Dr Paul Allen

English: Happy human, a secular humanist logo made in blender quick. Some edges could be cleaner.. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Are people good? Is humankind basically benign? In our current belief system, which we might term liberal secular humanism , which has held sway in the West since the Second World War , and which promotes human progress and well-being, only one response is permitted: Yes, of course! Any suggestion that there might be something wrong with people as a whole, with Man as a species, is absolute anathema. But today, two circumstances come together to prompt me to pose the question once more. The first is the ending, this week, of my 15 years as Environment Editor ofThe Independent. It has been a privilege beyond measure to work for so long for a wonderful newspaper which has put the environment at the heart of its view of the world. We are proud of all we have done about it, from raising the question, in 2000, of the mysterious disappearance of the house sparro...

Stained glass window, U. S. Pentagon, honoring the Four Chaplains, USAT Dorchester, 1943 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) A colleague forwarded me a  news article  awhile back written by James Dao of  The New York Times . My friend kept his own comments brief. "This is not a parody," he wrote. I was intrigued. After all, this was the Times , not the  Onion , why would he need to qualify it in that manner? The piece was titled, "Atheists Seek Chaplain Role in the Military." I quickly understood the context of my friend's note. "Strange as it sounds," Dao wrote, "groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy , hoping to give voice to what they say is a large—and largely underground—population of nonbelievers in the military." Existing chaplains are generally opposed to the idea, for obvious reasons. If atheism is the absence of religious belief , why would they want som...