The persistent unbridling of religious unbelief in the United States is reflected in a 2017 Pew Research Center survey showing that more than half of our citizens couldn’t care less whether people say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.” The idea that political correctness is killing our nation’s Christmas traditions, the survey reveals, is a flimsy […]

Despite being ultimately slammed for fatal flaws in some of his theories, psychoanalytical pioneer Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) offered other concepts of mind— such as why people harbor religious illusions—that have better stood the test of time. Some of these concepts are discussed in an excellent article in the December 2017 edition of Skeptic magazine by Raymond Barglow, Ph.D., a former instructor at University of California, Berkeley.

As the U.S. Supreme Court mulls the national debate over whether anti-homosexual (read: fundamentalist Christian) bakers can be involuntarily compelled to create gay wedding cakes, we tend to lose site of the dispute’s real genesis. For a good overview of the issue, read conservative op-ed writer David Brooks column, “How Not to Advance Gay Marriage,” this week in The New York Times. …

An excellent article in the Washington Post by a Portland, Oregon college professor disturbingly explains how critical thinking is often subverted today in American higher education. In the piece, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, points out that hysterical, self-reinforcing thinking and physical intimidation tend to drown out reason in the process of squelching unpopular views.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has a very nice smile but “teeth of steel,” as Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko once characterized Mikhail Gorbachev. The steel derives from DeVos’ unbendably conservative Christian faith. She grew up in a devout family, was educated exclusively in Christian schools and is today an elder in an evangelical church. None of this is problematic, except ristian indoctrination of children.

The United States is starting to look more and more like uber-secular Western European cultures by the day, including those paragons of unreligious impiety France, New Zealand and the Netherlands. According to a recent National Geographic survey, the planet’s fastest growing religion is neither world-dominating Christianity nor Islam, it’s atheism—represented by a loose

     Exactly five hundred years ago (Oct. 31, 1517), German Catholic priest Martin Luther nailed his historic ninety-five criticisms of Catholicism to a local church door. But success of the earth-shaking Reformation that his protest spawned was hardly foreordained.      Luther was simply railing about the scriptural errors and practical excesses of the […]

In the past 40 years, some 6.5 million babies have been born unnaturally. Which is to say, with the help of science and medical skill in tandem. The variations on this fertility-added process are staggeringly diverse and often mind-numbingly named. They include fertility-enhancing drugs, surgery to correct physical obstacles to fertility, intrauterine insemination, intracytoplasmic sperm …

Embedded vanishingly deep in America’s ongoing abortion war are private Christian assumptions. These beliefs obscure the real source of the conflict and vastly complicate any reasoned discussion of practical resolutions.
Religion aside, most people likely view the concept of abortion warily. It’s manifestly life-and-death but not black-and-white. It is the purposeful ending of a life form, …

It’s disappointing enough that our local newspaper only publishes a weekly “Religion+News” page and never a “Humanism+News” page, as though religious doctrines are so irreproachable that any contrary opinion is clearly irrelevant and need never be entertained. What’s worse is that many debatable ideas broached on that page then necessarily go undebated.