The Advocate

2 min read

I AM NOT a religious person. On a good day, I lean toward being an atheist, and on a bad day, I consider myself agnostic. (You just need to ask God what her deal is every now and again, right?) Still, I have always believed in some kind of intelligen

Nautilus

5 min read

On the evening of November 23rd, 1654, the brilliant polymath Blaise Pascal was thrown from his horse-drawn carriage, the creatures having been frightened by a thunderstorm. The horses fell off the bridge they had been crossing into the turbulent riv

The Guardian

5 min read

Non-believers remain few and far between in US politics, with atheism bringing ‘the notion of being anti-religion’, the California representative Jared Huffman explains

India Today

2 min read

Q. You are the first Indian to win the Richard Dawkins award, given to one ‘who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead’. Do you feel these aspects are flourishing or wanting? If yo

The Atlantic

17 min read

Over the past decade, no one has added more to my understanding of how we think about, discuss, and debate politics and religion than Jonathan Haidt. I first connected with Haidt in 2012, after I wrote a blog post for Commentary based on an interview

JOY Magazine

2 min read

A few years ago a man wrote an article on News24’s website angrily declaring his atheism. In the opening section of the article, after saying how he used to be a Christian (a claim I seriously doubt), he said the following: “I would now describe mys

Tribune Content Agency Opinions

3 min read

There are many definitions of patriotism. Mark Twain said patriotism means supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it. I like this, but it's flawed. Sometimes your country -- i.e., the people -- can do things that re

Nautilus

8 min read

A god who knows everything, is everywhere, and wields impossible power, is a potent fantasy. Allegiance to it animates the lives of billions worldwide. But this “Big God,” as psychologists and anthropologists refer to it, wasn’t dreamt from scratch b

The Christian Science Monitor

6 min read

In a letter up for auction, Albert Einstein talked about admiring “in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of the world.” More nonbelievers say they are seeking a sense of awe and reverence in their own lives.

Nautilus

10 min read

In the United States, the nones have it. The nones being people with no organized religion and increasingly no belief in God or a universal spiritual power. They have the momentum, attention, and an expectation that in the future they will become a m

The Atlantic

8 min read

When a Christian foundation interviewed college nonbelievers about how and why they left religion, surprising themes emerged.

Los Angeles Times

2 min read

Magician Penn Jillette believes "The Apprentice" producer Mark Burnett has tapes of Donald Trump saying damaging things during the president's time judging the NBC reality competition. As an alum of "The Celebrity Apprentice," Jillette "was in the ro

JOY Magazine

1 min read

Did you know that in the history of anthropology they have never discovered an atheistic tribe? Man is inherently religious. Here are some explanations for why: The German philosopher Karl Marx said that religion is the “opiate of the masses.” It’s

The Atlantic

2 min read

The U.S. is becoming more diverse in terms of faith, but its legislature isn’t. A major reason? Non-religious Americans' voting rates.

The Atlantic

10 min read

Among filthy puddles of rainwater in a slum in Alabang, a district just south of the Philippines’ capital city of Manila, a young woman named Jahziel Tayco Ferrer was teaching a science lesson. A group of children sat around her on a cracked basketba

The Atlantic

7 min read

Lubna Yaseen was a student in Baghdad when death threats forced her into exile. Her crime was to think the unthinkable and question the unquestionable—to state, openly, that she was an atheist. Growing up in Hillah, a city in central Iraq, she develo

Lion's Roar

1 min read

The notion of Buddhism as some feel-good religion, basically an anything goes so long as you smile and are sweet image. Dukkha is what Buddhism is really about. If you want to feel good, fine, but if you want out of suffering, then Buddhism is the ri

Nautilus

4 min read

In a recent viral news segment on CNN, cars are shown exiting what a narrator says is a church parking lot—dozens of people, including children, had just attended an evening service. A reporter asks a woman in her car why, when the COVID-19 pandemic

TIME

3 min read

LIKE A LOT OF WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE, I’VE TAKEN UP yoga. And because I don’t go halfway on my clichés, I’ve done immersion yoga weekends, learned the Sanskrit names for various ways of being upside down and at least once referred to “my practice.” S

Literary Hub

11 min read

Even as federal and state courts and American governing institutions in general accept as given that all true Americans are believers, the number of nonbelievers in the United States steadily increases. And some of these, ordinary Americans going abo

Los Angeles Times

6 min read

LOS ANGELES - Once a month, a very particular Sunday service unfolds on a patio outside a Starbucks in El Monte. When jets fly overhead, members of the congregation have to shout across the table at one another. Some days, there's a small crowd, and

The Atlantic

4 min read

A new study shows how poorly we understand the beliefs of people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular.

New Internationalist

1 min read

Should religion play a role in politics? Absolutely not! Religious people should be able to comment on social and moral issues but religion as such should not play any role in politics, and the only involvement politics should have in religion is to

The Christian Science Monitor

6 min read

It’s not often that Roy Speckhardt finds himself going to church to talk about how to make the world a better place. Yet as a leader in the community of American atheists and humanists, he’s been part of a few interfaith councils, some of which meet

Futurity

4 min read

Muslims and atheists in the United States are more likely than those of Christian faiths to experience religious discrimination, according to new research. In the study, which focused on public schools because they are government-run, community-facin

Guernica Magazine

3 min read

Discovered sleeping in a church and promptly nicknamed after the place they are found, Pew, the narrator and namesake of Catherine Lacey’s new novel, is difficult to classify: androgynous and ethnically ambiguous, itinerant, and without memory of eit

The Atlantic

6 min read

Despite secularism and atheism being on the rise, some areligious students feel discriminated against—at times violently. Now teachers across the U.S. are creating Secular Safe Zones to "curtail anti-atheist bullying, discrimination, and social isola

The Atlantic

6 min read

“Challenging Islam as a doctrine,” Ali Rizvi told me, “is very different from demonizing Muslim people.” Rizvi, a self-identified ex-Muslim, is the author of a new book titled The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason. One of the book’s s

The Atlantic

7 min read

“Not religious” has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right.

The Atlantic

5 min read

A new book by the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne tackles arguments that the two institutions are compatible.