Paul Fidalgo

The Council for Secular Humanism, the arm of the Center for Inquiry that publishes Free Inquiry magazine and operates the Freethought Trail and Robert Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, honors the best in humanist writing every year with the Morris D. and Selma V. Forkosch Awards. For calendar year 2020, the Forkosch Awards go to a trailblazing …

A global pandemic, in which an invisible agent brings sickness to millions and indefinite isolation to many more, creates fertile ground for belief in another kind of invisible evil: demons. At Skeptical Inquirer, JD Sword explores the dire mental health implications of the COVID-19 crisis and how it likely has exacerbated fears of demonic possession …

Beware the billion-dollar psycho-religious boondoggle that is Scientology. In an op-ed for Free Inquiry magazine, Robyn Blumner wonders at how the church has been able to maintain such an ironclad grip on its adherents, especially given the absurd, B-movie sci-fi theology at the core of its beliefs. You know, the ones about the intergalactic overlord …

Something has been disobeying the laws of physics, and that something is very, very small. Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have found that muons, subatomic particles related to electrons but about 200 times heavier, are not behaving the way they’re supposed to when put through a magnetic field. That means that something else, …

Richard Dawkins turned 80 years old on March 26, 2021, an occasion celebrated by fans and admirers around the world through their well-wishes on social media and gifts of support to the foundation that bears his name. A collection of Richard’s friends sent him video messages as a birthday surprise, and they (and Richard) have …

When he’s not going after snake oil salesmen on social media, Nick Little is the driving force behind the Center for Inquiry’s bold and pioneering legal efforts, working to defend the separation of church and state, fight for the equal status of the nonreligious, and protect consumers from being swindled by pseudoscience. On the CFI …

Facebook is riddled with ads for various health and wellness products, and too often they make promises that range from dubious to outright ridiculous. CFI Legal Director Nick Little stumbled upon one such ad on his own Facebook feed from a company advertising its ability to determine one’s intolerances to various foods and substances by …

COVID-19 has claimed nearly three million lives around the world, but the virus didn’t do it alone. Peter Hotez, Baylor College professor of pediatrics and molecular virology, writes at Scientific American that responsibility for the mass death of the pandemic can be pinned on antiscience, the movement that rejects mainstream science in favor of “unproven …

Last week, Texas Democratic State Rep. James Talarico delivered an opening prayer to the state legislature that referenced not just God and Jesus, but all manner of deities, faiths, and even the Big Bang. This infuriated his colleague, Republican Rep. Jonathan Stickland, who said he was “disgusted such blasphemy was spoken in the chamber.” We …

When the next British census is published, it is expected that for the first time ever, fewer than half of Britons will describe themselves as Christian. Recent surveys already show that the religiously unaffiliated make up a slim majority of the British population. Naturally, Richard Dawkins has had an outsized role in these changes, such …

Midway through the process of writing this article, I received the following message from a fellow translator.  “Does a printed book version of The Illustrated Magic of Reality exist in Arabic?,” they asked, referring to an edition of Richard Dawkins’s book The Magic of Reality, specially illustrated by Dave McKean. “If it didn’t, then I would be very …

Scotland has repealed its centuries-old law against blasphemy, but the road to getting to the repeal has been rather bumpy and twisted. We celebrated the news that a repeal of the law had been proposed, but it soon became apparent that the bill that would quash the blasphemy law was problematic in itself. The Hate …