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Freethought in the light of the sun
Back in May, I reviewed Steven Pinker's hugely ambitious new book The Better Angels of Our Nature , about the decline of violence through history. I couldn't do justice to all the ideas in this book with a single post, so I promised to return to it and write about Pinker's argument in more detail ...
My latest article has just been published on AlterNet, Why Is America's Most Progressive Voting Block Often Overlooked? In it, I discuss the strong progressive leanings of American nonbelievers, what we could accomplish if we worked together with liberal religious believers on causes we held in ...
In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America, as a private membership-based organization, had the right to discriminate against gay people by expelling them or barring them from joining. Since then, the BSA has been enforcing that policy with gusto, expelling gay and ...
As I'm writing this post, NASA's latest Mars mission - the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity - is just hours away from its destination. By the time you read this, we'll know if it touched down safely on the surface of the red planet. Curiosity is a robot rover about the size of an ...
On Friday afternoon, I got a call on my cell phone from an 800 number I didn't recognize. I let it go to voicemail, and I'm glad I did, because that means I had a recording of this wonderfully bizarre call so I could transcribe and share it with you: God bless you, this is [unintelligible ...
Last month, AlterNet published a column by James Rohrer, a history professor and self-identified progressive religious believer who had some unkind words for the New Atheists. I'd like to take the opportunity to respond here and to show how his essay partakes of many of the same fallacies that have ...
Summary: A solid, informative history of the rise of the American secular movement. Books like Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History or Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers show how brave nonbelievers have always existed, even in theocratic societies that were implacably hostile to their views. In ...
Well, here's an announcement! My first-ever original article for Salon has just been published, "Rise of the new atheists: Should non-believers make an alliance with religious progressives?" In it, I discuss the meteoric growth of nonbelief in America, why the so-called New Atheists think it's a ...
When it comes to debating the merits of religion, we atheists have an unfair advantage. Lately, almost every day when I go to work, there are Jehovah's Witnesses in the subway station. I see them in the morning and the evening, two or three of them sitting on folding chairs in the sweltering ...
A few weeks ago, I posted a video of "Satellite," the first single from Anna Dagmar's newest album of the same title. I first saw her play at a concert on Long Island, and not only did I love the song, I thought the subject matter would make it perfect to feature on my blog. I contacted her to ask ...
On Tuesday, Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary of clergy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was sentenced to three to six years in prison for his role in shielding pedophile priests from the law and reassigning them to positions where they could harm more children. At least one boy ...
(more info here) The majority of paper mail I get is from people asking me for money. Political candidates from every state, advocacy groups, seemingly every charity under the sun, museums, parks, orchestras, even religious groups. But probably the most surprising solicitation I've gotten ...
Just a quick note: I've been interviewed for the latest episode of Think Atheist Radio, which is now available for download and podcasting. In the interview, we chat about the arguments against God's existence, the basis for godless morality, the importance of the secular community - and, of course ...
I usually write optimistic posts. This is going to be a scary one. I apologize in advance. While I was in Columbus last month, I mentioned the furnace-like heat. Well, it wasn't just me. In what's becoming an annual tradition, heat records are being broken all across the country. And it's not ...
I've noticed recently that my blogroll has been looking pretty homogeneous (Freethought Blogs has gobbled up a lot of it), and I'm always on the lookout for interesting new voices I haven't heard from before. So, this is an open thread for the purposes of self-promotion. If you maintain a blog ...