No. 6 | Free Inquiry (original) (raw)
Manufactured Need: What Capitalism Learned from Christianity Adam Neiblum
Capitalism is, in many respects, an offshoot of Christianity. As capitalism developed, it borrowed significantly from the most successful sales model in society at the time: Christianity. In earlier Euro-America, as capitalism emerged and developed, Christianity was the dominant paradigm in terms of mass marketing, public relations, indoctrination, management, political influence, brand loyalty, and, of …
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The Manipulation of ‘Morality’: How Religion Co-Opts American Identity Simon Brittan
More often than not, scripture is seen as a “moral” text that is central to another myth, the “American way of life.” The wholly spurious interpretation of this historically important text has been manipulated by those in power, and by those who seek it, so successfully that to preface any claim (however preposterous or contrary …
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Religion for Thee, Not for Me: What Secularists Need to Understand about America’s Framers Mark Kolsen
“The Constitution, which contains no reference to God, is a purely secular document,” wrote historian Eric Foner in his book The Story of American Freedom (1998). [1] In his book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (2019), Andrew Seidel expands on Foner’s point, demonstrating that the Constitution’s Framers consciously rejected biblical values in …
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What If Ancient Greek Humanism Had Prevailed? Robert J. Muscat
In their “what-if” thought games, historians imagine the possible alternative paths history might have taken if at key turning points, often battles, the “other side” had won or things had happened a little differently. For example, what if the Christians had lost the skirmish at Tours in France in 732 CE that stemmed the Muslim …
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What More Atheists Must Do Victoria Scharf DeCastro
Imagine for one moment a perfect world free of hate, hunger, disease, and rush-hour traffic, a Lennonesque utopia in which no one steals from the poor, kills for sport, or murders their parents for money. Surely, in the vast expanse of the universe, such a planet exists. But it isn’t this one. Amazing as it …
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Editorial
Now What? Storytelling and Free Inquiry’s Next Chapter Paul Fidalgo
I am a humanist, in both senses of the word. As you would expect from the new editor of this magazine (hello, by the way) I subscribe to the values of secular humanism. I am also a humanist in the sense that my background is in the humanities. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in …
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Op-Ed
Onward and Upward Andrea Szalanski
Tom Flynn didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to the Center for Inquiry (CFI). When he died in August 2021, he planned to retire in a few years and had begun to hand off some of his many tasks to very capable successors. But the editorship of Free Inquiry would have been the last …
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Op-Ed
The Takeover of Healthcare by a Pro-Death Church Ophelia Benson
I wrote a column in the February/March 2013 issue of Free Inquiry about a woman in Ireland who died of a miscarriage because the hospital refused to terminate the remains of her pregnancy. Last October, Savita Halappanavar died at University Hospital Galway. The thirty-one-year old dentist, who had a popular practice in Galway, was seventeen …
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Op-Ed
Dobbs and Legal Moralism—a Wake-Up Call Russell Blackford
The recent U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a wake-up call. Dobbs overturned past case law granting American women a limited constitutional right to abortion. More specifically, the majority judges ditched the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade and the 1992 c.ase Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It will now be …
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Op-Ed
Can Freethinkers Be Conservative? S. T. Joshi
I have of late been giving thought to whether freethinkers of all stripes—atheists, agnostics, secularists, and others—can viably maintain a politically conservative stance. Superficially, it may seem that these two branches of thought (and action) have little to do with each other. In the past, we have seen such conservative or libertarian thinkers as Ayn …
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Op-Ed
The Price of Superstition and Traditional Medicine in Africa: An Untimely Death Barry Kosmin
One of the saddest features of the contemporary world is the fact that ignorance, lawlessness, and greed have undermined so many good intentions of enlightened western idealists pursuing humanist values. One example is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The main flouters of these agreements are newly …
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Op-Ed
A Lot of White Folks Sure Need Woking Up Gregory Paul
These United States are in a whole lot of trouble. We are at risk of rebecoming a White Christian Nationalist autocracy similar to what it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But at least back then the Christian Right claimed a majority of the population, while now they are a quickly shrinking …
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Op-Ed
Why the Pope Must Denounce Celibacy and Resign Shadia B. Drury
The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of children at Christian residential schools throughout Canada corroborated the sexual horrors endured by indigenous survivors—even unto death. The Pope felt compelled to come to Canada to beg forgiveness for the evils perpetrated by so many members of his church. As I will argue in what follows, he …
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Appreciation
Ted Richer, FREE INQUIRY’s Literary Editor (1931–2022) Julia Lavarnway
Ted Richer, who became Free Inquiry’s literary editor in 2017, was perhaps the most distinguished poet to occupy that role. He was a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Founding Faculty Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He also taught poetry at Bridgewater State University, the Massachusetts College …
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Looking Back
Looking Back, 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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Humanism at Large
Cultivating Empathy: A Humanist Response to Violence against Women Catherine Dunphy
In 2019, I planned to take a break from the secular community. I wrote a book, spoke at conferences, and generally felt that I had said most of what I needed to say regarding my experience of leaving Catholicism and my career in chaplaincy (see my book From Apostle to Apostate, the Story of the …
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Freely Inquiring
Scripture Sends the Wrong Message about Forgiveness Christopher Gerlacher
Eugene de Kock is one of South Africa’s most infamous death squad leaders. He led kidnappings, tortures, and assassinations of anti-apartheid activists, both inside and outside of South Africa. After he was imprisoned, he asked to apologize to the widows of one of his squad’s bombings. Two of the widows sat across from the man …
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Humanist Soapbox
Massacre of the Innocence Robert F. Allen
After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, Christian apologist Dr. William Lane Craig said the massacre of those children was a reminder of what Christmas is all about. Craig equated it with the myth of Herod’s infamous massacre of the firstborn children. Presumably because the birth of Jesus came afterward, this was …
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Cuno's Corner
A Farewell and Good Riddance to Empathy Steve Cuno
There’s a reason sales of bumper stickers and T-shirts emblazoned with “I don’t give a crap about anyone but me” haven’t taken off. Though most of us embrace the sentiment—don’t try denying it, you’re not fooling anyone—to say so out loud remains unfashionable. Even libertarians shy from too-frequent use of their official brand, I got …
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Thinking Out Loud
The Truth about Objective Truths Victor Moberger
Are there objective truths? That is, are there truths that are independent of us and our language, conventions, beliefs, attitudes, and social practices? Common sense says yes. After all, isn’t it rather obvious that the truth about, say, the shape of the Sun has nothing to do with us whatsoever? And if not, then isn’t …
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Great Minds
William Kingdon Clifford: Reason’s Role in Faith Eugene R. Moutoux
William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) was a brilliant mathematician and philosopher. He was the first to suggest the geometrical underpinnings of gravitation. Albert Einstein, a contemporary, developed his geometric theory of gravitation nine years after Clifford’s death. As a philosopher, Clifford was interested in and wrote about the mind and consciousness. Of principal interest to us …
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In Defense of Blasphemous Literature
Ethical Blasphemy Stephen R. Welch
Editor’s note: This is the second in a limited series. The first appeared in the August/September 2022 issue. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1815)1 is often termed as the first science-fiction novel. Written at a time when nascent science was not yet an institution and popular understanding of it was still clouded with alchemy, Shelley’s tale, gestated in …
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Review
A Saint in Search of a Nation Aroup Chatterjee
Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation, by Gëzim Alpion (Bloomsbury: New Delhi, London, Oxford, New York, Sydney, 2022, ISBN 978-93-89165-05-0). 296 pp. Hardcover, $115. It is difficult for an outsider to take this in, but when I was growing up in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s, Mother Teresa was neither a household name …
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Review
Belief, Unbelief, and Their Discontents Brooke Horvath
After God, by Peter Sloterdijk, trans. Ian Alexander Moore (Medford, MA: Polity, 2020, ISBN 9-781509-533510). 248 pp. Hardcover, 69.95;softcover,69.95; softcover, 69.95;softcover,24.95. After God is the thirty-sixth book by the influential and sometimes scandalous philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Eighteen have appeared in English translation, including Critique of Cynical Reason, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, …
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Poem
TIC-TOC Stuart Jay Silverman
So, I wonder what Proust thought he was doing—or imagined—when picking through the vault of memory on the hunt for the irrevocably lost. Oh, you think he truly believed it lay somewhere cloaked by mists spewed out by tumuli of being, ghosts of time not lost, mislaid? As though Pandora had not let the cat …
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Those seven pigeons, perched on a slate-gray roof— The highest peak on my street. Each pointed beak points In a different direction. As if they had all Conceivable angles of hindsight and foresight covered. Those seven pigeons, perched on the roof next door, And only the gray clouds moving …
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The green ivy The twisting ferns The grey fog swirling around the forest floor All of it entwining Over my legs and back Standing erect in the middle of the woods Buds and twigs And lichen Like sea-glass to the ocean I came home
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Letters
Letters to the Editor, October/November 2022
General I am glad to see that some resistance is being shown in Free Inquiry to the mad wokism so prevalent on the Left. Jack May’s article “On Agnosticism” is a breath of fresh air. America today stands on a precipice of its own making. Our techno-magic and overreach in so many areas are leading to disaster. Neither the …
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They Think It’s Murder Richard Dawkins
A substantial proportion of religious-Right voters care about, or at least vote on, only one issue: abortion. They swallowed their distaste for Donald Trump’s hypocrisy and (by their lights) egregious sinfulness and voted for him because of just one thing. He promised (and, as we now know, alas, delivered) a U.S. Supreme Court that would …
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