By all accounts a brilliant, electrifying speaker, Robert G. Ingersoll best exemplifies the embrace of freethought that has all-but-vanished from the GOP today.
I touched down in Los Angeles only six weeks ago and started North on my Biblical Morality tour. Most of my time has been spent speaking at secular organisations and student groups, and I've been surprised at just how active the atheist/secular community is in the USA and Canada.
Why does it matter that we give due credit to pre-Darwinian thinkers such as Chambers? For starters, it helps reduce some of the reigning fixation on Darwin, including his near-obsessive status among creationists.
The bill that Parliament approved, greatly affecting British culture for more than 150 years, stemmed almost single-handedly from the actions and concerns of one influential bishop, Beilby Porteus.
We now know that the moral dimension of human life derives not from religion but from our need, as social animals, to cooperate and live in community with each other.
In my experience, interfaith work doesn't require that people check their convictions at the door, and if the only thing keeping atheists from participating is a semantic disagreement with the word "faith," I think that is a missed opportunity.
It should be fairly evident that secularism is not simply the absence of religion. Rather, it is an active tradition its own articulations of the problems facing society, and its own solutions for making the world a better place.
As we head into 2011, humanist leaders around the world have resolved to give more and get their fellow freethinkers to do the same.
Thanksgiving was a religious holiday for me just as it was for generations of American Christians. But God is no more at the heart of Thanksgiving than brutality is -- meaning both were, and both can be, but neither must be.
And your best shot to do good in the world and avoid harm is to call upon reason and evidence, do your research and -- here is where religion often trips up -- ask the questions that could show you wrong.
When a person's altruistic impulses are directed toward winning converts, it is valid to ask whether they are actually serving human well-being or simply serving a mind virus.
