As my wife would gladly tell you, I am no libertine hedonist, wild-eyed radical or utopian free spirit, but I do subscribe to one core impulse for all of those: people’s need to privately figure out what parts of reality work best for them—without bowing mindlessly to hidebound tradition or mystical received wisdom. For me, accepting a universe where supernatural beings simply don’t exist is what works best. And this philosophy has …

During the decades I lived in Saudi Arabia, I eventually stopped noticing the dense black veils that hid the faces of local Muslim women. It was just the way it was, like the endless sandy sabkha (salt flats) in every direction. Even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Saudi women generally accepted their veils as a religious obligation, …

The fundamentalist Christian Right movement has changed its strategy but not its stripes as it continues aggressively trying to insinuate faith-based dogma into American voucher schools and children, an excellent New York Times article this week by columnist Michelle Goldberg illustrates. Southern states circumvented the constitutional civil-rights of freed slaves during Reconstruction after the Civil War by terrorizing blacks and constructing a rigidly apartheid …