Ideas, opinions, politics, humanities
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How Jewish people extremely diminished their suffering
Jewish history contains an almost incomprehensible amount of persecution. Long before the Holocaust, Jewish communities were expelled, segregated, robbed, forcibly converted, tortured, massacred, and blamed for catastrophes they did not cause. During the Crusades, entire Jewish communities were massacred. Medieval authorities restricted where Jews could live, what professions they could enter, whether they could own…
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Netanyahu will probably never end up in The Hague
Freethinkers International readers may have been spot on. When we recently asked whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would eventually appear before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, most respondents predicted that he would not. At the moment, their skepticism looks justified. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November…
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Can AI make people atheists?
Artificial intelligence was not invented to turn believers into atheists. Chatbots do not normally begin conversations by telling Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or anyone else to abandon their religion. Most mainstream AI systems are actually designed to avoid unnecessarily pushing users toward political, philosophical, or religious positions. Yet AI may still have an unexpected effect…
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Where did belief in God decline? And the sad news: The 21st century will still be a century of religion
For anyone expecting religion simply to disappear as education, science and technology advance, the first decades of the 21st century offer a frustrating answer. In large parts of the developed world, secularization is real. Christianity has lost millions of adherents. More people openly identify as atheists, agnostics or religiously unaffiliated. In some countries, the transformation…
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Will the NYT publish Chomsky’s obituary?
I am not saying I do not wish this esteemed professor many long years to live. I certainly do wish him that. But the question is not whether The New York Times will publish his obituary. It definitely will publish it. The real question is how much you must be pro-establishment, pro-war, and a believer…
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There is no “me”, only a network of neurons
We wake up every morning with an extraordinarily convincing impression. There is someone inside our heads. There is a “me” observing the world, making decisions, remembering yesterday and planning tomorrow. That impression is so powerful that questioning it can sound absurd. Yet neuroscience gives us little reason to believe that a separate self exists behind…
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Ruhollah Khomeini wrote about sex with children and animals. Perhaps he should have studied economics instead
Ruhollah Khomeini is remembered primarily as the architect of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and the founder of the Islamic Republic. He was also a prolific Islamic jurist. Some of his writings demonstrate just how extensively religious law can intrude into the most intimate—and sometimes deeply disturbing—areas of human behavior. His Tahrir al-Wasilah is not some…
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Marx and Engels’ disgusting remarks about Slavs, Jews and Blacks
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels presented themselves as thinkers concerned with exploitation, inequality and human emancipation. Their writings helped inspire political movements that claimed solidarity between workers regardless of nationality. Read some of their other writings, however, and the picture becomes considerably uglier. Marx and Engels occasionally wrote about Jews, Black people and entire Slavic…
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Gross neglect of drug addicts in the US: Only celebrities are visible
Hayden Panettiere was famous, successful and recognizable to millions. She was also remarkably open about addiction. She described years of problems with alcohol and drugs, repeated attempts at treatment and a struggle for sobriety that continued alongside a successful acting career. Then, on August 16, 2026, Panettiere died at only 36. She was found unresponsive…
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Priests, pastors and predators: America’s continuing church abuse scandal
For generations, American churches presented themselves as places where parents could safely leave their children. Priests heard confessions, pastors organized youth groups, ministers counseled troubled teenagers and religious institutions taught families that their leaders deserved trust. For thousands of children, that trust became a vulnerability. The Catholic sexual abuse scandal exposed one of the most…