The Humanist Advocate

BOOK REVIEW: The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012

By Sharan Newman The Real History of the End of the World is a light-hearted look at a heavy subject. Historian and author Sharan Newman chooses examples from different cultures, religions, and time-periods to show that messiahs, millenarians and other doom-criers are a universal fixture of human societies. The approach is journalistic rather than academic, emphasizing breadth rather than depth. Each of the 43 very short chapters discusses one particular example of apocalyptic madness. A skeptical eye is turned on…

BOOK REVIEW: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

By Sam Harris Having enjoyed The End of Faith (2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), I eagerly awaited the 2010 publication of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. I’ve finally been able to give this book the time and attention it deserves, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in secular ethics, even though I find it somewhat incomplete. In The Moral Landscape, Harris attacks the willingness of the scientific establishment to accept…

How Will You Cope With Being Left Behind?

That was the essay question posed by NOSHA at our “Left Behind” party in May. You know the day the world was supposed to end? We even awarded prizes for some of the best submissions written that wacky evening. Here’s the winning entry submitted by Betty of New Orleans: 1ST PLACE How will I cope? What will I do? In a word: very dry martinis. Wait! That’s three words. How irrelevant. But then, when it’s all over – everything is irrelevant. So…

Just What This Town Needs….More Skeptics

Right? We do a pretty good job here at NOSHA pushing for observation and rational discourse, but goodness knows, we coud do with a touch more. And we’ll have it after all of the hinting and hoping we’ve been doing since Katrina to get a meeting in town “put on” by one of our national organizations. The end of October 2011, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in collaboration with Skeptical Inquiry Magazine and the Center for Inquiry will host CSICon 2011 in…

Thou Shalt Ignore Stupidity

If we only could, right? The Louisiana legislature passed a bill this month that will allow a monument of the Ten Commandments to be placed on the capitol grounds in Baton Rouge. This falls under the guise that such a “serious” presentation will be in reference to the historical significance of this per the First Amendment or other such nonsense. You see, there are people who believe that without the Ten Commandments we may not have been able to come up with the laws we…

BOOK REVIEW: Are We Living in the End Times?

by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Are We Living in the End Times? by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins is a comparatively light and readable introduction to “typical” End Times exegesis, if by “typical” one understands the Protestant, fundamentalist, and pre-millennial approach. At 370 pages it might appear lengthy, but the material is not at all dense, and is vastly more condensed than the thousands of pages these same authors have produced in their fictionalized version of the…

The Whole Enchilada

It’s pretty clear that secular, progressive citizens of Louisiana will not have any “wins” this year. What am I talking about, you ask? Here’s the big four bruises, so far, for this year: CREATIONISM: The repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act did not make it out of committee despite Baton Rouge high school graduate Zach Kopplin’s most valiant efforts and the support he generated from forty Nobel Laureates. Here’s one example of the blow back our state can expect: “The…

To Mock or Not to Mock…

That is the question. And it seems to be a question of the minds of people who were concerned that our “Left Behind” activities would send the wrong message to the public about NOSHA and what we stand for. Are we mocking people and how does that promote respect and harmony? It’s a valid question even if you don’t feel we are doing anything to be ashamed of. (Which we aren’t IMHO.) A friend of mine, Jim, wrote a very…

Share The Good and The Bad

Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Most of us chalk it up to chance and luck. But one of the annoying comments that will come up every once in a while is the charge that because non-believers, atheists, secular humanists and others “of our ilk” don’t believe in magic, we must not know what it means to have traditions and share in the community at large. I know it’s part of psychology to distance ourselves from…

BOOK REVIEW: The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth

by Henry M. Morris Henry M. Morris (d. 2006) is well known to creationists and creationist-debaters as a founding member of the Institute for Creation Research and as an author and co-author of books that are still heavily cited by creationists, most notably The Genesis Flood (1961) and the Troubled Waters of Evolution (1982). I was recently prompted to read one of his more obscure books, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), which Morris styled as “a brief summary…

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