kabul to London. The line started operating three years before I […]
Posted inSpace
For all of humanity’s failings, we’ve never stopped wondering about the stars
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was an atypically dry English spring when a man in Bath scanned the skies with a 7-inch reflecting telescope he’d designed and built by hand, through painstaking refinements to Isaac Newton’s principles of optics. William Herschel was studying stellar parallax, the phenomenon that makes a nearby star look like it has moved in relation […]
Posted inCulture
Jesus was ‘woke’: Historical figures who have moved humanity forward
Reading Time: 4 minutes When we use the word “woke,” we’re suggesting a sense of wakefulness, alertness, vigilance, and watchfulness. It’s a metaphor of self-designation for those who possess a certain kind of moral acuity. Those on the political Right who oppose what they call “The Woke Left” might embrace numerous other metaphors to signify their own ethical perception, for instance: The Somnolent […]
Posted inHistory
Book burning as ancient practice and modern menace
Reading Time: 7 minutes Since ancient times, people from almost all religions and societies have been burning books. As one scholar put it: “The goals of the book burners have been to extirpate history, to intimidate and stamp out opposition, to create solidarity, and to cleanse society of controversial ideas.” Not surprisingly, the act of book burning has […]
Posted inHistory
Celebrating World Humanist Day: Meet scholar Matthew Turner
Reading Time: 4 minutes On World Humanist Day, I’d like us to toast the first publicly avowed, and first published atheist in the English-speaking world. He is a man who is our originator, a man who arrived at all our complaints against God a mere 240 years before we did. And his name is Matthew Turner. In 1781, the […]
Posted inHistory
The remarkable story of Christina Johansdotter
Reading Time: 2 minutes Here’s a clever Christian loophole: if you want a quick trip to heaven but suicide is against the rules, murder someone and ask for forgiveness.
Posted inArt
Toppling Confederate monuments is only half the job. What replaces them?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Citizens in Charlottesville, Virginia, are giving input on what kind of public art ought to be created at a park where a massive statue once stood. Not just any statue. The monument glorifying Robert E. Lee. Not just any park, but the site of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and “alt-right” denizens […]
Posted inCulture
Are we talking about the same America?
Reading Time: 4 minutes When I hear, “Donald Trump doesn’t represent the America I know,” it makes me wonder what America they’re speaking of.
Posted inHistory
E Pluribus Unum: It’s time to bring back our motto
Reading Time: 5 minutes Our national motto is “In God We Trust.” Not only does it disenfranchise non-Christians, it steps on the Constitution. When pressed, Christian supporters admit the problem. We must return to E Pluribus Unum.