Reading Time: 5 minutes Turns out Barack Obama was right about guns and religion. During his successful 2008 presidential campaign, he alluded to white, blue-collar manufacturing workers in America who were terribly incensed that their well-paying jobs and comfortable lives had vaporized in globalization during the previous quarter century: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling […]
Second Amendment
Posted inViolence
Why are AR-15-style rifles so wildly popular in America?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Why does the United States all-too-casually allow virtually anyone to buy an AR-15-style rifle, a fearsomely lethal weapon millions of American civilians have already joyfully acquired? I ask myself that question every time one of these awful weapons is used to kill many, many innocent people in a matter of minutes or even seconds—including the […]
Posted inParenting & Family
After Uvalde, an open letter to US legislators with children
Reading Time: 4 minutes A father of 2 boys, still trying to process the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, TX, addresses legislators on assault rifles.
Posted inRacial justice
Mental illness doesn’t cause mass shootings. Hate armed for war does
Reading Time: 6 minutes First Amendment-loving conservatives have long blamed isolated mental-health issues in very angry individuals but never the availability of guns as the proximate cause of America’s decades-long epidemic of horrific mass shootings in America. Or they claim mass shootings are hardly a problem at all and that, by the way, overall gun violence is supposedly down […]
Posted inSatire
Señorita pistols and the amendment after the First
Reading Time: 3 minutes This piece does not intend to minimize the horror of gun violence in the U.S. Indeed, the purpose here is to lampoon the ineffectiveness of our gun policies and the notion that more guns is what we need. Consider this A Modest Proposal. The text of an upcoming speech by Senator Burlo Winchester—an advocate of […]
Posted inHealth
Naomi Judd, guns, and suicide: Public health and the 2nd Amendment
Reading Time: 4 minutes America loves its guns, even though that love affair is killing us. If you own a gun, don’t worry. I’m not coming after them. I know of many nonreligious folks, like Seth Andrews, the popular Thinking Atheist podcaster, who own firearms. But as a secular humanist, don’t you want to live a life guided by […]
Posted inRacial justice
Did too-blind justice free Kyle Rittenhouse?
Reading Time: 4 minutes FYI to my readers: My OnlySky essays are always informed by secularism, nontheism and humanism but do not always focus on patently irreligious themes. My essential aim is to investigate our world from the perspective that gods are nonexistent. Blind justice, it turns out, can be too blind. Take, for instance, then 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy
The Foundation to My Whole Worldview
Reading Time: 8 minutes In a sense, this is about the most important piece I can write because out of it comes my whole philosophy. What you are about to read pertains to any abstract object: morality, meaning (of life or words), maths, purpose, and so on. I am just about to release a new book called Why I […]
Posted inPolitics
Trump Is Ripping up the Constitution and His Supporters Don’t Care
Reading Time: 9 minutes It’s hard not to be obsessed with politic at the moment; it is all-consuming, it is everywhere. I have argued over the Consitution with Trump cultists here many times and they appear to obsess over it. The drool over their own justification of the document. When it is convenient. When it is less convenient, they […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Enlightenment and Conflicting Rights
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a post that covered a number of things, John Crawford, who normally comments here in protection of gun advocacy, a sort of faux-libertarianism and other positions, commented as follows: So, what is the heritage of our belief in the sanctity of life, that you support abortion? What is the heritage of our belief, that […]