Imagine you’re going to throw a huge party, no limits. You can invite as many people as you want. The setting is totally up to you: perhaps a mansion atop a hill? Or maybe an open meadow surrounded by deep woods. Or a beachfront yacht club. As for catering—whatever you like. Any food is possible […]
Phil Zuckerman
Phil Zuckerman is the author of several books, including What It Means to be Moral (Counterpoint, 2019) The Nonreligious (Oxford, 2016), Living the Secular Life (Penguin, 2014), Faith No More (Oxford, 2012), and Society Without God (NYU, 2008), and the editor of several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Secularism (2016) and The Social Theory of W.E.B. Du Bois (2004). He is the Associate Dean as well as Professor of Sociology at Pitzer College, and the founding chair of the nation’s first Secular Studies Program. He is the Executive Director of Humanist Global Charity. He lives in Claremont, California, with his wife and three children.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
On Yom Kippur, and its homophobic beginnings
In the early days of October, millions of Jews will observe Yom Kippur. During this most sacred day of the Jewish religion, the faithful will spend hours fasting, praying in synagogue, and spiritually atoning for their wrongdoings against God and people. While many Jews are not regular synagogue attenders, if they do ever go to […]
Posted inEthics, History, The Secular
20 secular moral beacons
Mother Teresa. The Dalai Lama. Martin Luther King. Gandhi. If you ask most people to think of prominent individuals who represent the highest of moral activism, the apex of humanitarianism, the aspirational essence of care, compassion, and justice —these are the names that will spring quickest from their lips. It’s a fine list. Aside from […]
Posted inPolitics, Religion, The Secular
When bad religion reigns
Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton publicly declared his fervent desire to arrest consenting adults who engage in non-procreative sex. And he just may get to do so in the near future, given Supreme Court Justice Thomas’s stated intention to revisit Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 ruling that rendered sodomy laws unconstitutional nationwide. What […]
Posted inPolitics
Why Trump will ‘win’ again
OnlySky · Why Trump will ‘win’ again (and the USA will be no more) “Them’s the breaks.” So said Boris Johnson the other day, as he resigned from the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in the wake of various scandals, exposed lies, and dwindling political support. Alas, if only we had such […]
Posted inCritical thinking, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, The Secular
The atheist case for free speech
It was about 15 years ago, at Pitzer College, a small liberal arts institution in California, in my Sociology of Religion class. The morning’s lecture was “The Origins of Mormonism.” A main point of the lecture was to illustrate the way in which this recently-established world religion emerged not because of any supernatural magic, but […]
Posted inAnalysis, Ethics, News, The Secular
Of God and guns
In the wake of yet another and another and another mass shooting by a young man armed with an AR-15, it is natural for people to seek someone or something to blame. The left blames their usual suspects: too-easy access to increasingly lethal firearms, the NRA, and their Republican enablers. The right also has their […]
Posted inEducation
Shut it down: Sikivu Hutchinson’s seismic grad speech
On May 21, 2022, Pitzer College in Claremont, California – home of the nation’s only Secular Studies Program – featured Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson as its graduation speaker for the Class of 2020. It was a momentous occasion, not only because the Class of 2020—thanks to COVID—had to wait two years for their in-person graduation ceremony, […]
Posted inCulture
It is time for the end of Zionism
There was that first day in Jerusalem, sitting on that stone wall in the heart of the Old City, looking down at the alleyway below, and seeing that young Palestinian boy pushing a cart full of freshly baked bread, only to be suddenly ambushed—pelted by rocks from a yelling group of kippa-wearing Jewish kids who […]
Posted inReproductive rights
The secular defense of reproductive rights
Those who are most supportive of a woman’s right to decide what goes on in her uterus are the most secular among us.