April 2022

God’s Trimesters: His Infancy, Adolescence, and Adulthood,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry

Death is the mother of religion. Would faith ever have been born if not for life’s only inevitability for all: The Reaper? As the first Homo sapiens discovered, we are all renters in life until we buy the farm. So, even before the wheel, mortals invented the first life insurance policy: religion. Each major creed

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Doubt May Be a Virtue,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry

Examining the claims and doctrines of the world’s major religions reveals clearly that there are profound controversies. There is one claim, however, for which there is virtually no disagreement: Religions provide comfort and satisfaction to their adherents. I think this is an understatement. Religious faith provides spectacular rewards to its followers. These include intense feelings

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Why Deism Is Critical to Religious Criticism,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry

Atheists and theists sometimes notice—or think they notice—the same irony in the legacy of atheist thought. “Isn’t it funny,” they ask, “that many great thinkers atheists look up to are deists?” Many of the writers atheists admire are deists. Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Mark Twain were all deists. All three also had insightful and funny

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Nehru: India’s Extraordinary Atheist Prime Minister,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry

Jawaharlal Nehru . (Credit: Prakash pandey07 – Wikipedia.) Historians have been reluctant to acknowledge that India’s most famous prime minister—Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)—was not only an atheist but an extraordinarily learned atheist. His atheism did not develop as a reaction to a religious upbringing or the suffering of the Indian people (though he thought only a

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Agency: The Myth at the Heart of the Mystical,Nicole Scott,Free Inquiry

In our earliest personal understandings of atheism, most of us tend to focus on religion as the sole target of unbelief, concentrating on whatever local god, holy book, or other anointed authority our home culture presents us with. But as we become more comfortable with basic atheism, we begin to understand that religion isn’t the

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