Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s the sort of story you couldn’t get past a fiction editor as “realistic”, but which is nonetheless par for the course in our relentlessly self-destructive world: Ahead of COP28, the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference to be held from November 30 to December 12 in the United Arab Emirates, an undercover investigation has confirmed […]
News
The latest breaking news and journalistic reporting from a secular perspective at OnlySky, a secular community for nonreligious Americans.
Posted inReproductive rights
Abortion travel bans: Coming soon to a red state near you?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Despite one stinging defeat after another, religious conservatives keep trying to outlaw abortion—now, by making it illegal to travel out of red states to places where it’s legal.
Posted inPolitics
Stoking division: How Putin is helping the rise of the right
Reading Time: 16 minutes The rise of the far right in Russia is deeply concerning for the global community. Is it organic, or is it covered with the dirty fingerprints of Vladimir Putin?
Posted inWar and Peace
Wartime hostages and armchair analysts
Reading Time: 14 minutes As the world awaits the Israel-Hamas hostage deal and temporary ceasefire, it bears remembering how complex political and wartime kidnappings always are.
Posted inCritical thinking
A response to Hirsi Ali’s response to her critics
Reading Time: 6 minutes Former atheist anti-Islamic author Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently wrote a column for UnHerd declaring her new identity as a Christian. This caused quite some uproar in certain circles given her previous ardent advocacy for rejecting Islam for unbelief. The author and public critic of Islam was associated with the New Atheist movement. I discussed previously […]
Posted inEconomics
Argentina and the politics of desperation
Reading Time: 6 minutes On November 19, Argentina elected Javier Milei as its next president, to take office this December. His politics have been compared to those of Donald Trump (in his showmanship) and Jair Bolsonaro (in his rightwing extremism and denialism), but his ideas go further than both. Milei calls himself an anarcho-capitalist (a form of libertarian), whose […]
Posted inNews
Bring down the paywalls
Reading Time: 3 minutes Paywalls are born from the economic reality that we have to pay for good journalism somehow. But even a necessary evil is still an evil. There should be more creative and flexible ways to support the industry that keeps us informed.
Posted inClimate Crisis
A grim sort of hope: Notes from the fifth US climate assessment
Reading Time: 10 minutes The fifth US National Climate Assessment offers a few promising notes amid a mountain of grim news about how extreme environmental changes are already here.
There’s plenty we can do to mitigate the worst of them—but will we?
Posted inNonreligious News
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former atheist, becomes Christian
Reading Time: 4 minutes Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a former ardent atheist, embracing the lure of Christianity. But how justified and surprising is her move back to religion?
Posted inReligious News
Yet again, Southern Baptist leaders caught making life harder for sex abuse victims
Reading Time: 7 minutes Four high-profile Southern Baptist Convention group leaders quietly filed an amicus brief opposing a sex abuse victim’s lawsuit in Kentucky. This lawsuit had nothing to do with them or the SBC, but if successful it could drastically alter the scope and number of lawsuits the SBC faces from similar victims.