Hiroshima and Nagasaki—Sixty-Five Years Later

On Friday, May 27, 2016, President Obama will become the first U.S. President to visit Hiroshima, Japan, site of the 1945 atomic bombing that remains controversial to this day. While President Obama has indicated he... Read More
It’s Bigger than You Might Think

Skeptics sometimes frame the science versus religion debate as one of knowledge and enlightenment versus ignorance and superstition. This framing oversimplifies the problem in a number of ways. It leaves the impression that worldviews rejecting... Read More
Spoil the Earth, Spare the Child: Freeman Dyson’s Inconvenient Climate Views

There he was, gnomically staring out from the cover of the March 29, 2009, New York Times magazine. The accompanying article proclaimed Freeman Dyson as a global warming heretic. Was he actually allying himself with... Read More
Defending Climate Science Today

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” Mark Twain famously quipped. After almost a decade of delay in addressing the climate changes brought on by well-documented global warming, certain segments of American society are still... Read More
America’s Addiction to Belief

Henceforth, people will be looking at the universe with the eyes of oxen. —Katib Chelebi, seventeenth-century geographer “Barack Obama won’t show us his birth certificate,” insists Steve, a Connecticut resident and small business owner, while... Read More
Christians, Homosexuality, and the Same-Sex Marriage Question

Humanity has a curious relationship with sex. It obviously enjoys it—there are nearly seven billion people in the world and not all that output could be the fruit of duty. Yet, for a practice so... Read More
Strategies for Fighting Blasphemy Laws in a Post-Tolerant World

The new decade was ushered in by a disturbing headline: “Ireland’s New Blasphemy Law Goes into Effect.” New blasphemy law? Don’t those belong in some earlier century? The unfortunate answer is no—blasphemy laws are making... Read More