Articles
Begley, S. (2009). Newsweek 3/13/2010 "At last check, intimations of mortality had not been banished from the human mind—the Grim Reaper still stalks our thoughts. Nor have our brain circuits shaken their habit of perceiving patterns in chaos, such as seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of burned toast; imagining the invisible hand of a supernatural agent in acts of randomness, as in 'answered' prayers..." read more
Below is the full transcript of a class lecture given by Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard. In his own words: I first met Pete Boghossian when he was called in at the last minute to give a speech at the Freedom from Religion Foundation convention in Portland, and our shop talk afterward on cognitive theory prompted him to invite me to address his class (he was not very familiar with the details of the burgeoning Intelligent Design movement, which…
After seeing the US State Department's recent report on International Religious Freedom, Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard created a Global Secular Bill of Rights as a call to arms and details on the scale of the problem based on other surveys of persecution around the world and the population figures. The full text is available below. Read Downard's Global Secular Bill of Rights
Below is the full text of Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard's's 2009 Kennewick Freethought Society lecture on how people come to believe things that aren't true. Downard summarizes: "The take home point on the lecture is that people who believe things that aren't true all share a deep common trait, the ability to not think of things they don't think about. I dub these people Tortucans, a quality independent of their intelligence or religion or politics. This aspect is of considerable importance, because…
Downard, James, Secular Global Institute Communicator 7/31/2014 The scientific concept that all life on earth is related by common descent, and has come to be the way it is through natural processes observable today and open to experimental investigation, is one of the major unifying discoveries of human thought. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace independently recognized the role natural selection played in this, but even had they never lived, others would have followed to connect the same evidence. In the century…
By Teresa Wiltz, (2013). The Guardian America's founders insisted on church-state separation. Yet now we have senators and justices prattling about the devil. Save us. read more
by Matthew Bulger, (2013). Humanist Network News With election season upon us, and a near constant stream of public jabs and rebuttals between incumbents and their challengers, we should focus on something besides the Americans that are running for office. Instead, let’s turn our attention to a rather peculiar set of state laws relating to elections and nonreligious Americans... read more
Pini Herman. (2011). Jewish Journal, 10/31/2011 “The US Jewish population is comprised of over a third of ‘Jews, No Religion,’ a strange term that may describe a lot of our friends and families. Years of experience surveying Jews have taught me that the ‘no religion’ column has a lot of Jews… Jewish population studies show that the population of Jewish ‘Nones’ has 4 sources of origin…” read more
Vergano, D. (2009). USA Today 9/14/2009 “Can we all get along? Maybe not when it comes to science and religion. Just ask scientist Francis Collins, installed last month as head of the National Institutes of Health. It wasn’t just newspaper editorials — scientists such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker, who called Collins an ‘advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs,’ criticized placing an outspoken evangelical Christian in the post.” read more
James A. Haught. (2011). Patheos. “Since World War II, worship has dwindled starkly in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced democracies… But quietly, under the radar, much of America slowly is following the path previously taken by Europe. Little noticed, secularism keeps climbing in the United States. Here’s the evidence…” read more
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