The Center for Disease Control has recommended routine vaccination of girls age 11/12 against HPV, a virus that causes cervical and other deadly cancers. You can read the report at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/rr/rr5602.pdf
(Thanks to Alan E. for the link).
For more poetic reading, Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” is available at poets.org (I read from [...]

Just back from a wonderful weekend in San Jose, visiting the forming Ethical Culture Society of Silicon Valley. It’s good to see Ethical Culture spreading on the West Coast. There were planning meetings, workshops on dialog and meditation, and a platform (“Spirituality without God?”) that drew old friends and newcomers, young parents, octogenarians, and [...]

The podcast for last Sunday’s platform address on “Ethical Sex” will be up soon, and since I’m about to leave for a long weekend in California visiting the new Ethical Society of Silicon Valley, let me now give credit where it’s due. The platform is dedicated to my mother, Nancy, whose passion for women’s [...]

A U.S. Congressman has publicly declared that he does not believe in a supreme being. A recent poll (mentioned in the article) says that 55% of Americans would not vote for an atheist, but I don’t think anti-atheism sentiment is really that bad. Those kind of poll results simply measure stereotypes–it doesn’t say [...]

Being a small (but scrappy) movement, it’s nice when we’re acknowledged in the wider culture sometimes. On a Prairie Home Companion a few years ago, Garrison Keillor referred to Ethical Culture as “the Jewish version of Unitarian. Also known as A.W.C. — Atheists With Children.” Not necessary an accurate joke, since we have [...]

In this clip, late-night comic Craig Ferguson talks about the cruelty of humor and his struggle with alcoholism. It’s a remarkable moment of true humanity on TV. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch this video. (I know some of you don’t like AA, but he only makes a reference to [...]

When I tell people that I do not follow or believe in the Bible or other religious scriptures, I am often asked, incredulously, what I base my ethics on. I find this curious, because as far as I can tell, no scriptures, holy books, ancient philosophies, etc., give us a moral code to follow. [...]

If you like these sorts of things, check out this rather long but very interesting debate on faith and reason between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris. Although it’s a shame that they skim so quickly past what they agree on, I’m impressed that they remain civil.
Toward the bottom Harris expresses a longing for “a [...]