Excerpts from the latest issue:

Freethought and Compassion (pdf)

- Daniel T. Strain

According to the Houston Church of Freethought’s website, a freethinker is “a person who forms opinions about religion independently of tradition, authority, or established belief.” I might quibble a bit that this is somewhat narrow, because I would suspect that we try to form all of our opinions in this manner—not just those pertaining to religion. The site goes on to say that “freethinkers attach more importance to the why of belief than to the what.”...

A Humanist's Faith: Towards a Humanist Alternative to Religion (pdf)

- Alistair J. Sinclair

Humanists are often caricatured as bleak, selfish materialists who tolerate everything and believe in anything or nothing. But such materialism is a feature of those secular humanists who see no value in religion whatsoever. Spiritually minded humanists can accommodate what is valuable in religion without indulging in a superstitious belief in supernatural entities...

Accidents: Some Reasoning about Behavior, Punishment, and a Surprising Conclusion

- Tom Gillis

If a ‘Claim’ is defined as a statement or proposition that is unambiguous (singular and clear) in meaning so that it can be evaluated as either true or false but not both, then we can define a ‘Belief’ as a Claim that is accepted as true or probably true. If you believe that a Claim is false, then the definition means that your Belief is in the logical negative of that Claim (every Claim has a negative form.). There is presently no known way to adopt a Belief directly, i.e., just because you want to—like flexing a muscle. If that were possible, then you could easily break habits and addictions by making yourself believe in imminent dire consequences; then fear would...

Notes on Moral Education

- Howard B. Radest

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Annual Retreat (February 2005) of the Ethics Committee of the South Carolina Medical Association. The subject was moral education in medical schools. A brief selection, “Creating An Effective Pedagogy for Moral Education” was published in the Journal of the S.C. Medical Association. My concern was on the soon-to-be physician and the moral issues he or she was bound to face in practice. ...

The Trouble With Truth

- Lucas Carpenter

Both within its own borders and in the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, the United States is facing a growing crisis precipitated largely by the increasingly violent clash of fundamentalist religions—both among themselves and with all brands of secularism. At the center of these conflicts is the philosophical concept of the Absolute Truth: the only thing about which there is virtually total agreement among the contending parties, that is to say, almost everyone agrees that there is an Absolute Truth about the way the world is and that they are in exclusive possession of it...