Reading Time: 3 minutes When he joined the Royal Navy, a friend of mine was asked his religion. When he answered that he was nonreligious, he received the reply, “Well in that case, we’ll put you down as Free Church.” There was no existing way to accommodate such a category at the time. The Armed Forces are generally associated […]
Nonreligious News
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 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 inNonreligious News
The Healy wearable: Just a newer, weirder multi-level marketing scheme
Reading Time: 9 minutes The Healy wearable has only a very limited FDA clearance. But its claims go much, much further as they blitz your social media.
Posted inSocial Media
CNN, Twitter, and the danger of signal-boosting
Reading Time: 3 minutes We are a species that struggles with group think, especially when confronted with the specter of popularity. If a famous or infamous person is in the news, it’s difficult not to pay attention. But there is a danger in allowing our attention to boost the signal for toxic people and ideas.
Posted inNews
A tale of two gun countries
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last Wednesday, a 13-year-old opened fire on students in his school, killing nine and wounding seven others, possibly following the “kill list” he’d made in advance. He will not be prosecuted due to his age, but while he undergoes psychiatric evaluation his parents were arrested, and his father, the owner of the firearms used, faces […]
Posted inLatest research
UK census: Most LGBT people are nonreligious
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s always interesting to see the demographic connections between religious worldviews (or lack thereof) and politics. One often assumes that the more politically liberal one is, the higher the chance that they will be nonreligious. Pew Research Center has found that 53% of “nones”—religiously unaffiliated—are or lean Democrat, with only 23% favoring the Republican Party. […]
Posted inIdentity
Millennials: your liberal atheist elders
Reading Time: 5 minutes Millennials are defying long-established patterns by getting older without becoming more religious or voting more conservative. It’s an unpleasant surprise for the American religious right.
Posted inNonreligious News
New York is a city of freedom, not a city of God
Reading Time: 5 minutes New York Mayor Eric Adams’ thoughtless and un-American attack on secularism shows a failure to understand what makes his own city great.
Posted inGen Z Rising
Gen Z is killing religion
Reading Time: 5 minutes Gen Z is the least Christian generation in American history, and as they come into their own, their influence is reshaping culture and politics. The era of the religious right is drawing to a close.