Religious apologists have a playbook for scholars who get too close to the truth. That playbook is a dog-eared, reliable little volume passed down through generations of believers who find the disinfectant of sunlight a bit too harsh for their tastes. My first thought after reading Massimo Introvigne’s scathing review1 of a new book by …

This article will serve as a response to Bill Cooke’s Free Inquiry article “Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists” (August/September 2024). I object to the slander of his first sentence when he claimed that American secular humanists who are mythicists are following a siren call into an intellectual sinkhole. The claim that Jesus was not …

The “historical Jesus” theory has no explanation for the Holy Trinity. Its meaning is never set forth in the New Testament, and there are only two places where the recitation appears in the form recognized in prayer and creed. Both are undoubtedly later additions. The first occurs in Matthew 28:18–20, which reads as follows (emphasis …

In the August/September 2024 issue of Free Inquiry, I posed five challenges to proponents of the myth theory of Jesus in a bid to move the argument on (“Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists”). The article attracted several replies; the one submitted by Don Wharton is the most recent. As with the previous responses, no …

In this issue, Don Wharton boldly asserts that not only was Jesus a mythical entity, but the claim that he did not exist can be “confirmed at a level of scientific certainty.” I disagree. But before explaining why I disagree, some preliminary comments about the nature of the controversy, including the inherent difficulties in resolving …

Jesus is treated as the ultimate moral guide. Reason asks if he can stand the test. The Ethics We Inherit You’ve heard it in courtrooms, classrooms, and campaign speeches: a quote from Jesus offered as moral truth. Yet, when these words are repeated without scrutiny, they risk insulating us from deeper insight. His teachings are …

Did Jesus Really Exist? Besides social issues, the biggest controversy in Free Inquiry seems to be whether there really was a Jesus. Even factoring in the lack of mass media at the time, the paucity of contemporaneous accounts of Jesus led me to think that he didn’t exist, or at most that the Jesus of …

Despite history’s potential for helping us avoid past mistakes, it is often a culture’s darkest chapters that slip from collective memory and become buried the deepest. Few Americans today know that a practice now widely condemned as harmful and oppressive—cutting the genitals of young girls—was once promoted within the United States. This practice, called female …

With every mass shooting, two questions arise with the press and public: 1) Was the shooter mentally ill, and if so, how was a firearm obtained? and 2) Would “Red Flag” laws have prevented these killings? The answers are complex, and the professional literature offers varied and disparate conclusions. What Constitutes a Mass Shooting? There …

Our planet is awash in a variety of rules and principles that purport to guide us onto a proper moral pathway. These rules and principles often vary a good deal, and it seems difficult to find a basic agreement about the proper rules and principles. One aim of this article is to explain just why …