March / April 2011

Scientific Spirit

In March 2009 headlines blared across the front pages of New York’s Daily News that were at once stimulating, scary, and altogether predictable. Dr. Jeff Steinberg, a doctor at the Fertility Institute, with offices in Los Angeles and New York, announced that within six months he would enable would-be parents...

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Features

Up Front

A Bad Month for Atheists?

Following the January 8, 2011, mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that killed federal judge John Roll along with five others and injured fourteen people, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, I found myself, like many other Americans,...

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Columns

Reviews

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Black Practice of Disbelief

The following excerpt is from a new book from Beacon Press, set to be published in May 2024. Introduction I have grown to like “nontheist” as a broad-spectrum term that carries less baggage than more commonly used words such as “atheist” or...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

“I Stand for Freedom for All”

This text is excerpted from the remarks of Commissioner Mohamed Magid of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom made at the launch event for the 2023 Freedom of Thought Report from Humanists International. The event was held on Capitol Hill in...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

Editor’s note: OpenAI’s now famous ChatGPT bot was used by the Humanist to generate this article as an experiment to discover what today’s AI knows 
and will tell about the dangers posed by AI technology. IN RECENT YEARS, the rapid advancements in...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Fragility of Truth in the Existential Crisis

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He is director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and...

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