About Marilyn Westfall

Marilyn is a long-time Atheist and Unitarian Universalist and currently serves on the board of the American Humanist Association. Marilyn is a co-founder and a senior editor of The Eloquent Atheist on-line magazine. She has published fiction, poetry, and criticism in several literary magazines.

An Interview With Annie Laurie Gaylor

Annie Laurie Gaylor is Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) since 2004, along with Dan Barker. She was the organization’s co-founder in 1976, when she was a college student, with her mother Anne Nicol Gaylor. The FFRF now has a program on Air America Radio, “Freethought Radio,” broadcast weekly on Saturdays.  FFRF works to protect the constitutional principle of separation of Church and State; it also educates people about nontheism. Annie Laurie is also the editor of Freethought Today, the only freethought newspaper in the United States, … Read on…

An Interview with Susan Sackett

Susan Sackett is best known as a production associate and writer for Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as the assistant to Gene Roddenberry, with whom she worked closely until his death in 1991. She has written or co-authored 10 books, several about Star Trek, such as Letters to Star Trek, The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Inside Trek. Her other books include You Can Be a Game Show Contestant and Win (and, indeed, … Read on…

Alienation and Outreach

By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down. We also wept when we remembered Zion. Upon the poplar trees in the midst of her, we hung up our harps. For there those holding us captive asked us for the words of a song, And those mocking us—for rejoicing. “Sing for us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing the song of Jehovah upon foreign ground? — Psalm 137 Many Evangelicals I’ve met tend to embrace Psalm 137 … Read on…

An Interview With Jason Torpy

An Interview With Jason Torpy President, Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers Jason enlisted in the Army in 1994 as an Intelligence Interceptor. After earning top graduate honors from two intelligence training programs, Jason was offered direct admission to the United States Military Academy. Upon graduation, Jason was commissioned and served for five years in Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq with the Army’s 1st Armored Division. Jason left the service in 2005 at the rank of Captain.

An Interview With Roy Speckhardt

Roy Speckhardt is the Executive Director for the American Humanist Association, the oldest and largest Humanist organization in the United States. He is also a board member of the Humanist Institute, and an advisory board member of both the Secular Student Alliance and The Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program. Previously, he served as deputy director for the Interfaith Alliance. He lives in Maryland with his wife Charlene Gomes and daughters Johanna and Riley. (Roy’s Web Site). Q: Roy … Read on…

An Interview with Herb Silverman

Herb Silverman is a native of Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Syracuse University and has been a Professor of Mathematics at the College of Charleston since 1976. He has published over 100 research papers in mathematics journals, and is also the recipient of the Distinguished Research Award. In the 1990s, after learning that atheists were ineligible, by law, to hold elected office in South Carolina, he ran for office and pursued overturning the law in court, succeeding … Read on…

An Interview with Ellen Johnson

Ellen Johnson has been an activist for American Atheists (AA) since 1978. In addition to having served on the AA Board of Directors, she was also the New Jersey representative for ten years. Currently, she is the President of AA. She considers herself “one of the fortunate few who grew up in an Atheist home.” She is raising her two children in an Atheist environment. American Atheists is an organization dedicated to securing the civil liberties of Atheists and the … Read on…

The Old Idol

Springtime, the final week of March, but shivering at the garden gate, its hinges frozen shut, I push open the heavy planks and fresh snow tumbles from pickets, lands softer than birds on the white backyard. Where summer roses climbed, now stretches a trellis of gray and cracked cedar, each crotch in its diamond pattern glassy with ice, as is the crisscrossed wooden niche,

An Interview With August E. Brunsman IV

August E. Brunsman IV, Executive Director, Secular Student Alliance Brunsman has been the unpaid Executive Director of the SSA since 2001 and has been the paid ED since October 2004. Before that, he worked as a programmer for the Institute for Humanist Studies for three years. In 1997 he founded Students for Freethought at the Ohio State University where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa majoring in psychology and minoring in mathematics and cognitive science in 2001. Brunsman is also the … Read on…

Mission Dolores Part IV (of four)

At Mission Delores, San Francisco: Religious Romance & Genocide IV – Reflections & Models Prior to 1769 and the first missions, likely 350,000 to a million native peoples lived in what is now California.  Five-hundred independent tribes spoke as many as one hundred languages or dialects-by estimates of linguists and anthropologists. There was great diversity in customs, rituals, story-telling, clothing and adornment, basket-weaving, and trading. In a land of plenty, peace was the norm. By contrast, in1846 the diarist Titian … Read on…