“[H]ave tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, But, bear-like, I must fight the course.” ~Macbeth, William Shakespeare, 1606 Bear-baiting is a blood sport involving the encouragement/force of a dog and chained bear [chained to a stake by the neck or leg] fighting (baiting). … Bear-baiting was very popular in Europe from the 12th […]

Donald Trump has caused lasting damage to our country and our democracy, or at least to what many of us believed our country to be. But, unlike the slick charlatan who preceded him, DJT has pulled back the shroud on the rotting corpse of our Republic and revealed the maggoty remains. In that, he has […]

LETTER TO BORIS† November 23 Дорогой Борис, I’m happy that you introduced me to Александр С. Грибоедов (Alexander Griboyedov), who was, in addition to being a playwright, poet and composer, an ambassador to Persia, serving Emperor Nicholas I. I was also pleased to discover a new (to me) Latin descriptor: homo unius libri, meaning “a […]

I grew up super-religious. ... And I’m now an atheist. And the reason why I’m an atheist is because of education. ... I made my own decision because I was empowered to do so.

If you’re not Antifa, doesn’t that make you a fascist?

No, Really: All Evidence to the Contrary Years ago, when I was teaching public speaking to community college students, I started an impromptu debate on the topic of free speech. It was easy to get a student to take the “pro” side; nobody was willing to argue the “con,” so I did. What I said […]

It was on this date, November 2, 1955, that the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Annie Laurie Gaylor was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She was educated in journalism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With her mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, and John Sontarck, the three founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 1976, expanding […]

It was on this date, June 14, 1928, that Argentine-born Marxist revolutionist, physician and military leader Che Guevara was born Ernesto Guevara (Lynch) in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina. He grew up in a family which already had leftist leanings, but which also valued education: Guevara’s reading list not only included Karl Marx but William Faulkner, […]

It was on this date, June 4, 1945, that American writer and independent scholar Susan Jacoby was born. A journalist for the Washington Post and other publications for over 25 years, and author of the Post’s weekly column, “The Spirited Atheist,” Jacoby has authored the 1984 Pulitzer Prize finalist Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, […]

It was on this date, February 20, 1932, that American newspaper editor and writer James A. Haught was born. As he writes in “A Freethinker’s Testimony” (7/9/2011), “Just because you grow up in the Bible Belt (I was born in a West Virginia hamlet with no electricity) doesn’t mean automatically that you’re a fundamentalist. My […]