We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Freethought in the light of the sun
[Author's Note: I'm reposting some old favorites while I'm away on vacation this week. This post was originally from April 2011.] I'm an atheist, in part, because I'm a moral person. When I first read the books that are called holy, what I found were countless passages that are abhorrent to ...
[Author's Note: I'm reposting some old favorites while I'm away on vacation this week. This post was originally from October 2007.] I recently received an e-mail which asked me if I believe that atheism is a worldview that anyone can take up, or whether the majority of society needs religion to ...
[Author's Note: I'm reposting some old favorites while I'm away on vacation this week. This post was originally from November 2006.] One argument for theism that I have always found interesting is the argument that humans do not have desires for which there exists no corresponding object in the ...
[Author's Note: I'm reposting some old favorites while I'm away on vacation this week. This post was originally from February 2007.] One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. "Thou hast covered with anger, and persecuted us: thou hast slain, thou ...
[Author's Note: I'm reposting some old favorites while I'm away on vacation this week. This post was originally from August 2010.] I've been writing since the beginning of Daylight Atheism about the unique ways that religion harms women. Although men have also suffered innumerable harms from ...
Last week, Jen McCreight announced that she was fed up with sexism in the atheist movement and called for a new wave of atheist activism, one explicitly concerned with social justice, which quickly acquired the name "atheism+". These posts landed like a cannon shell, generating a huge wave of ...
Last week, after the shooting in their lobby that wounded a security guard, the right-wing Family Research Council immediately blamed their listing by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group - as if that label, rather than the actions they took to earn it, was the only possible reason a ...
If you're not already, you should be reading Surly Amy's ongoing post series asking men who are leaders in the atheist movement to speak out against the sexist hate and hostility that we've lately been spending so much time battling. It's a brilliant idea, and she's already garnered statements from ...
Over the weekend, JT linked to this post on Patheos by Ben Witherington, an evangelical Bible scholar, opining about the legal basis for separation of church and state in America. But what about those founding documents— the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Didn't they set ...
Editor's Note: Please welcome Korey Peters, who's written a guest post about an atheist organization he's founded that he's calling the Calgary Secular Church. In this post, he'll explain what motivated him to do it and what he's hoping to achieve. My name is Korey Peters, and I'm one of the ...
In 2011, I wrote "Pro-Family Christians Support Child Kidnapping", one of the more despicable stories of how the religious right despises and mistreats GLBT people (and that's really saying something). There have been more developments in that case, so here's an update. The story up till now ...
For those of you who don't have an e-reader (a category which, I have to admit, includes myself), or who just prefer something more tangible, here's some hopefully welcome news: Daylight Atheism, The Book is now available in paperback through Amazon CreateSpace! Here's the link. If you're ...
The WIN-Gallup International network of polling firms has released a new poll titled Global Index of Religion and Atheism 2012, and there's a lot of good news in it for us. Some of these results are so encouraging, I hesitate to believe them without additional confirmation - but if they bear out ...
There's a lot of news this week: • Two examples of humanism in action: Charles Feeney, a billionaire philanthropist, plans to give away all his remaining money within a few years, and a new nonprofit helps to crowdfund DNA sequencing for children with rare genetic diseases. • Since we still ...
Just as a reminder: The last week of this month, I'm taking a trip to London and Edinburgh. If you live around there and are interested in meeting me, come on out! I'm arriving in London on the morning of Saturday, August 25, and we're tentatively planning a meetup that night. On Wednesday ...