The Human Prospect is a peer-reviewed, indexed journal focused on the development and refinement of humanist values and ethics, as well as ways the humanist movement can foster them throughout society. It also covers new scientific evidence, theories, and conclusions, as well as their impact upon and relationship to society, values, and ethics.
An oldie-but-goodie from self-proclaimed skeptic and agnostic James A. Haught, who’s written several books on atrocities and injustices wreaked in the name of religion. The subject of taboos wouldn’t be complete without this quintessential jeremiad originally published in the Winter 1996/97 issue of Free Inquiry (a journal of secular humanist opinion and commentary founded in 1980 by Paul Kurtz).
It may seem hypocritical to claim that women continue to be oppressed in the United States and globally as I write this article in a studio apartment from which I am free to come and go at will, and which I am able to afford on my own due to a successful career. Yet, when a 25-year-old Polish woman is denied medical treatment because it might risk her pregnancy and never told why, thus denying her the choice to seek other treatment, I am reminded that government and society are too willing to sacrifice my life simply because I am a woman.
Religion has always involved a tension between knowledge and faith. Jesus taught, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” At the same time, however, Paul cautioned believers that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Jesus made clear to the apostle Thomas that, of the two, faith is the greater goal: “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
Approaching alternative health as a secular religion has important implications for how we address belief in pseudoscience. Alternative health shares many features with conventional religious belief including a creation myth, fall from grace, demons and salvation. It explains why education in the sciences, or specific disciplines of immunology, oncology, etc. has limited effectiveness in changing deep-seated alternative health beliefs.
Paul Kurtz devoted his life to articulating a coherent vision of secular humanism, one which was naturalistic, evidence-based, and humane. Consequentially, his views were often critical of contemporary religious claims. Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, many responses to his work label it “critical” and “hostile.” What were Kurtz’s thoughts on religion, and were they as simplistic and_ _strident as critics claimed?
Humanism and the struggle for civil rights in the United States have had much in common. Martin Luther King Jr. is considered to have been a Christian humanist, while other civil rights leaders have been more secularly inclined. The political activist life of the late civil rights organizer and secular humanist James Forman is memorialized.
Besides having invented the late-night TV talk show in 1953, entertainer and musical composer Steve Allen went on to have a many-faceted career. He wrote more than 50 books, fourteen of which were published by Prometheus Books, the publishing house founded by Paul Kurtz. For nearly three decades he and Kurtz were colleagues and friends. A philosopher, as well, and a dynamic advocate for rationalism and reason, Allen wrote about religion, politics and social issues. Unalterably opposed to censorship, he was nevertheless a harsh critic of the trend towards coarseness in popular culture. Allen died in 2000, so he was spared the spectacle of the United States of America’s 45th president.
