Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden made a strange reference in a speech that he had carried out and released to Al Jazeera: We should raise again the unique flag of Allah on all stolen Islamic land,…
Christmas is typically a joyous time for Christians. But many believers were not able to celebrate their most important holiday this past year. Or any other. By numbers, Christianity is the most persecuted faith. For example, confronting a population with…
Chances are, if you learned about the history of modern political freedom in high school or university, you were taught that it advanced as the Western world retreated from religion. Freedom of religion meant freedom from religion. With intelligent people…
If you make it to the end of Moby Dick (it’s been done), Herman Melville starts the epilogue with a quotation from the Book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Melville’s readers at the time…
The release of 400 pages of internal Chinese government documents obtained by the New York Times revealing the mass detention, torture, and reeducation of as many as one million predominantly Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region should give pause to…
University of Oxford developmental psychologist Dr. Olivera Petrovich has spent years researching a single question: Are children predisposed to belief in a transcendent being? This research, much deserving of greater exposure, intrigued me, since I have engaged atheism’s most prominent…
I had the chance to meet a scholar recently, a woman from Norway. I went to hear her talk about a historical figure I’ve written about on this site before — Hans Nielsen Hauge (pronounced “HOW-geh”), the early 19th-century Norwegian…
My family just visited Chocolate World at Hersheypark in Hershey, Pennsylvania — the so-called “sweetest place on earth.” We hit it every two or three years when traveling through. For those unfamiliar, Chocolate World is the heart of the Hershey…
Our women are now seen as serving no useful purpose to mankind other than having children; they are considered simply as serving for pleasure, like musical instruments or jewels. But they constitute half and perhaps more than half of our…
Blaine Amendments are state constitutional provisions rooted in 19th-century anti-Catholic bigotry, designed with the purpose of preventing the government from funding religious schools. Fortunately, challenges to the Blaine Amendment’s constitutionality are being heard with increasing frequency by the Supreme Court. This legal…