Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of san...
It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of better we might...
It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnanc...
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and m...
Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have faile...
Each of us is looking for a path back to the present:
Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry.
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an alternative to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most...
Tres millones de almas podrán morir de hambre o ser asesinadas en el Congo sin apenas reacción por parte de nuestros medios de comunicación. Pero si una princesa muere en un accidente de coche, la cua...
Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life e...
Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will...
Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books wr...
Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossi...
Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous blood...
It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-minded way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts.
It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in po...
In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship,...
How can we be free as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?