Mark Matousek

The following was a talk I delivered at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, May 1, 2012.

Raise your hand if you've ever been cheated on in a relationship. Raise your hand if you've ever cheated on someone else in a relationship. How many of you have ever done...

One wintry afternoon last month, I was strolling through a forest with a philosopher friend when she stopped dead in her tracks, all of a sudden, staring up through the trees at a patch of blue sky. "This is exactly what my life feels like."

"What is?" I asked.

For the past few months, I've been talking to men about their penises. White men, black men, gay men, old men, youngsters, transgender men, singletons, and fathers. I spoke to a bus driver, a monk, a jock, a hooker, a nursing home resident and a web designer. I've heard...

At a moment when religious zealotry poses a greater threat to Western civilization than planetary warming and Wall Street combined, it's logical to ask ourselves: Why are we so scared of atheists? Why are we so phobically threatened by people who don't believe in God when faith itself is causing...

If Michele Bachmann were accused of fondling a male employee, she'd be off the GOP hopefuls list before you could say perimenopause.

How is it, then, that married studs like Herman Cain, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Silvio Berlusconi, and Bill Clinton -- to name a few -- get away...

If Jesus were alive today, he'd be Occupying Wall Street and turning pepper spray into Beaujolais.

The laughable display of Republican piety at Saturday afternoon's 13th GOP candidacy debate in Des Moines was enough to make a Christian sick. Bragging shamelessly about their devotion, the six participants in this...

Dating is a miserable business. Part popularity contest, part Nuremberg Trial, part aikido (block that rejection!) we meet and greet and hope for the best, sometimes clicking, mostly not, and often wondering: Why do we bother?

When I was single, I hated it (the dating part). Until I hooked up...

Poor Gloria Cain. Now that her husband's bid for the Republican nomination is all but sunk, she's being dragged into the national spotlight to do the dirtiest political wife work of all: defending the dawg who allegedly cheated on her, selling him to the voting public using her word as...

Now that Joe Paterno has been canned for keeping quiet about the serial rape taking place on his watch at Penn State, a troubling question is burning anew in the public conscience: How guilty are we for crimes we do not commit but fail to report? Are we, as innocent...

Though gossip is inevitable, it also gives us a false sense of power. While evolution has prepared us to dish about others, it has not provided us with the power to change them in any way whatsoever, no matter how brilliant our input may be.

This paradox can be excruciating....

Good people do stupid things. But what makes a married Congressman spew soft porn into the Twitter-verse, a governor to use a state helicopter to fly to his son's baseball game, or a comic -- a black one, no less -- to launch into a homophobic tirade in (half) defense...

It's funny to learn that ethics would never have evolved without gossip. In the beginning, anthropologists tell us, "Language evolved as a replacement for physical grooming."¹ Our human shift from picking each other's lice to minding each other's business appears to have been a natural progression for our nosy species....

Religious people find it very annoying that people don't need God to be good, as science has now incontestably proved.

For millennia, we've been brainwashed into believing that we needed the Almighty to redeem us from an essentially corrupt nature. Left to our own devices, people would quickly devolve...

Men and women are wired to make different ethical choices. Though we strive for gender equality in our politically correct, post-feminist world, the truth is that moral life is not immune to mammalian biology.¹

In fact, sex is an excellent starting point for understanding how our physical differences help to...

Human morality grew out of disgust. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that our human aspiration for spiritual uplift actually began as an adaptation against bestiality. Aware of how disgusting our lives would be without morality, humans adapted a survival tool for self-improvement and transcending our animal nature -- at least now...

When archetypal figures die, a part of our national psyche goes with them. Diana, the flawed Fairy Princess. Michael, the boy who wouldn't grow up. When we mourn them, we mourn what they symbolized to us, the mythic 'archetype' -- as Carl Jung first called it -- they play in...

Americans need to think about anger. It's time to examine our ruffian soul, our John Wayne machismo and taste for revenge.

Watching the evening news last night, this message was painfully obvious. Here was another prickly right-wing pundit (in this case, Liz Cheney, the daughter of our ex-VP) complaining...

Why do some people radiate goodness and hope? Is there a biological basis for what makes us good?

I put this question to Daniel Goleman, the bestselling author of "Emotional Intelligence" at a Tibetan restaurant in Northhampton Massachusetts. "Emotions are contagious,...

Breaking up isn't hard to do: It's hell on earth, at least at the outset. You sit there surveying the rubble of promises broken, the empty bed, the romance discarded with yesterday's news -- licking your wounds like a grief struck beast -- till one day you realize that you've...