Reading Time: 10 minutes It was about 15 years ago, at Pitzer College, a small liberal arts institution in California, in my Sociology of Religion class. The morning’s lecture was “The Origins of Mormonism.” A main point of the lecture was to illustrate the way in which this recently-established world religion emerged not because of any supernatural magic, but […]
The Secular
Posted inLeaving Religion
How humanism helped me let go of God
Reading Time: 3 minutes I grew up with the idea that goodness came from God. My family was sort of Catholic—the soft Catholicism that meant we didn’t read the bible or go to church unless it was absolutely necessary. And while hell was a concept I was familiar with, it wasn’t the main focus of our religion. The main […]
Posted inAnalysis
Of God and guns
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the wake of yet another and another and another mass shooting by a young man armed with an AR-15, it is natural for people to seek someone or something to blame. The left blames their usual suspects: too-easy access to increasingly lethal firearms, the NRA, and their Republican enablers. The right also has their […]
Posted inLaw
What does being a ‘person’ do?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In 2008, a Macedonian court found a bear guilty of damaging beehives. Since it had no owner and belonged to a protected species, the state was made to pay the fine instead. Legal history abounds with stories of animal trials, especially in the Middle Ages and early Enlightenment, when both secular and Ecclesiastical variants played […]
Posted inThe Secular
Sahra’s last message | Ashkan Mehr Roshan
Before the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, an Iranian activist, blogger, and translator who goes by the pseudonym Ashkan Mehr Roshan connected with an Afghan woman and freethinker. Together, they formed one of the biggest and most effective underground support communities for nonbelievers and religious minorities in the region. But shortly after the Taliban […]
Posted inNonreligious News
‘Identitarianism’ isn’t tearing humanists apart. It’s making us stronger
Reading Time: 7 minutes In an editorial appearing in the June/July issue of Free Inquiry, Robyn Blumner, the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &, Science, claims identity politics and cancel culture have “torn apart” the Humanist movement (as far as there is one) mostly because people criticized […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Memento Mori’: To live with the prospect of death (Strange New Worlds)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Like any self-respecting Trekkie, I learned the basics of gunpower from Star Trek: The Original Series. One of TOS‘s most memorable scenes comes from “Arena” (Season 1, Episode 18), when Captain Kirk, trapped on a planet with minimal resources, has to use his wits to survive an encounter with a brutish reptilian species called the […]
Posted inThe Secular
The poisoned church: When pastors use their pulpits to spread disinformation
Reading Time: 4 minutes As we see the world becoming victim to the effects of misinformation and disinformation of authoritarian political agents, it is worth remembering that this is also happening closer to home in our local churches. I was reading an article in Atlantic magazine last night about an Evangelical church in Brighton, Michigan (a state in which […]
Posted inThe Secular
Ten years later, it still sounds like humanism
Reading Time: 2 minutes Ten years ago, the American Humanist Association ran a clever campaign quoting any number of famed religious people, noting that a given quote sure “Sounds Like Humanism.” The idea was this: You people are really one of us, even if you don’t openly admit it. Ancient Christian intellectuals did the same thing, making the extravagant […]
Posted inThe Secular
Hey atheists, can we just stop arguing?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Enough already. How many times do we have to take public issue with some chapter and verse in the Bible? How many times do we have to contest a theological story and say it makes no sense? Animals upon an ark. Talking donkeys. God-men. Water into wine. Sacrificial deaths. Subterranean torture chambers of eternal duration. […]