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The Bright Line between Good and Evil
This article was adapted from a transcript of the November 7, 2023, episode of the author’s podcast, Making Sense. We have witnessed extreme moral confusion since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Some of it has been just frank anti-Semitism, but much is actual confusion. …
This article is available for free to all.Reflections on a Death Spiral
“Don’t let them drive the tractor. They need to know their place.” It was 1992. I was living in Israel, breathing in the desert air, loving the family that adopted me on the kibbutz, and enjoying the company of the Palestinian day-laborers who came over from Gaza each morning to work. They had to get …
This article is available for free to all.A Half-Fundamentalist Church
My high school was a Catholic seminary. All my teachers were priests. They were all well-educated and were especially devoted to the students, because they felt responsible not only for providing us with a good background in mathematics, science, Latin, history, literary analysis, and oratory skills but also for seeing to it that our vocation …
Immaculate Misconceptions
To better understand the idea of the virgin birth, we need to go back to the beginning. Unfortunately, there are more beginnings in the world’s religions than there are bagels or baklavas. But whatever else there is, the story needs a woman, a miraculous birth, and a special offspring. Isis and Co. One of the …
Myths about Overpopulation
Editor’s note: As a publication based in secular humanist values, we frequently cover and discuss existential risks. In particular, the ecological impact of human overpopulation has resonated deeply with many of Free Inquiry’s writers over the years and has been frequently raised as one of our most serious threats. In his article “Save the Earth; …
This article is available for free to all.The Trillion-Sided Die: Bayesian Reasoning for Evolutionists
Skeptics and critical thinkers are experts in the frailty of human thinking. We study logical fallacies and cognitive biases, and we are well-versed in the many other ways that humans err in their thinking. But what is not widely studied is the science of thinking correctly. What does rational thinking look like when it is …
Evolution’s Worst Mistake
It’s a familiar statement in biology: “Evolution is a tinkerer”—a comment on the way life has developed, offering to explain both its brilliant (if fortuitous) strokes and its all-too-frequent oddities, some of which are decidedly counterintuitive. In 2001, Scientific American published a short and entertainingly illustrated article on what humans might be like if evolution …
Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian Nationalism Gets Congressional Attention—Not the Good Kind
We have a caucus in Congress. Yes, we do. The Congressional Freethought Caucus (CFC) is dedicated to promoting the secular character of government by protecting the strict separation of church and state, as well as evaluating public policy based on its adherence to reason and science. That is about as close to the mission of …
This article is available for free to all.The Age of Unreason, Self-Delusion, and Self-Destruction
The Enlightenment that introduced the world to secular humanism emerged during the Age of Reason. Human beings were thought to be throwing off superstitions and fanciful beliefs in the pursuit of social and economic progress and betterment. This outlook led in turn to the idea of rational economic men and women pursuing their own self-interest, …
Academic Freedom in the News: The Jo Phoenix Case
Western democracies accord prestige to free inquiry and discussion in the realms of science, scholarship, and philosophy. These freedoms are often under threat, but few commentators repudiate them entirely. Since the nineteenth century, universities have been seen as especially important centers for inquiry and discussion, but they’ve come under attack from opponents with a bewildering …