Repression of atheists by the religious right

The Economist Magazine reports this morning that the number of people who identify as Atheists in the United States population has grown five-fold in the last five years. They derived this information from a Gallup poll which reinforces a year-old Pew survey, the latest in a series of such polls taken over the years. Read on…

Humanist Manifesto III- A Review

I didn’t really intend to review the Manifesto again, in detail, though that will happen as I review the series, the responses to it, and my thoughts in retrospect. All experiences are interesting, from one end of the spectrum to the other; this is not one I would particularly put away for safekeeping in a box, but perhaps some lessons can be learned from it. Read on…

Humanist Values- Working for a Better Society

The last two values espoused in the Humanist Manifesto III continue the general feeling set by the previous two, which is to say they may tend to inspire a yawn. But again, I will attempt to find something positive about the statement “Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.” In attempting to do so, I once again consulted the AHA on the subject: Read on…

Humanist Values- Relationships

At the risk of inciting more anti-Humanist Manifesto III feelings, I am going to stubbornly continue through the list. 🙂 Next up is one which is even less specific than the last: Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. By my standards, at least, that is more of a New-age philosophy than it is a Humanist philosophy. It feels vaguely like something taken from a Depok Chopra self-help book. Still, we will soldier on. Read on…

World Humanist Day

People sometimes ask me whether I’m an agnostic, an atheist, a skeptic – or what. I have a standard reply: I don’t think about labels; I just think about being honest and truthful. Read on…

Fading Faith

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect. Read on…

Humanist Ethical Values

This third value espoused by the 2003 Humanist Manifesto is perhaps more complex than the first two, and requires what I see as a divorcement between the concept of ethics and the concept of morals. In its entirety, this third item reads: Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Read on…

Anatomy of a Humanist “church”

There is a tiny area at the back of my head where I run mental jobs that are the human equivalent of background tasks. I can poke them back there to run on their own, and they pop out with a “DING!” when they have something to say. Some of them have been there for years; they keep dinging but still need more work, so I put them back. Read on…

Reader Content Survey Results

Our reader survey regarding preferred content drew relatively few responses, but those which we received had something to say. First, the basic genre question had some surprises. The folks that answered the survey had five choices in the basic Genre category. The genres and the number of votes each got are as follows: Read on…