Reading Time: 6 minutes OnlySky · Episode 8 of the Raising Freethinkers podcast Search not to find what lies too deeply hid Nor to know things whose knowledge is forbid. That bad advice is from John Denham, an English poet and politician in the 17th century. Bad advice, but also really common in our culture. If we want to […]
Parenting & Family
Exploring the world of family and parenting from a secular, nonreligious perspective.
Posted inReproductive rights
Pro-life Christians as civil rights trailblazers?
Reading Time: 3 minutes In a blunt lecture, a Christian anti-abortion advocate scolds the pro-choice community about civil rights and ends with a big slice of Godwin’s Law.
Posted inParenting & Family
Do atheists just need a father figure?
Reading Time: 4 minutes A Christian scholar reports that Christians are Christian because they had good father figures and atheists are atheists because they had bad ones. Let’s explore the failures in this offensive claim.
Posted inParenting & Family
From father to son: Sport as a catalyst for wisdom
Reading Time: 3 minutes In college, I read Umberto Eco’s richly complex and insightful novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. A particular line jumped out at me at the time: “What we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments when they aren’t teaching us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” This stuck with me years after reading, […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Reflections of a father figure
Reading Time: 4 minutes OnlySky · Reflections of a father figure | JH McKenna I was looking at my face in the mirror this morning, as I do every day soon after waking up, but this time, for some reason, I saw afresh the lingering imprint of my father. Daddy, as we southern-bred kids called him, was raised with […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Daddy issues: Do ‘defective fathers’ lead children to reject the idea of God?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Few atheists will be celebrating their dads on Father’s Day. At least that’s the solemn judgment of Dr. Paul Vitz, psychologist and author of Faith of the Fatherless: the psychology of atheism. Published in 1999, Vitz’s book argues that absent or abusive fathers cause their children to lose trust in father figures, leading those kids […]
Posted inBooks
Adam the Ape: A thought-provoking middle-grade book for science-loving readers
Reading Time: 2 minutes Humans have been paired with chimps in movies, television, and books as far back as I can remember. I’d assume that’s mostly due to the similarities we share with these great apes—how we can see ourselves in them and undeniably realize our link to them, despite also being indoctrinated elsewhere into the idea that humans […]
Posted inSex & Gender
When men’s mental health becomes a political weapon, everyone loses
Reading Time: 8 minutes When I was a kid, comedians and pundits still felt comfortable joking about how terrible women would be in political office because they menstruate. Hormones, get it? As if only half the population has them, and testosterone has no complex interactions for human bodies. As a child, I absorbed all kinds of reductive claims about […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The work we do, with the time we have
Reading Time: 6 minutes When I was a wee sprog, I dreamed big. I was going to be a physics professor, working on tricky cosmology problems related to heat and expansion. (I was the precocious twit reading Feynman and Hawking at twelve and, like any twelve-year-old, feeling confident that I understood everything because I’d read a few pop-sci texts.) […]
Posted inReligious News
Child Evangelism Fellowship seizes school shooting opportunity to recruit children
Reading Time: 3 minutes Child Evangelism Fellowship is now distributing indoctrination booklets to already-traumatized kids and families in Uvalde