Reading Time: 4 minutes Earlier this week, OnlySky contributor Kristen Chase offered her take on how we should respond when well-meaning religious people offer their blessings and prayers to atheists. She suggested nonbelievers such as myself respond with one simple phrase: Thank you. I partially agree, while pointing out Kristen’s essential qualifier: well-meaning. Yes, when well-meaning, not passive-aggressive, people […]
OTOH
Posted inCritical thinking
The atheist case for free speech
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 […]
Posted inPsychology
The mating minds of mass shooters
Reading Time: 10 minutes OnlySky · The mating minds of mass shooters | Dr. Hector Garcia This time it happened in Uvalde, Texas. A gunman burst into an elementary school, brandishing a weapon designed for combat, and tore our most precious human treasures to pieces. Some of the 19 corpses of nine, ten, and eleven-year-olds that he left strewn […]
Posted inBooks
So, you’re a boastfully bookish book hoarder
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve heard you all—in personal conversations and in radio and TV interviews—boasting about how many books you own. “You wouldn’t believe how many books I have piled up in my home.” Isn’t this a self-congratulatory semaphore-flag-waving announcement that you are smart? I’m bookish too, but I was taught that it’s inelegant for bookish people to plume themselves […]
Posted inCulture
No jubilation for the Jubilee: Why the monarchy must end
Reading Time: 5 minutes OnlySky · No jubilation for the Jubilee: Why the monarchy must end The Platinum Jubilee, which celebrates 70 years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, is everywhere in the UK. The front pages of newspapers and magazines blare their worship of an old woman and her family. The television news is given over to segments on […]
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 inPolitics
Disinviting bigoted campus speakers blocks bigotry, not free speech
Reading Time: 6 minutes When American university and college students try to deny “free speech” platforms to arch-conservative opinion leaders they consider dangerous purveyors of bigotry, or just shout them down, right-wing complaints of suppression are swift and virulent. The constant trope is that American higher education institutions are controlled by “woke,” “liberal” academics and students who want to […]
Posted inEnvironment
What degrowth is, and why it matters
Reading Time: 11 minutes In Livermore, California, there is a light bulb that never goes out. It was installed in 1901 in a fire station that didn’t realize for many decades what a wonder it had on its hands. The bulb was made by the Shelby Electric Company, with a patented-coil carbon filament eight times thicker than the tungsten […]
Posted inTechnology
Why degrowth is (still) wrong
Reading Time: 6 minutes Earlier this month, I wrote an essay against degrowth, the position that drastic reductions to the modern lifestyle are our only hope of saving the planet. I argued that, to the contrary, renewable energy promises a future of greater abundance even as we tread more lightly on the Earth. It’s the very rare case where […]
Posted inTechnology
Why degrowth is wrong
Reading Time: 4 minutes Americans are obsessed with bigness. We build bigger and bigger houses. We drive bigger and bigger cars. We even eat bigger portions and consume more calories than anyone else, including more meat, the most resource-intensive of foods. In short, we idolize excess. We’re the richest society that’s ever existed, and we consume in a way […]