Secular Global Institute

This article, published in the Social Forces journal,  examines the changing association between higher education and reporting no religious affiliation in the United States. Using more than three and a half decades of repeated cross-sectional survey data, the author discusses how the results relate to changes among the college-educated population, the religious deinstitutionalization of the non-college-educated, cultural diffusion across social statuses, and other cohort-appropriate social and cultural changes. Read the full summary and article at oxfordjournals.org

In this paper (full text available below), Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard tackles non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA. His summary follows: Make no mistake about it, this non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) issue is one of the prickliest ones in all the religion/atheism debate. The historical examples of Clifford, James and Russell are used to lay out the argument without jabbing at some of the current combatants in this area, but that shoe is naturally waiting to drop. The upshot: Gould got…

From Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard, here is a paper breaking down Michael Behe's appearance at the 2005 Dover Intelligent Design trial and how he tried to lay out the limits of evolution via bacterial resistance.  It does discuss some technical and historical issues and explains things in such a way that the reader will come away understanding the dynamics of bacterial resistance and the philosophical concerns of the spontaneous generation debate better. Read the full text of the paper

Here is a paper from Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard entitled, "Taking “Teach the Controversy” Critical Analysis seriously: What does Intelligent Design have to say about the Reptile-Mammal Transition?" An investigation (with illustrations) of the evasions and incompetence of current Intelligent Design "textbooks", the full text includes a 7-page Appendix containing the S3 Darwin Day handout to compare to the literature Jehovah's Witnesses were handing out, and also to highlight by example how a purely scientific evidence-based Darwin Day presentation can proceed. Read the full paper  

In his paper "Three Macroevolutionary Episodes: Deep Time and the Creation/Evolution Controversy," Secular Global Institute Communicator Jim Downard discusses fossil records, including illustrations and several chronology charts. It also contains a critique of Jonathan Wells' "Icons of Evolution" on the Cambrian Explosion, pointing out several errors, most notably that Wells put phyla on the list with fewer samples than ones he omitted, and the common reason appeared to have been a desire to restrict himself to ones with a fossil track. Read the full paper

Bruch, Stephanie A (2009). 53 St. Louis L.J. 1253 Religious statements made by political candidates may seem inappropriate, especially to those individuals who believe religion and politics should never overlap. However, religion and politics have been overlapping throughout history, and this interplay will likely continue. From the examples above, it is clear that political candidates frequently make religious statements, but what about religious individuals or churches making political statements? The concepts of separation of church and state and church tax…

Asser, S. and Swan, R. (1998). Pediatrics v101-4, 625-629 Results. One hundred forty fatalities were from conditions for which survival rates with medical care would have exceeded 90%. Eighteen more had expected survival rates of >50%. All but 3 of the remainder would likely have had some benefit from clinical help. Conclusions. When faith healing is used to the exclusion of medical treatment, the number of preventable child fatalities and the associated suffering are substantial and warrant public concern... read…

Mahoney, J. (2010). Journal of Value Inquiry, March 2010 In recent years, most discussion on the topic of secularism and political legitimacy has centered on the United States. Some relevant examples that have shaped the current debate over religious exemptions to legitimate secular law include the controversial Yoder decision, limited exemptions from federal drug laws, as well as exemptions from various forms of military service... While we will use as background familiar liberal claims about secularism and legitimacy as they…

Skirbekk, V., Goujon, A., and Kaufmann, E. (2008). Vienna Institute of Demography We project the religious composition of the United States to 2043, considering fertility differences, migration, intergenerational religious transmission and conversion by 11 ethnoreligious groups. If fertility and migration trends continue, Hispanic Catholics will experience rapid growth, expanding from 10 to 18 percent of the population between 2003 and 2043. Protestants could decrease from 47 to 39 percent over the same period... read more

Baker, J. (2012). East Tennessee State University ...This study analyzes data from a random, national survey of adults to examine the empirical connections between perceptions of science and secular identities in the United States. Analyses demonstrate that perceptions of science correlate strongly with American secularism, particularly among atheists and agnostics... read more