September / October 2009

The HUMANIST Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ahead of this Sunday's premiere of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, TheHumanist.com revisits our 2009 interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, winner of that year's Isaac Asimov Science Award at the American Humanist Association's 68th Annual Conference. Tyson's reboot of Cosmos follows Carl Sagan's wildly popular original. Watch the premiere on Sunday, March 9...

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Features

Up Front

Humanism and the Burqa Bugaboo

The recent burqa controversy, plaguing France has produced yet another headache for liberals, humanists, and lovers of democracy who feel themselves trapped between conflicting principles. While the term “burqa” (a head-to-toe covering) is commonly used in...

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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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