The boasts of religious and secular humanists, and the cosmic perspective of antihumanists — Humanism is an odd, seemingly trivial ideology. We might have thought humanism is just the obvious affirmation that people do what people do. But according to historians, most people haven’t been humanists; on the contrary, humanism is supposed to have begun in earnest only in the early modern period, with…

David Graeber’s tactical error, and his theory’s underlying strength — In his book Bullshit Jobs, the anthropologist David Graeber argued that there’s been an explosion of “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious” jobs since the 1980s, owing to the rise of managerial feudalism and to the financialization of capitalism. Graber’s analysis posits several types of BS jobs: Flunky positions are created because…

The rise of Christianity and the Roman Empire’s last laugh — Christians interpret their religion’s history as amounting to a miraculous Christianization of the very empire that had executed Jesus and persecuted the early Christians. Only the Holy Spirit could have initiated such a reversal of fortunes. In one century, under emperors Nero, Aurelius, and Decius, Christians went into hiding or…

John Gray’s cheap shot at liberal atheism — John Gray is my kind of old school, existential atheist. His book Straw Dogs delves into some dark, illiberal implications of atheism, those that Nietzsche emphasized and that the “new atheists” downplayed. For Nietzsche, God’s “death” is a catastrophe, and Gray explores the outer reaches of a nondelusional, naturalistic worldview…

I dare you to test whether your culture is less cultish than the Heaven’s Gate cult — Here’s a challenge we can all take on: as bizarre as cults like the Branch Davidians, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate are, try to show that your primary beliefs and practices aren’t just as cultish. I expect you think that passing that test would be easy. Let’s find out whether you’re…

How to condemn villainy without stigmatizing mental illness — How despicable we are for demonizing Donald Trump! He’s the most obviously mentally ill person who has a prominent role in public life. The stigma of mental illness is real. In some of my writings, I’ve attempted to wipe away that mark of disgrace by exploring the philosophical aspect of…

The modern Christian’s grim choice between hypocrisy and lunacy — Last week I drove past a busy street corner and saw, standing in the rain with no umbrella, a woman in a robe who was carrying a large, hand-drawn sign that said, “Jesus saves. Repent!” Several other people were waiting in a nearby bus shelter, none of whom were paying…

Reconciling science and religion with pantheism — If nature’s wild, how can it be ordered by laws? The paradox posed by that question is resolved once we recognize that “wilderness” and “laws of nature” are social metaphors that are thematically distinguished. Two metaphors for nature Nature is wild in so far as the world isn’t cultivated, domesticated, or enslaved by human…

Childlike and sophisticated takes on the same inexplicable fact of the natural order — What’s the difference between animism and pantheism? Could prehistoric animists and modern, naturalistic pantheists be talking essentially about the same thing, about the ultimate inexplicability or bruteness of what we think of as naturalness, as the mindless emergence of regularities in the universe? Is this difference mainly perspectival, so that…