Reading Time: 6 minutes Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter I And now, we embark on the third and final part of Atlas Shrugged. When we left off at the conclusion of Part II, it was on a cliffhanger: Dagny’s plane was spiraling down for a crash landing, plummeting into a mysterious valley that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Part […]
utopia
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The Perils of Scriptural Morality
Reading Time: 3 minutes I was cheered by a story I saw last week about about heroic activist groups working to end the barbaric custom of female “circumcision”, aka female genital mutilation, that’s practiced in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. FGM isn’t unique to Christianity or to Islam, but is found across a range of traditional […]
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Dispatches from Future America: Nation Ratifies Reproductive Rights Amendment
Reading Time: 3 minutes [Editor’s Note: The last dispatch I received in this ongoing series was particularly bleak. As if on cue, I got another message the other day, this one apparently originating from a very different, and much rosier, future. I get the strong impression that these two possible worlds are, in some manner, competing against each other.] […]
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There Are 10 Times as Many Atheists as Mormons: When Will Non-Believers Become a Political Force?
Reading Time: 9 minutes This essay was originally published on AlterNet. The propagandists of the religious right shout it aloud as their battle cry: “America is a Christian nation!” And in the trivial sense that ours is a nation populated mostly by Christians, this is true. But in the sense that they mean it, that Christianity was intended to […]
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Dispatches from Future America: Nation Celebrates National Day of Reason
Reading Time: 4 minutes [Editor’s Note: This just keeps getting stranger. Last month, I received a news dispatch from a disturbing future version of America through an anonymous remailer. The other day, I received a message from a different address, presenting itself as the same thing… but apparently from a very different future than the previous one. I have […]
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Chris Hedges Doesn’t Believe In Moral Progress (Except When He Does)
Reading Time: 3 minutes A Review of When Atheism Becomes Religion, Part III As I’ve written before, Chris Hedges is a nihilist. He flatly denies the possibility of moral progress, and vehemently asserts that any efforts to improve humanity will inevitably end in mass slaughter and destruction. He says so bluntly at the beginning of his book: Those who […]
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The Contributions of Freethinkers: Gene Roddenberry
Reading Time: 3 minutes As a wedding present to ourselves, my wife and I bought the DVDs of the original Star Trek, and these past few months, we’ve been working our way through them. For myself, it was a test: I hadn’t seen most of these episodes since my childhood, and I was curious to see if they held […]
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Reengineering Human Nature: Dogmatism
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Problem: Human beings are stubborn creatures, set in our ways, resistant to changing our minds once we’ve made a decision. Religious groups publish creeds which they believe must be taken on faith and should be maintained against all contrary evidence – and they consider the ability to do that a virtue, rather than a […]
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Reengineering Human Nature: Pride
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Problem: According to Christianity and other monotheistic religions, pride is the deadliest sin. Taking excessive pleasure in yourself and your own talents and accomplishments is the surest way to end up condemned. I personally don’t agree with the extreme view that pride is the worst possible character flaw – when properly harnessed, it’s an […]
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Reengineering Human Nature: Selfishness
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Problem: Nearly all the world’s religions teach that we should be generous to the poor and needy, and warn that greed and selfishness are destructive sins. “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). But this principle is rarely honored, even by the religious leaders who supposedly believe […]