Reading Time: 2 minutes You don’t call yourself an a-unicornist. Or an a-Santaist. Why call yourself an a-theist?
Deep Dive
Exploring the big questions—life, death, morality, consciousness, meaning—from a secular point of view.
Posted inThe Secular
God Doesn’t Exist: Believers are Products of their Environment
Reading Time: 2 minutes What fraction of Muslims were not raised in a Muslim environment? What fraction of Christians were not raised in a Christian environment? What does it say about the validity of religious claims that people typically take on the religion of their culture?
Posted inThe Secular
God Doesn’t Exist: Christianity Looks Invented
Reading Time: 2 minutes Does Christianity look like the one true religion, clearly different from all the thousands of manmade ones? Or does it look the same as all the rest?
Posted inThe Secular
God Doesn’t Exist: Christianity Relies on Indoctrination
Reading Time: 2 minutes What would happen if we categorized Christianity as an adult activity? It would be like smoking, drinking, voting, driving, sex, and so on—things that you must be mature enough to handle wisely. This adults-only Christianity would die out within a few generations.
Posted inThe Secular
God Doesn’t Exist: Historians Reject the Bible Story
Reading Time: 2 minutes You never find the story of Jesus in a history book, like you would for Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Why is that? Why is the Bible not cataloged in the library in the History section?
Posted inThe Secular
A National Registry of Atheists? Y’know–Like Sex Offenders.
Reading Time: < 1 minute Who wants a national registry of atheists?
Posted inReligion
Map of the History of Religion
Reading Time: < 1 minute I made an interesting discovery a few years ago. Not an especially unique discovery, I’ll admit, and rather obvious in hindsight. But here goes. The Eastern Mediterranean spawned three great religions: Judaism, then Christianity, and then Islam. With Christianity dominant in the US, it’s easy to focus only on this region. But northern India also […]
Posted inCritical thinking, Science
The aspiring rationalist
Reading Time: 4 minutes The brain is an inelegant and inefficient agglomeration of stuff…Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer…The brain is built like an ice cream cone (and you are the top scoop): Through evolutionary time, as higher functions were added, a new scoop was placed on top, but the lower scoops were left largely unchanged. –David Linden, […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Ten years of Calling Bernadette’s Bluff
Reading Time: 4 minutes My 500th post goes back ten years to the beginning of my public freethought life, before Parenting Beyond Belief, before Foundation Beyond Belief… Spring 2001. I’m a mostly closeted secular humanist on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s Friday afternoon, so I’m sitting with a small, sad knot of St. Kate’s […]
Posted inCritical thinking, Parenting & Family
“To hell with this goddamn freethought parenting!”
Reading Time: 4 minutes To hell with this goddamn freethought parenting! — REBEKAH McGOWAN, June 11, 2007 That shocking phrase came hurtling from between the tender lips of the mother of my children as we sat nursing our morning lattés yesterday. Turns out Becca had spent the end of the previous evening fencing with our nearly 12-year-old son over […]