Richard Dawkins and Robyn E. Blumner. What is Dubai and why should we care? Is it the murmurings of a nascent Arab Enlightenment where reason and science are valued, giving hope to its future? Or is it a gleaming, modern facade under which beats the heart of an Islamic theocracy run by a PR-savvy ruler? […]
Richard Dawkins and Me in Dubai,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
The trouble with humans is that we never know when to stop. We know how to invent things, but we seem to be completely unable to figure out how to uninvent them—or even just stop using them once we’ve invented them. We can commission like crazy but we can’t decommission. Like, for instance, cruise ships
Cruising over the Edge,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
The Decline and Fall of C. S. Lewis C. S. Lewis in 1958 In assessing C. S. Lewis’s achievement as a Christian apologist, the key is chronology. He is, of course, best known for his writings of the 1940s, and it is as the author of such celebrated books as The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, The
Beyond the Double-Bolted Door,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
Author’s Note: This is dedicated to Sue Gibbons, because she loved Tom Flynn more than anyone did (and he her), and he helped greatly with this article, as with so many other things. Not long ago, in the context of discussing an article in The Guardian about a documentary on the exploitation of “Jane Roe”
Groups or Their Members: Who’s to Blame?,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
Death is the mother of religion. Would faith ever have been born if not for life’s only inevitability for all: The Reaper? As the first Homo sapiens discovered, we are all renters in life until we buy the farm. So, even before the wheel, mortals invented the first life insurance policy: religion. Each major creed
God’s Trimesters: His Infancy, Adolescence, and Adulthood,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
Examining the claims and doctrines of the world’s major religions reveals clearly that there are profound controversies. There is one claim, however, for which there is virtually no disagreement: Religions provide comfort and satisfaction to their adherents. I think this is an understatement. Religious faith provides spectacular rewards to its followers. These include intense feelings
Doubt May Be a Virtue,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
As a typical American Jew who was born in the 1950s, most of my knowledge of Christian theology comes from having memorized every song in Jesus Christ Superstar when I was in high school. As I understand it, Christians believe that Jesus, the son of God, was born in Bethlehem in the Roman province of
One Jew’s View of the Death of Jesus,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
Jawaharlal Nehru . (Credit: Prakash pandey07 – Wikipedia.) Historians have been reluctant to acknowledge that India’s most famous prime minister—Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)—was not only an atheist but an extraordinarily learned atheist. His atheism did not develop as a reaction to a religious upbringing or the suffering of the Indian people (though he thought only a
Nehru: India’s Extraordinary Atheist Prime Minister,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
Atheists and theists sometimes notice—or think they notice—the same irony in the legacy of atheist thought. “Isn’t it funny,” they ask, “that many great thinkers atheists look up to are deists?” Many of the writers atheists admire are deists. Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Mark Twain were all deists. All three also had insightful and funny
Why Deism Is Critical to Religious Criticism,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
In our earliest personal understandings of atheism, most of us tend to focus on religion as the sole target of unbelief, concentrating on whatever local god, holy book, or other anointed authority our home culture presents us with. But as we become more comfortable with basic atheism, we begin to understand that religion isn’t the
Agency: The Myth at the Heart of the Mystical,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry Read More »
