Looking Back | Free Inquiry (original) (raw)
Free Inquiry Volume 44, No. 6
October/November 2024
Nicole Scott
Every article in Free Inquiry’s over forty-year history is available online at secularhumanism.org. I utilize this tool when I draft the Looking Back article for each issue of FI. It is an invaluable resource, not only for me as an author, but for every secular humanist. The pages of FI have covered many topics over …
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Secular Humanism on Racism in America
Free Inquiry Volume 44, No. 5
August/September 2024
Nicole Scott
Racism in America has garnered much international mainstream attention since Spring 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a White police officer. This may be because the world was in the middle of a global pandemic that caused long lockdowns where most people were home and glued to any media they …
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Free Inquiry Volume 44, No. 4
June/July 2024
Nicole Scott
There are some questions that humans have been asking since the beginning of time, such as: What is right and what is wrong? To answer this question, societies have looked to deities and god-appointed kings. Laypeople were told what was right and wrong. As society evolved, some people began to question whether what the deities …
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James A. Haught’s Thirty Years with FI
Free Inquiry Volume 44, No. 1
December 2023/January 2024
Nicole Scott
With over fifty articles published in Free Inquiry spanning more than thirty years, James A. Haught was one of FI’s most fruitful contributors. His first article, titled “Murder in the Name of Religion,” appeared in the Summer 1990 issue and discussed the contradiction in what religion preaches versus practices. After providing numerous examples of how …
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Free Inquiry Volume 43, No. 6
October/November 2023
Nicole Scott
The word atheist has been used in some form for many centuries, dating back to ancient Greece. The secular community uses many identifiers: atheist, agnostic, freethinker, nonreligious, etc. A way researchers have used to classify the entire secular community is with the label “Nones”: those who select some variation of “None of the above” on …
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Hitch Was Here: Christopher Hitchens’s History with Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 43, No. 5
August/September
Nicole Scott
Free Inquiry has hosted many writers over the years; some have been more prominent than others, while some have grown with us. One such prolific writer who graced the pages of Free Inquiry was none other than the late Christopher Hitchens. He is of course remembered for bestselling books such as God Is Not Great, …
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Life’s Rituals: Do They Have to Be Religious?
Free Inquiry Volume 43, No. 4
June/July 2023
Nicole Scott
One major part of any religion is its rituals, traditions, and rites of passage. These provide opportunities for individuals to showcase their beliefs and be involved with a community. Many people continue following these traditions even if they have left their religious beliefs behind—or never had them to begin with. So how does secular humanism, …
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Does Humanism Need a Revitalization?
Free Inquiry Volume 43, No. 3
April/May 2023
Nicole Scott
In every organized movement, there comes times when changes in the landscape require a shift in direction. It’s not necessarily about a change in values or core principles but rather a rededication, a refocusing to address new challenges. Humanism is no different. In the past few decades, politics, culture, and world events have changed dramatically. …
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The Alleged Immorality of Atheists
Free Inquiry Volume 43, No. 2
February/March 2023
Nicole Scott
How can someone live a “good” life without threats from some all-powerful entity looming over them? Many authors have shared their perspectives on living a good life without organized religion or supernatural belief in the pages of Free Inquiry. In the Winter 2001/2002 issue, FI introduced the “Living Without Religion” department, featuring stories from humanists, …
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A Long History Supporting Free Expression
Free Inquiry Volume 43, No. 1
December 2022/January 2023
Nicole Scott
In February 2015, I had only been working for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), home of Free Inquiry, for about a month when activist and writer Avijit Roy was murdered by machete-wielding assailants in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bonya Ahmed, his wife and a fellow writer, was also badly injured during the attack. This was my introduction …
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Looking Back, October/November 2022
Free Inquiry Volume 42, No. 6
October/November 2022
35 Years Ago “In terms of the values moral judgments try to realize or achieve, we might say the single value that sets religious morality apart from secular morality is ‘God’s wish (or will).’ This wipes out any supposed difference between humanist and theist morality; it makes belief in God of no special importance ethically. …
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Looking Back August/September 2022
Free Inquiry Volume 42, No. 5
August/September 2022
35 Years Ago …
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Free Inquiry Volume 42, No. 4
June/July 2022
35 Years Ago “Lack of religious worship, prayer, and ceremony has affected my life very favorably—by giving me much more time than I otherwise would have had to be committed to other, quite worldly pursuits. Including personal pleasure! “I consider life meaningful even though I reject the idea of a theistic being, because I make …
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Free Inquiry Volume 42, No. 3
April/May 2022
35 Years Ago “The view that religious belief and practice were indispensable for the preservation of social order, not only between classes, but within classes, seems to have been held by leading statesmen like Napoleon and Metternich, who were not themselves noteworthy for their religious piety. Some members of elite groups in Western society who …
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Looking Back February/March 2022
Free Inquiry Volume 42, No. 2
February/March 2022
35 Years Ago “The obvious implication—uncomfortable, no doubt, for rationalists and freethinkers—is that atheism does not at all ensure a free society. Indeed, as I’ve tried to suggest, it seems more comfortable with fundamentalism than with liberation. “Atheism is not the same as naturalism either. It is instead a narrowly drawn mirror-image of its opponent. …
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Looking Back – December 2021/January 2022
Free Inquiry Volume 42, No. 1
December 2021/January 2022
35 Years Ago “… I think it a fundamental misuse of language to equate religion with secularism when the latter refers to different aspects of experience. This is linguistic definition by capricious legislation, a form of definition-mongering. Anyone has the right to misuse language if he so wishes, but there is something basically unethical about …
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Looking Back – October/November 2021
Free Inquiry Volume 41, No. 6
October/November 2021
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Modernization is brought about by taking seriously (1) the cognitive claims of scientific knowledge and the scientific method, and (2) the moral claims of secular life and its quality. It is because traditional religions are often inimical to these claims that they need to be combated and their authority …
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Free Inquiry Volume 41, No. 5
August/September 2021
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “High in the back area of the Coliseum, using an electronic scanner receiver, Bob Steiner and Alec Jason had quickly located the frequency used by the Popoffs—39.17 Megahertz. A tape recorder was attached to the receiver, and every word was heard. When Popoff made his entrance, we heard Mrs. …
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Free Inquiry Volume 41, No. 4
June/July 2021
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “We are faced with a serious problem: Although some forms of faith-healing may relieve psychosomatic symptoms, there is no clear evidence that faith-healing can cure organic illness; and yet faith-healing has become fashionable. Countless numbers of people are now being deceived in healing sessions and by television reports of …
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Free Inquiry Volume 41, No. 3
April/May 2021
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “What should a nontheist do when asked to swear in a courtroom? In the case of jury duty, there is an implied religious test. The option (to affirm, and without a Bible) is there by law; but it is not mentioned, and to ask for it makes one a …
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Free Inquiry Volume 41, No. 1
December 2020 / January 2021
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “When I visited Europe this past summer I found our Western European friends and allies—humanist and nonhumanist alike—aghast at the growth of fundamentalist religion in the United States. … “[S]ecularist and humanist influences in many ways are far more advanced in the countries of Western Europe, and the influence …
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Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 6
October / November 2020
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Did Jesus offer a pattern of statecraft for future readers? On the basis of the evidence in the Gospels the answer must be negative. In spite of all the efforts by Christian interpreters to provide a clue to the meaning of the ‘Render to Caesar’ utterance, it remains an …
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Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 5
August / September 2020
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “Since April 24, 1978, I have been sober—free from alcohol and all other mind-altering chemicals. … My only chance for continued survival is the maintenance of my personal sobriety. A well-accepted approach to curing addicts is to utilize the substitute addiction of reliance upon a mystical power ‘greater’ than …
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Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 4
June / July 2020
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “The campaign against the public schools has intensified in recent years … vigilante groups seek to censor what is being taught in the schools and rid them of the influence of secular humanism. The new law [the Education for Economic Security Act of 1984] and the rule [regulations proposed …
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25 Years Ago in Free Inquiry — Vol.40, No.3
Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 3
April / May 2020
“The political changes since [the overthrow of Poland’s Communist regime in] 1989 have not raised living standards for the majority of people, nor led to improvements in the state of education … . The increasingly strong position of the Catholic church—despite the change of political parties in government—may lead to the formation of a religious …
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35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry — Vol.40, No.3
Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 3
April / May 2020
“[S]cientific materialism is currently posing a new challenge to religious belief because up to this time no one has thought through the full implications for religion of the Darwinian evolution of the mind. Consider, for example … ‘the epigenetic rules.’ These are the features by which the mind is assembled. In some instances they are …
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Looking Back — 35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 2
February / March 2020
“The [Jehovah’s] Witnesses compute the time of the end [of the world] with their own variant of [the Book of] Daniel’s periodization of history by divine arithmetic, using an amazing conflation of unrelated biblical texts. William Miller predicted that Christ’s Second Coming would occur in 1844. After that hope failed, Charles Taze Russell, using different …
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Looking Back — 25 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 2
February / March 2020
“The November 1994 American elections have revealed a surprising political shift to the right, with conservative Republicans gaining control of both houses of Congress and thirty governorships. Liberals and moderates are in a state of shock. … “Have we finally exhausted the possibilities of the New Deal coalition formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, …
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Looking Back: 35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 1
December 2019 / January 2020
“The United States is again deeply embroiled in presidential politics. … “We do not wish to pass on the merits [of any candidate]. We simply wish to point out that the nation would be better off if religious faith were not injected into the political arena by either side. … “We believe in the civic …
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Looking Back: 25 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 40, No. 1
December 2019 / January 2020
“Even in a rural area, word about an airplane crash gets out fast and the media was soon present. “‘Where are you from?’ “‘Tampa.’ “‘Tampa? What were you doing all the way up here?’ “‘Attending an atheist/humanist convention in Toronto.’ “‘R-e-a-l-l-y!’ “I told the whole story to three or four different reporters … . “They …
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Looking Back – 25 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 6
October / November 2019
“Humanists know something must be done. We know that it is only by coming together and figuring out what kind of world we want to live in, only by giving our attention to why ‘values’ have been eschewed and why so many people seem to have given up, that we can pursue our vision, the …
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Looking Back – 35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 6
October / November 2019
“Tribalism ultimately, however, is a distortion of the values of religion, a perversion that poses serious dangers not only to world peace but to the American ideal. The danger is not so much religion as tribalism; and, when one group insists that its morals, teachings, view of life, and cultural values are the only correct …
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Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 5
August / September 2019
“Most individuals would be outraged to learn that the academic study of religion is fundamentally an atheist project. … However, these heated reactions are unnecessary. The word atheist comes from the Latin atheos, and means ‘without god.’ … [T]he question of the existence or non-existence of a god, gods, or goddesses is irrelevant when studying …
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Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 5
August / September 2019
“Socrates argued in Plato’s Euthyphro that justice precedes piety; merely to pray to the Gods is no guarantee that an act done in obedience to what the gods dictate is any more moral than one done in the light of reflective examination of the merits of the case and in terms of the ethical principles …
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Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 4
June / July 2019
“… Puritanism is not the American tradition, it is one among many. From Anne Hutchinson down to Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson, our history is rife with alternatives to orthodoxies sired during the Middle Ages and the Reformation, orthodoxies that are dependent upon a literal, …
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Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 4
June / July 2019
“Honest conversation with children, telling them that as parents (or teachers) we don’t have all the answers, but that we are willing to check facts and draw logical conclusions, is important. Standing firm on certain issues, such as the necessity for separation of church and state, or evolution as a fact, a disbelief in a …
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Looking Back – Volume 39, No. 3
Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 3
April / May 2019
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “The dangers to children associated with faith-healing sects are enormous. They are cared for by people with no medical knowledge, people who are trained to deny disease and its symptoms as illusions, people who demand more faith as the disease gets worse. They have no standard for judging when …
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Looking Back – Volume 39 No. 2
Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 2
February / March 2019
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “… the question of the sacrifice of innocent life in war … I find an extremely difficult problem. Temperamentally I am inclined to the simple view (to misquote one of the late Michael Flanders’s characters) that ‘killing people is wrong,’ but I have to recognize that, until mankind finds …
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Free Inquiry Volume 39, No. 1
December 2018 / January 2019
35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry “As humanists, surely we do not wish to develop according to the model of the classical religions. Though these religions have provided a social structure, a moral framework, and psychological comfort for their adherents, humanism is not and should not be a denomination or sect competing with others. We …
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Free Inquiry Volume 38, No. 5
August / September 2018
“The courage to doubt, on which American pluralism, federalism, and religious liberty are founded, is a special brand of courage, a more selfless brand of courage, than the courage of orthodoxy. A brand that has been far rarer and more precious in the history of the West than the courage of the crusaders or the …
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