Reading Time: 5 minutes I remember the first time I saw the enemy. They weren’t anything like what I expected. I think I was picturing an Al-Qaeda version of a Navy SEAL, bulging muscles, armed to the teeth, all-around intimidating warfighters. But what I saw were young men hardly old enough to grow a beard, with a skinny physique and wearing […]
The Secular
Posted inBooks
The weirdness of being secular
Reading Time: 4 minutes Is organized atheism too much like a religion? Is it okay for secular people to participate in rituals? If a humanist holds beliefs, is this dogmatic? Can a nonreligious person say “bless you” after someone sneezes? Probably every atheist or nonreligious person has, at some point in their lives, asked themselves or been asked questions […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
Secular grief: How I learned to cope without heaven
Reading Time: 4 minutes Shortly before my mother went in for surgery to correct an issue with her bowels, I drove up to her rural northern California home to help her prepare. I sat on the piano bench in her living room and waited for her to retrieve something she just had to show me. She returned from her […]
Posted inThe Secular
Less grey, less white: How to reach younger, more diverse seculars
Reading Time: 4 minutes We are a social species, and we do our best work together. But without a church, synagogue, or mosque in which to congregate, secular people must depend on local, state, and national organizations to create opportunities to network. National conferences occupy an especially large role in fostering engagement. I attended the 2021 Freedom From Religion […]
Posted inThe Secular
The secular corner of South America
Reading Time: 8 minutes In recent years, international scholars have been developing new methods to understand two challenging belief categories: religious believers without affiliation to any religious institution, and those who define themselves as unbelievers—the “nones.” Several quantitative studies have reported clear disparities among the countries in Latin America. This article explores the characteristics of these two groups based […]
Posted inBooks
Mark Twain sums up the absurdity of God in a single quote
Reading Time: 2 minutes As I meander along the sometimes remote byways of the nonreligious environment, I frequently come across some lovely sunlit glens. I recently found one in the form of a quote posted by someone named u/Lazy_boa in Reddit’s r/atheism tributary, titled “Mark Twain summed up the absurdity of God over a century ago.” This quote submitted […]
Posted inReligion
When bad religion reigns
Reading Time: 3 minutes Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton publicly declared his fervent desire to arrest consenting adults who engage in non-procreative sex. And he just may get to do so in the near future, given Supreme Court Justice Thomas’s stated intention to revisit Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 ruling that rendered sodomy laws unconstitutional nationwide. What […]
Posted inEthics
Is ‘sentientism’ really better in practice than humanism?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Imagine a world where all sentient beings – human or otherwise – have recognized and protected rights. That’s sentientism. But is it better?
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 inThe Secular
Why the Kennedy v. Bremerton SCOTUS ruling empowers secular defenders of religious liberty
Reading Time: 3 minutes As the recent Supreme Court ruling Kennedy v. Bremerton allows football coaches to kneel with students in prayer on the fifty-yard line, it also opens the door for more teachers, coaches, and other public officials to practice their religion in public. This seems like an unhappy entanglement between religion and the state, but could secular […]