They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add ...

This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist. My personal philosophical trajectory can be summarised as follows: (mildly) Catholic by birth; atheist at 15; humanist until 50; ...

Greg Graffin, evolutionary biologist and lead singer of pioneering US band Bad Religion, talks music and rebellion ...

Most scientific breakthroughs take years of research – but often, serendipity provides the final push, as these historic discoveries show .

The great Buddha statue in Nha Trang, Vietnam by Petr Ruzicka On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out ...

God: An Anatomy (Pan Macmillan) by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

The popular association of atheism with immorality is a particular deterrent for women who have religious doubts, since in Arab society they are expected to be “virtuous” in order to marry. “It is ...

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy There ...

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, discusses her new book, on the importance of fiction to democracy.

“Truth’s a menace, science is a public danger,” says Mustapha Mond, the “Controller” in Aldous Huxley’s iconic dystopian novel Brave New World. “That’s why we so carefully limit the scope of its ...

Every hero needs an antagonist to define themselves against. For “the West” – the eternal hero of the dominant discourse on international affairs – the antagonist of the hour is Vladimir Putin, a ...