religion

From atheism to secular humanism, the terms we use to describe non-belief carry centuries of argument, persecution, and hard-won clarity. Understanding the vocabulary is the first step to understanding the movement.

By Jon Ajinga 5 min read 960 words

A North Texas school board voted Tuesday to allow volunteer chaplains, without state counseling credentials, to serve students during the school day — the first district in the state to do so since enabling legislation passed in 2023.

By Jon Ajinga 2 min read 353 words

In 1633, the Roman Inquisition forced Galileo Galilei to recant his support for the Copernican heliocentric model — a trial that has been mythologized into a simple story of science versus religion when the actual conflict was more complicated and more interesting.

By The Freethinking Times 5 min read 875 words

In 1925, a high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolution — a circus of a trial that the anti-evolutionists technically won and culturally lost, setting the terms of a conflict that has never fully resolved.

By The Freethinking Times 6 min read 1,006 words

Pantheism is the metaphysical view that God and the universe are identical — that there is no transcendent creator standing apart from creation, but that the totality of nature is itself divine.

4 min read 633 words

Deism is the belief that a creator God can be known through reason and observation of the natural world, but that this God does not intervene in human affairs, has not revealed himself through scripture, and is not available for prayer or worship.

3 min read 588 words

Atheism is the absence of belief in gods, or the positive assertion that no gods exist — a position that can be arrived at through reasoning about evidence, through philosophical argument, or simply through finding no compelling reason to believe.

4 min read 659 words

Agnosticism is the position that the existence of God, gods, or the supernatural is unknown and perhaps unknowable — that the evidence available to human beings is insufficient to justify either theistic belief or confident atheism.

4 min read 630 words

The collection that made Russell the most famous atheist of the 20th century — essays combining rigorous argument with elegant wit.

3 min read 414 words

A provocative revisionist history of humankind that makes you reconsider nearly every assumption about how human civilization came to be — including religion's role in it.

3 min read 423 words

The most commercially successful atheist argument of the 21st century — polemical, exhilarating, and often philosophically underdeveloped.

3 min read 409 words

The most widely read freethought text of the 18th century, written in a French prison and smuggled out — Paine's systematic, accessible critique of revealed religion.

3 min read 423 words