atheism – Religion & Liberty Online

March 19, 2026

Seeking God at the End of the World

Is the end of the world drawing nigh? This is the question at the heart of Christopher Beha’s 2020 blockbuster novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts. A deranged-looking street preacher appears at the beginning of the novel, predicting the end times, setting a concrete date to the end of it all. Continue Reading...

March 27, 2025

The Secular and the Dead

More than a decade ago, I had the privilege of visiting Tuol Sleng, a museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, that displays in horrific detail the murderous brutality committed by the totalitarian Khmer Rouge, which governed the country from 1975 to 1979. Continue Reading...

March 12, 2025

Ross Douthat Wants You to Believe

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat relates a story from a couple of decades ago, in which he had a late-night conversation with the famously combative atheist Christopher Hitchens. Continue Reading...

January 16, 2025

The ‘Magic’ of the Mind Is the Science of the Future

It’s hard to look at the culture and not conclude that intellectual secularism is in decline. When I was a teenager, the biggest books about faith were New Atheist titles like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. Continue Reading...

June 06, 2024

Richard Dawkins and Mere Cultural Christianity

On April Fool’s Day, I saw headlines that Richard Dawkins, the famed British atheist and evolutionary biologist, had claimed to be a “cultural Christian.” I assumed the headlines were clickbait consistent with the day’s theme. Continue Reading...

December 07, 2021

The problem of the atheist economist

There is much in the classical liberal economist that I find attractive. By classical liberal, I do not mean the sort of political liberalism that defaults to certain presumptions of big government. Continue Reading...

July 24, 2020

China: Remove pictures of Jesus or lose government aid

The Chinese government demands a small price in exchange for your monthly check: apostasy. Chinese Communist Party officials have ordered impoverished Christians to remove pictures of Jesus from their walls or lose the government aid that’s keeping them alive. Continue Reading...

December 18, 2019

Acton Commentary: How socialism causes atheism

Most socialists have been atheists, but does accepting socialist economic principles make believers more likely to become atheists? This week’s Acton Commentary, which is the cover story of the newest issue of Religion & Liberty, explores survey data and anecdotal evidence that a socialist worldview can lead believers to lose their faith. Continue Reading...

July 31, 2019

Simon Leys on Christopher Hitchens, Mother Teresa & “The Empire of Ugliness”

One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. He wrote that one of his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014. Continue Reading...

April 17, 2019

Should Notre Dame be rebuilt to reflect secularism?

The flames that consumed the spire of Notre Dame and burned the 856-year-old church to its foundations could have been doused by the tears of the faithful. If France heeds calls to rebuild the cathedral as a reflection of what modern “French people want,” the new structure may be flooded by their tears. Continue Reading...

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