The Wailing Pool

David Payne takes us to the Middle East for a weekend of mystery, intrigue and sinkholes and Uzis - with the Clash's "Rock the Casaba" playing in the background. With a pulpish flavor a la Jim Thompson we learn a great deal about the origin and evolution of humankind.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

The conversation that day with Douglas covered almost the entire range of thought about horses ... trees ... grass ... mountains ... law ... philosophy ... religion ... Learned Hand ... Brandeis ... Holmes ... bourbon ... scotch ... marriage ... divorce ... his father (a Presbyterian minister who died very young) ... his living in a tent while graduating with honors at Whitman college ... his passion for animals and the land ... conservation....

I Was an Atheist in a Foxhole

Philip Paulson dispels the old cliche that there are no atheists in foxholes by recounting his experiences in the military. (Note: This piece was written in 1989 and first appeared in The Humanist magazine.)

History’s Troubling Silence About Jesus

Exploring the popular writing and thinkers from the start of the common era, the author discovers that there is little mention of Jesus, the Christ and the Savior. Considering the miracles of Jesus, His resurrection and the profound impact this all is said to have made upon the land and its people, Salisbury is astounded by the silence of history - unless, of course, the stories are false.

The Worst Deception

Religions are based on emotional needs, and most religions fulfill the great tribal need to belong to something larger and more powerful than ourselves. With the sole exception of pure science, objective truth will usually be sacrificed in favor of personal and tribal emotional needs.

Respecting Ignorance

The insidious and seductive cliche that seems to saturate the wimpish mind is that you should not be critical of another person's religious beliefs. They all deserve respect, no matter how ignorant ... how bigoted ... how ugly ... how false ... how cruel ... how superstitious ... they all deserve "respect".

Apology for Christianity

John Paul does not have enough days left in his life to say "For my part ... I am sorry" to all of the millions and millions of human beings slaughtered by the Christian church ... to all new discoveries of truth ... slaughtered by the church ... or to a legacy that has promoted sexism ... racism ... the desecration of the natural environment and the intolerance of other world spiritual traditions from Buddhism to the American Indian.

The Next (top) Ten Commandments for the New Millennium

Using passages from the Bible, Neal Matson shows that just about any commandment can be gleaned from the Good Book - both ideas of great worth and ideas that are outdated and no longer applicable to humankind. As with many of the ideas printed in the pages of books throughout history, humans have provided much food for thought.

The Missionary’s Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon

"Dividing the people on racial lines through dubious pseudo-scientific theories has always been a ploy of the Church not only in India but also in different parts of the world." Indian scholar Aravindan Neelakandan.S., studying missionary strategy and conversion tactics, explores the "theory" of Aryan race and their invasion of ancient India.

Lament for Douglas

Richard Dawkins, after learning about the terrible news of Douglas Adams' death, writes a heart-wrenching lament to the science-fiction writer, humorist and all-together great mind who will be sadly missed by many.

Intelligent Design: The New Stealth Creationism (PDF)

Intelligent Design is the name used by the latest attempt to incorporate teleological explanations as part of science. The claim is made that scientific data cannot be understood naturally but require the additional element of purpose, divine or otherwise. In the minds of at least some of its proponents, the evidence in support of their position has become so strong that they propose, in the name of fairness, that it should become part of science texts and be taught in the science curriculum. However, as I will show, intelligent design arguments are little more than new variations on the ancient argument from design. While the proponents of Intelligent Design are generally not biblical literalists or Young Earth Creationists and accept most of what modern physics and cosmology sat about the cosmos, they still insist that that cosmos had to be the result of some outside agent––based on scientific arguments. The intelligent design movement is a kind of stealth creationism, creationism by another name.

A Defense of Naturalism

The first part of this essay discusses what naturalism in the philosophy of religion should entail for one's ontology, considers various proposed criteria for categorizing something as natural, uses an analysis of these proposed criteria to develop theoretical criteria for both the natural and nonnatural, and develops a set of criteria for identifying a potentially supernatural event in practice. The second part of the essay presents a persuasive empirical case for naturalism based on the lack of uncontroversial evidence for any potential instances of supernatural causation, with particular emphasis on the lack of evidence for supernatural causation in our modern scientific account of the history of the universe and in modern parapsychological research.

Confessions of a Former Mystic

Drawing on his own experiences as a devotee of a New Age religion, Tabash argues that the universality of searching for the transcendental, and the different sources attributed by people of different perspectives as the cause of lofty experiences, yields no additional evidence in our world of a supernatural being that undergirds reality.

God’s Calendar

Did you know that our familiar calendar is pagan through and through? This intolerable situation must be stopped! A call to action for all true Christians.

No Phony God Talk From First Presidents

There is so much blabbering God talk coming from the phony politicians today that you want to throw up. They can't make a statement without ending it with "God bless you ... and God bless America." Our first six Presidents, Humanists and Deists, would find this talk repugnant.

Bush and Moses

You are not going to believe you are reading the next paragraph. You had better go get another cup of coffee and sit down, maybe even hold tight to the edge of the breakfast table for balance.

In God We Trust — For Revenue

Tired of seeing Christian conservatives have all the fun of grousing at welfare queens getting free rides at taxpayer expense? It's time to get them to pay for the free ride their imaginary superfriend has been enjoying!

The Mensa Flu

We have broken the code used to encrypt the files on the history of the virus they call the Mensa Flu...