Who Says Body Painting and Lingerie Parties Aren’t Divine? Property Tax Exemptions Should Apply to All Churches (or Better Yet, None)

The religious right ought to be up in arms over the latest government assault on the free exercise of religion. Last week in Panama City Beach, Florida, government officials stripped away the property tax exemption... Read More
Religious Nationalism A Weapon of Mass Destruction

It is hard to believe that the conflicts currently ravaging the Middle East could get much worse, yet the refusal of numerous parties to make substantive compromises on key issues is increasingly likely to lead... Read More
Egyptian Atheist Gets Prison for Facebook Posts

An Egyptian court in Baheira governorate on Jan. 10 sentenced a student to three years in prison for announcing on Facebook that he is an atheist and for allegedly "insulting Islam." The sentence, the latest... Read More
I Met God, and S/He’s a Cultural Construct

To humanists, attempts to define or understand the nature of a deity can appear meaningless. Why bother to attempt to explain something that does not exist? Shouldn’t we focus on real-world, material problems that affect... Read More
The Interstellar Stakes Against God Global Warming Hardly a Ringing Endorsement for an Architect

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that something like the doomsday scenario depicted in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Interstellar, were actually to take place (minor spoilers ahead). Imagine that over the next few generations,... Read More
Who Deserves Compassion?

Considerations on the Eve of a Terrorist’s Trial The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is scheduled to begin in January, a year and nine months after the then nineteen-year-old lay bleeding in a stranger’s boat in... Read More
ISIS and Khorasan A Humanist Perspective

ISIS, the new Islamic state that took over much of northern Iraq and northeastern Syria this past summer, directly threatens the existing states in the region. We’ve since learned of Khorasan, a splinter group of... Read More