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“Who will believe this silly stuff?”
Another excerpt from Voices of Unbelief, my current project. You may remember that one of my goals in this book is to fill in the 1400-year silence between Rome and the Renaissance that dogs most...
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Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) has had a profound influence on me for years. It’s hard to think of a greater artist with the language or a more incisive thinker. He took a different approach than I...
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Squinting in hindsight
Delaney (10) is on an awesome winning streak with fantastic teachers all the way back to preschool. Her current one has her all lit up about the American Revolution, and she gets off the bus every day...
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The easy ones and the hard ones
Preparing a talk on critical thinking and ethics reminded me of this post from three years ago. “Omigosh. Some of these things are soooo easy, but this one is totally hard.” “What things?” “These...
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Unnatural
(Part 2, continued from “Born This Way?“) You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade / You’ve got to be carefully taught....
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6000 days
Part 3 of 3. Go to Part 1 or Part 2. The aim that the child should grow up to become confidently independent is synonymous with the aim that the child should grow up mentally healthy. Psychologist John...
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The Social Network
One of the real pleasures of being neck-deep in the freethought movement at the moment is how quickly the conversation is growing up. Not that it isn’t still fun and worthwhile to throw tomatoes at bad...
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Missing church
Quick coda to yesterday’s post. Peer-reviewed research is great when you can get it, but a lot of the questions at the heart of my work fall in the remaining gaps between studies. Until those gaps fill...
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Squirrel!
McGowans just don’t do sports that way. Connor McGowan My kids are sportier than ever I was — which is to say they play sports, period, at all. But I’d never thought much about the way they do it until...
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On being awake
To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? From Walden by Henry David Thoreau A question on the Parenting Beyond Belief Facebook...
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Just do it?
(First appeared May 13, 2010) “My heart goes out to the man…who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of...
View ArticleChecking in on FBB
Foundation Beyond Belief, the humanist giving community I first announced on this blog, is continuing to grow, and I realized recently I haven’t been keeping Meming of Life readers in the loop very...
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A Bump in the Fence Line: One Step Further from Bigotry
I love finding out that a concept I’ve had in my head for years has a name. Example: Someone dislikes all gays, then learns that his brother is gay. Instead of dropping the prejudice altogether, he...
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The Power of Two: How Shared Dissent Can Make All the Difference
First published in 2011, this article feels especially urgent in 2018. Erin is now a junior in college. A few days ago, Erin, my eighth-grader, made me proud. That alone is not news. But in this case...
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God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
I think most nonreligious parents would really enjoy the first two chapters of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (“Childhood” and “Adolescence”). Among other things, this section recounts his...
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