LAHORE, Pakistan — The Lahore High Court on Wednesday acquitted Dr. Nadir Shafiq, a philosophy professor at a private university here, of blasphemy charges that had kept him in custody since his 2022 arrest, in a ruling that human-rights observers described as rare and narrowly drawn.

Shafiq, 52, had been convicted in 2023 of making “derogatory remarks” against a religious figure during a lecture on comparative ethics. The prosecution relied primarily on the testimony of two students and a partial audio recording of uncertain provenance; in reversing the conviction, a two-judge bench held that the recording had not been properly authenticated under the Qanun-e-Shahadat and that the students’ accounts diverged on material points.

The court did not rule on the constitutionality of the blasphemy statute itself, a provision of the Pakistan Penal Code that carries a mandatory death sentence for certain offenses and has been used, rights groups say, disproportionately against religious minorities and academics. International watchdogs including Amnesty International have long called for the law’s repeal; the Pakistani government has consistently resisted such calls, citing public sentiment and political sensitivities.

What the Ruling Does, and Does Not, Signal

Shafiq’s lawyer, speaking at a brief press conference outside the courthouse, described the acquittal as “a narrow evidentiary victory, not a victory for free expression.” The professor will likely remain under informal protective custody for some time: mob violence around blasphemy cases is a documented pattern in Pakistan, and at least sixteen people accused or acquitted under the statute have been killed by vigilantes in the past decade.

Colleagues at the university said Shafiq had told them during his detention that he would not return to Pakistan after his release. His family has declined to disclose his current whereabouts.

The High Court has in recent years issued a small number of acquittals on evidentiary grounds while leaving the underlying statute untouched — a pattern that one Lahore-based legal scholar called “judicial minimalism under duress.” Legislative reform, the scholar said, remains “politically unthinkable for now.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A bill advancing out of committee in the Missouri House would make state library aid contingent on “demonstrated good-faith compliance” with a centralized registry of challenged titles, potentially redirecting millions in funding away from any library that retains a book a parent has formally objected to.

The registry, established in 2024 and expanded twice since, currently lists more than seven hundred titles. Under the proposed amendment, a library’s annual certification would be audited against the registry, and a disputed retention — even pending internal review — could trigger a partial or full withholding of that year’s grant.

“This is a funding lever pretending to be a procedural rule,” said Margaret Halliwell, director of the Missouri Library Association, in an interview. “You are telling librarians that the price of professional judgment is the loss of the budget they use to buy replacement HVAC systems.”

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Carl Denton (R-Cape Girardeau), characterized the provision as “an accountability measure” and said libraries that “follow the process” would have “nothing to worry about.” Denton declined to say how many libraries he expected to fall out of compliance, or whether the state had modeled the fiscal impact on smaller rural systems that rely on the state grants for a majority of their operating budget.

What the Registry Actually Contains

A review of the registry’s current contents by The Freethinking Times shows a mix of young-adult novels, graphic memoirs, sex-education material, and a small number of academic works on race and American history. Roughly a quarter of the entries were added in response to a single statewide form letter circulated by an advocacy group in late 2025; several titles appear on the list despite never having been held by more than three Missouri libraries.

The bill is expected to reach a floor vote in early May. Library-system directors in two of the state’s four largest counties said they would refuse certification rather than remove titles from their collections — a stance that, if the bill passes, would make their systems ineligible for state funding for the fiscal year.

This is a developing story.

Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature has been, since 2011, the kind of book that attracts either conversions or denunciations — rarely the long-form responses it actually asks for. Rachel Kessler’s The Better Angels, Revisited is the book a careful reader wanted someone to write: not a demolition, not a vindication, but a patient re-examination of Pinker’s claims in light of fifteen years of additional data and the sharper methodological questions that have accumulated around them.

Kessler, a historian of violence at the University of Edinburgh, takes the original argument seriously. The opening chapters are an admirable summary, less polemical than Pinker’s own and in places more favorable: where Pinker’s critics have sometimes dismissed the entire downward-trend thesis, Kessler concedes the direction is real across several domains, most robustly for interpersonal violence in settled states.

What the book disputes — and where it earns its title — is the mechanism, the completeness, and the forecast. On mechanism, Kessler shows that Pinker’s preferred explanations (the Enlightenment, commerce, the “civilising process”) systematically under-weight the role of administrative state capacity, which is messier and less ideologically charming but empirically better correlated with violence declines. On completeness, she assembles an unusually careful catalogue of domains where violence has not declined, or where the decline depends on how you count: state-inflicted harms, structural harms, violence internal to carceral institutions, and forms of harm that the data infrastructure of the twentieth century was not built to see.

Where the Book Is Strongest

The chapter on “statistical invisibility” — what it means that we can reliably count battlefield deaths but not deaths in for-profit detention, and how this shapes which declines we trust — is the best thing I have read this year on the epistemology of large-scale moral claims. Kessler is not arguing that the figures are invented; she is arguing that the figures we have are the figures someone chose to gather, and that treating the resulting trend lines as straightforward descriptions of reality is a philosophical mistake, not merely a statistical one.

Where It Could Go Further

The book is less incisive on the future. Kessler’s scepticism of linear-progress narratives is well-taken, but her own forecasts, in the final chapters, are notably hedged — hedged, I think, in ways that do not quite acknowledge how much of the reader’s interest in the question is about what happens next. A book that is this good on the history could afford to be a little braver on the future.

Still: this is the first long response to Better Angels that feels like it was written to persuade thoughtful readers rather than to win a Twitter thread. Recommended without qualification for anyone interested in moral progress as a question rather than a slogan.

Every intellectual tradition builds its own vocabulary. The freethought tradition is no exception — but its vocabulary carries an unusual burden. These are not neutral academic terms. They are words that got people killed, words that were weaponised against the people who used them, and words that were eventually reclaimed.

The oldest word: atheism

Atheism is perhaps the most misunderstood term in the entire tradition. Its detractors define it as a dogmatic denial of God’s existence — a kind of anti-religion religion. Its defenders point out that it means nothing more than the absence of belief in gods. The distinction matters. One is a metaphysical claim; the other is simply a description of where someone has landed after examining the evidence.

The ancient Greeks used the word atheos to describe anyone who rejected the gods of the city. Socrates was charged with it. Early Christians were called atheists by the Romans because they refused to worship the Roman pantheon. The word has always meant “the wrong kind of believer” more than “no believer at all.”

Freethought and the Enlightenment

The term freethought emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe a method rather than a conclusion. A freethinker was someone who insisted on forming beliefs about religion, morality, and metaphysics through reason and evidence rather than through tradition, authority, or revelation.

This distinction — between method and conclusion — is what separates freethought from atheism. An atheist has arrived at a particular answer. A freethinker has committed to a particular process. The two often overlap, but they are not the same thing. A deist like Thomas Paine was a freethinker who believed in God. A materialist like Baron d’Holbach was a freethinker who did not.

The careful agnostic

Agnosticism was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, and it remains one of the most frequently misused terms in philosophy. It does not mean “I haven’t decided yet” or “I’m on the fence.” Huxley meant something much more precise: that the question of God’s existence falls outside the reach of human knowledge, and that intellectual honesty requires acknowledging this limitation rather than pretending to certainty in either direction.

This is a genuinely radical position. It does not grant atheism the easy confidence of certainty, and it does not grant theism the comfort of faith. It demands that we sit with not knowing — which, as anyone who has tried it can confirm, is harder than it sounds.

Rationalism versus empiricism

These two terms name a philosophical argument that predates the freethought movement but runs through it like a fault line. Rationalism holds that reason, independent of sensory experience, is the primary source of knowledge. Empiricism insists that all genuine knowledge derives from observation and experience.

Most freethinkers lean empiricist — David Hume, the patron saint of the tradition, certainly did. But the tension between the two positions is productive. Rationalism at its best produces the precise logical arguments of Bertrand Russell. Empiricism at its best produces the scientific method of Carl Sagan. The freethought tradition needs both.

Determinism and the question of free will

One of the less comfortable corners of freethought is determinism — the doctrine that every event, including every human thought and action, is the inevitable consequence of prior causes and natural laws. If the universe is governed by physical law, and the brain is a physical organ, then in what sense are our choices “free”?

This question has divided freethinkers for centuries. Some, like Sam Harris, argue that free will is simply an illusion. Others insist on a compatibilist position: that determinism and meaningful human agency are not in conflict. The vocabulary here matters enormously, because the answer you give shapes your views on morality, criminal justice, and personal responsibility.

The secular humanist synthesis

Secular humanism represents a relatively modern attempt to build an affirmative philosophy out of the freethought tradition. Rather than defining itself by what it rejects (gods, revelation, supernatural claims), it defines itself by what it affirms: human dignity, reason, ethics without reference to the supernatural, and the capacity of human beings to live well on the basis of natural capacities alone.

The term gained formal institutional backing in the twentieth century, but its roots are older. The idea that human flourishing does not require divine permission runs from Epicurus through Spinoza through Mill through Russell.

Materialism: the unfashionable position

Materialism is the metaphysical claim that everything that exists is physical — that matter and energy, operating according to natural laws, constitute the whole of reality. Mind, consciousness, and apparently non-physical phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena described in other terms.

This is the position that most working scientists hold implicitly, even if they would not describe themselves as materialists. It is also the position that most people find intuitively unsatisfying, because it seems to leave no room for the felt reality of consciousness, meaning, or purpose. Whether this dissatisfaction is a genuine philosophical objection or merely a failure of imagination remains, as the philosophers say, an open question.

Skepticism: the method beneath it all

If there is one word that unifies the entire freethought tradition, it is skepticism — the insistence that knowledge claims require evidence, and that many claims commonly accepted as knowledge fail to meet the standards that genuine knowledge demands.

Skepticism is not cynicism. The cynic doubts everything and believes nothing. The skeptic doubts in proportion to the evidence and believes in proportion to the proof. Hume was a skeptic. Sagan was a skeptic. The entire scientific method is an exercise in organised skepticism.

The vocabulary of unbelief is not a fixed lexicon. It grows, shifts, and occasionally contradicts itself — which is, perhaps, exactly what you would expect from a tradition that refuses to treat any text as final.

HELSINKI — In a ruling issued Tuesday, Finland’s Supreme Administrative Court held that the country’s longstanding practice of defaulting pupils into Evangelical Lutheran religious instruction — with secular ethics offered only as an opt-out — impermissibly privileges one worldview over others in the public basic-education system. The court ordered the Ministry of Education to propose a revised framework by December.

The case, brought by a Helsinki family on behalf of their ten-year-old daughter, argued that the opt-out structure required them to either affirmatively request secular instruction — creating a record identifying their child as non-religious — or accept instruction in a denomination they do not adhere to. The family’s lawyers had argued, and the court agreed, that the arrangement functioned as a de-facto religious test, in tension with Section 11 of Finland’s Constitution.

The ruling does not prohibit religious instruction in Finnish schools, which remains constitutional under the country’s tradition of accommodating both the Evangelical Lutheran and Orthodox churches alongside secular ethics. But it requires a symmetric opt-in structure, in which no worldview is the administrative default.

How Other Nordic Countries Handle the Issue

Finland’s decision places it in line with Sweden, which discontinued confessional religious instruction in public schools in 1969 and now teaches religion as a comparative, academic subject. Norway — which lost a 2007 European Court of Human Rights case on a related issue — has since moved to a similar comparative model. Denmark retains Evangelical Lutheran instruction by default but is now the only Nordic country to do so.

The Finnish Bishops’ Conference issued a brief statement calling the ruling “regrettable” but pledging cooperation with the ministry on any revised framework. The Finnish Humanist Association, which had filed an amicus brief, described the decision as “overdue.”

Implementation details — including how schools will reconfigure scheduling, staffing, and curricula — remain to be negotiated between the ministry, municipalities, and teaching unions over the next eighteen months.

DENTON, Tex. — The Cedar Hollow Independent School District on Tuesday became the first Texas district to formally implement Senate Bill 763, the 2023 law permitting volunteer chaplains to assume duties previously reserved for licensed school counselors. The board’s 5–2 vote authorized the superintendent to begin recruiting chaplains through local religious organizations this summer, for placement beginning in August.

Under the new policy, chaplains will be available during regular school hours to meet with students “who request spiritual support,” the district said, and may also address groups during lunch periods and, with parental consent, during elective time slots. The policy does not require chaplains to hold a counseling credential, a social-work license, or training in trauma response — three qualifications Texas requires of licensed school counselors.

Dissenting board members and a coalition of parents have objected to the program on two grounds: the substitution of religious figures for mental-health professionals, and the near-certainty that the volunteer pool, drawn from local congregations, will not represent the full range of religious and non-religious backgrounds present among the district’s students.

Who Qualifies as a Chaplain

The Texas law sets no statewide definition of “chaplain.” Districts are left to adopt their own standards; Cedar Hollow’s policy requires only that a chaplain be “endorsed by a recognized religious body” and complete a district-provided orientation covering mandatory-reporting obligations. The policy contains no viewpoint-neutrality clause, no minimum-training hours on adolescent psychology, and no provision for auditing a chaplain’s conduct during meetings with individual students.

The American Humanist Association and the Freedom From Religion Foundation have both signaled that they intend to seek chaplain placements under the program, a move that would test whether the district’s “recognized religious body” standard extends to non-theistic belief systems. The district’s attorney, asked for comment on whether a secular humanist chaplain would be admitted under the same terms, said the matter “had not been considered” and would be addressed “on a case-by-case basis.”

Similar bills are pending in at least eleven other state legislatures. In three states, implementing districts have been sued.

This story will be updated as the Cedar Hollow program moves toward implementation.

Most documentaries about the nineteenth-century freethought movement fail in one of two directions: they flatten their subjects into a procession of heroic doubters, or they hedge so carefully about the subjects’ contradictions that the result is less a portrait than a disclaimer. Claire Havemann’s three-part Radicals does neither. It is unusually willing to let its subjects be both admirable and discomfiting, often in the same sentence.

The three episodes center on Robert Ingersoll, Annie Besant, and the less-remembered Charles Bradlaugh, respectively. Each is allowed to speak in the words of their own published work — the film is generous with primary sources — and each is followed by a thoughtful, un-cynical commentary from a rotating cast of historians who disagree among themselves. The result is a documentary that trusts its audience to hold more than one thing at once.

What the Film Gets Right

The Ingersoll episode, which I expected to be the most familiar, is surprising. Havemann does not smooth over his racial attitudes or the limits of his political imagination on questions like women’s suffrage, which arrived later for him than it should have. But she also does not substitute easy moralism for analysis: she situates the contradictions, and makes clear what Ingersoll did and did not do with the considerable platform he had. The effect is unusual in the genre — you come away respecting him more, because the respect is being offered to a real nineteenth-century person rather than a flattering projection.

Besant’s episode is the most ambitious. Her trajectory — from a free-thinking critic of the church, to a radical secularist, to a Theosophist, to a figure in Indian independence politics — is the kind of story that a weaker documentary would either shorten or rearrange. Havemann lets it unfold in its actual messiness. The sequence on the Bradlaugh–Besant birth-control trial is the best twenty minutes of the entire series: a prosecution that the defendants welcomed, as a platform, becomes a meditation on when doing the right thing looks exactly like being a self-promoter.

The Bradlaugh episode is the quietest and the finest. Havemann resists the temptation to make the oath controversy — Bradlaugh’s six-year fight to be seated in Parliament without swearing on the Bible — into a triumphalist narrative. The film acknowledges what it cost him, what it cost his family, and what the fight did and did not win; the final sequence, on the later lives of his allies, carries an honest kind of weight.

Reservations

The film’s one real weakness is a structural one: Havemann is clearly more interested in her British material than her American, and the American episodes sometimes feel compressed against the British ones. A viewer coming to the subject cold might finish the series with the impression that the center of the nineteenth-century freethought movement was in London; a fuller picture would include more on the American Secular Union and on the women who staffed the movement’s journals.

But this is quibbling. Radicals is the best documentary treatment of its subject in memory, and it is made in a spirit the subjects themselves would have recognized — a seriousness about ideas that refuses to pretend its heroes are saints.