The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

[Note: references above to ‘post(s)’ refer only to the original post on the Freethinker website (for the original post of this invitation, see here), not to these Substack re-posts.]

Register for Freethought History Webinar #13: G.W. Foote, Freethinker Founder, NSS President, and Prisoner for Blasphemy. With Bob Forder.

The webinar will take place on 15 September 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: George William Foote (1850-1915) was the founder and first editor of this very magazine, the Freethinker, and President of the National Secular Society (NSS) from 1890 until 1915. In this webinar, Bob Forder will discuss Foote’s life, career, and legacy, paying particular attention to the foundation of the Freethinker and Foote’s leadership of the NSS, including his origins, ‘conversion’ to militant freethought, and his imprisonment for publishing blasphemous cartoons.

About the speaker: Bob Forder is the National Secular Society’s historian, a bookseller, freethought book collector, and former history teacher. He is also a board member of Secular Society Limited, which (via GW Foote & Co) publishes the Freethinker. You can read his articles for the Freethinker here.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

A day late and a dollar short, as the old saying goes. Yes, it is the fifth, rather than the Fourth, of July. But before setting down some reflections on the 250^th birthday of the United States of America, I wanted to hear what the current president, simultaneously the most American American and the least American American of all time, had to say.1

Also in my defence, the Fourth could very well have been the Second, for it was actually on 2 July 1776 that the Continental Congress declared that ‘these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States’. On the fourth, the Congress approved the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, and the fourth would, in time, become the Fourth.

No less a figure than John Adams predicted that 2 July would be the immortal date:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

As I think I recall correctly, my old professor of American history, Frank Cogliano, once said of this prediction that Adams was, as ever, so close to and yet so far from being right. The point remains, though: 4 July 1776 was not predestined to become Independence Day. Various dates both before and after could legitimately have ended up capitalised. Indeed, it was on 5 July 1776 that the Declaration was first printed for dissemination and signing. So one could argue that the Fifth is as valid a date as the Fourth, or any other, to mark the occasion. Such is my defence for this delayed reflection, anyway.

But back to Donald Trump. His speech yesterday was predictably pathetic, bombastic, self-absorbed, and, to use the parliamentary language the president is so fond of, full of shit. Appropriate then, that heatwaves and thunderstorms were the order of the day, for the republic is burning, on the edge of apocalypse. Some choice excerpts:

After 250 years, unlike so many others in the world, in this country we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal justice under the law, although I wasn’t treated that well. But we won’t get into that. (Couldn’t resist, I suppose.)

And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one Almighty God. (It doesn’t say that.)

We rebuilt our military and my first term, we use it a little bit in our actually, I should say third term, but I won’t do that because I don’t want any controversy. (Eloquent as ever.)

Not exactly Jefferson’s First Inaugural or the Gettysburg Address, but who am I to judge? After all, I am a foreigner, and President Trump doesn’t much care for the opinions of foreigners.2 Indeed, critical foreigners are at risk of being denied entry to the States these days (so much for Donald Trump as free speech champion). And this was a speech delivered in a very tired voice by what looks like a very tired old man, so perhaps we ought not to worry too much about those unconstitutional yearnings for a third term or the authoritarian, ‘enemy inside’ asides sprinkled throughout. But no, that would be too easy. As the American politicians Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth have recently argued, the US is undergoing a ‘rolling coup’:

Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.

Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens.

Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.

The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.

This intervention is extraordinary, and terrifying. Read the full thing if you remain sceptical about the claims made by those of us still too often dismissed as suffering from ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’.

But as I said, I’m a foreigner, so why should I care? What to the foreigner is the Fourth (or Fifth) of July, if it isn’t too presumptuous of me to adapt Frederick Douglass?3 Apart from anything else, what happens in America matters everywhere else because America is so powerful. That would be reason enough for a foreigner to take an interest. But more than that, I am a partisan of the ideals of the American Revolution(s), which have been misunderstood and misrepresented many times over, by the left as well as the right, and by nobody more than Donald Trump and his fans.

I refer, of course, to the ideals of Young, Allen, Paine, Jefferson, Madison, Douglass, Assing, Lincoln, Ingersoll, Debs, Rustin, Baldwin, and so many others: the champions of the secular, democratic, radical America which takes its Enlightenment foundations seriously. That America was founded on radical and atheistic ideals is the alternative, truer narrative than the one most Americans are familiar with. It is certainly truer than the lies of Trump and his ilk that America is a fundamentally ‘Judeo-Christian’ nation, whatever ‘Judeo-Christian’ means.

Thankfully, Trump was lighter than usual on that narrative in his Fourth of July speech, but it was present nonetheless, in all his references to the Almighty, especially in the plainly Christian nationalist line ‘And our destiny is written by God’. To return to a point made above, the Declaration of Independence does not say ‘we are all made in the image of one Almighty God’; a careful reading shows that ‘Nature’s God’ and the rest are, as the philosopher and historian Matthew Stewart might put it, essentially atheistic invocations.

Here, then, is some recommended reading on the radical, atheistic origins of America. Perhaps one or more of these books would make a good gift for any right-wing fundamentalists in your life. Come to think of it, they would also make wonderful gifts for any left-wing haters of America in your life. Both groups misunderstand and despise America, in their own ways, and despite their protestations on one or both counts. Anyway, to the books: The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American by Andrew L. Seidel (2019), Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014) and An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2024), both by the aforementioned Matthew Stewart, and Gordon S. Wood’s classic The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991). (Though I don’t think Wood appreciated, or would go along with, the ‘atheistic’ aspect of the thesis so much.)4

Then there is the deep, abiding connection between American and British freethinking radicalism, starting with Paine and continuing to the present. G.W. Foote, founder of the Freethinker, was a friend and ally of D.M. Bennett, founder of the American freethought journal The Truth Seeker, both of which are (obviously) still going strong (and still collaborating) today. Please do check out the latest edition of The Truth Seeker, which marks 250 years of Paine’s Common Sense (and thus also of America).

We could do with a bit more of that freethinking, internationalist solidarity in these dark days for the republic—and the world. This Fifth of July, let’s remember the true, or at least the better, America. When I said that Donald Trump is the most American American ever, I meant that pejoratively, for he is the encapsulation of all the worst stereotypes about America: he is crass, and boorish, and ignorant, and ugly, and dangerous. But he is the least American American ever, too, in the best possible way: he knows and feels nothing of the foundational American spirit, which, yes, was marred by slavery and many other moral and political failures, but which was also genuinely radical and emancipatory (and the revolution it effected is still unfinished).

Now is a good time to return to the words of the two great democrats of America’s youth, who never stopped championing the ideals of 1776. I speak, of course, of the two Thomases: Paine and Jefferson.

I have lately been perusing the wonderful new Princeton University Press edition of Paine’s collected writings, a project backed by the equally wonderful Thomas Paine Historical Association. As Scott Cleary, one of the editors, put it during our recent Freethought History Webinar on the project, Paine did not, contrary to the usual narrative, sink into obscurity and drunkenness and illness and oblivion upon his return to America from France in 1802. He continued to take part in the turbulent politics of the young nation, and often used his trusty old quill to defend the legacy of ’76. In 1807, just two years before his death, he wrote:

Men of all nations can unite upon the ground of principle but not of place. The founders of the Republic, the men of 76, created a system of government, the representative system; and whoever is not in allegiance to this system as well in principle and theory, as in form, is a FOREIGNER whether born in America, or in Europe, or in any other part of the Globe.

A nice blast for the universalist spirit of 1776, this. And I don’t think I need to spell out the relevance of these words to some of what I said above.

Not so incidentally, this paragraph comes from a defence of immigrants against those who would, for political reasons, deny them their rights. In the course of this short piece, Paine also says that ‘except the Indians every man in the country is a foreigner or descended from foreign stock’. Paine, one of the founders of Enlightenment modernity, speaks to us still.5

The Fourth of July is the birthday of both America and also the date on which the author of its Declaration of Independence died. Shortly before his death, Thomas Jefferson had to turn down an invitation from the mayor of Washington, D.C., to attend a celebration of the Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary. In what turned out to be his final letter, Jefferson wrote:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

250 years on, and many, perhaps most, people are still stifled under those monkish chains. They continue to manacle themselves and others. Thus also does Jefferson still speak to us, this Fifth of July.

John Adams died on the same Fourth of July as his old frenemy and successor as president (and latter-day friendly correspondent). His last words were ‘Jefferson still lives’. A salute to a surviving American titan? Irritation at being outlived by his onetime bête noire? Both? Neither? Who knows? In any case, Jefferson did not still live. He had died a few hours earlier, unbeknownst to Adams.

And yet, of course, Jefferson does still live. As does Paine, whose democratic radicalism and open disdain for organised religion Adams detested. With reference to Paine’s anti-Christian classic The Age of Reason, Adams once wrote:

I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs or the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.

One can still smell the sulphur! But the backhanded compliment is telling. Once again, Adams was so close to and yet so far from being right. This is still the age of Paine, Jefferson still lives, and for all of the flaws and the failures of America, the spirit of ’76 is still worthy and still radical. And despite the current counterrevolutionary attempt to suppress, distort, and coopt it, it endures. Yes, after all, the American Revolution is an ongoing concern.

Happy Fifth of July.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

[Note: references above to ‘post(s)’ refer only to the original post on the Freethinker website (for the original post of this invitation, see here), not to these Substack re-posts.]

Register for Freethought History Webinar #12: The Atheistic Radicalism of America’s Founding and Refounding. With Matthew Stewart.

The webinar will take place on 30 June 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up, the meaning of America is more hotly contested than ever before. Under the Trump administration, Christian nationalism has taken the reins, imposing its vision of America as a nation founded on ‘Judeo-Christian principles’ and in dire need of a restoration of religion—that is, the Christian religion.

In this webinar, Matthew Stewart will discuss the still under-appreciated role of the philosophy of the radical Enlightenment in the founding and the refounding of the American Republic. The talk will sketch the historical and philosophical narrative presented in his works, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014) and An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2024).

About the speaker: Matthew Stewart is an American philosopher and writer. He is the author of the forthcoming Everything You Need to Know: How Philosophy Can Set You Free (November 2026), and, previously, The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy (1997), Monturiol’s Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World (2004), The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006), The Management Myth: Debunking the Modern Philosophy of Business (2009), and The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture (2021). You can find out more about him and his books on his website, here.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

[Note: references above to ‘post(s)’ refer only to the original post on the Freethinker website (see below), not to these Substack re-posts.]

Register for Freethought History Webinar #11: A New Vision of Thomas Paine. With Gary Berton and Scott Cleary.

The webinar will take place on 20 June 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the American Republic is approaching. But the world’s oldest secular democratic republic is facing an onslaught of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism. So it is especially appropriate that a new edition of the radical democrat and secularist Thomas Paine’s works is about to be published by Princeton University Press. Managed by the Thomas Paine Historical Association, this groundbreaking project will include nearly 400 newly discovered works of Paine’s and promises to revolutionise our understanding of arguably the greatest Founding Father.

In this webinar, two of the editors of the new collection, Gary Berton and Scott Cleary, will discuss the project and the enduring importance of Paine 250 years on from the publication of his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense and the founding of America. What new vision of Paine emerges from this ambitious project? And what can we learn from Paine today, as America teeters on the brink? Register now and find out.

About the speakers: Gary Berton is President of the Thomas Paine Historical Association, and Scott Cleary is a Board Member of the Thomas Paine Historical Association and Professor of English at Iona University.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

Originally published in the Freethinker, 20 May 2026.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

[Note: references above to ‘post(s)’ refer only to the original post on the Freethinker website (for the original post of this invitation, see here), not to these Substack re-posts.]

Register for Freethought History Webinar #10: Ernestine Rose, the Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter. With Bonnie S. Anderson.

The webinar will take place on 19 May 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: Ernestine Rose was a freethinker, a feminist, and an abolitionist—and better-known in the 1850s than either Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony. Born in Poland in 1810, she was raised as a Jew, but became a freethinker at 12. She left Poland at 16, travelled throughout Europe, and ended up in London. There, she became a follower of the socialist freethinker Robert Owen and met her husband, William Rose. In 1836, the couple emigrated to New York, where they lived until 1869.

There, Rose began to work actively for three causes: women’s rights, anti-slavery, and free thought. She lectured throughout the states, ranging west to Iowa and south to the Carolinas. She attended many conventions on all these subjects. She never divided these three causes, believing them all to be part of one great struggle for human rights and freedom. She spent the final years of her life in England, dying in 1892.

Unfortunately, Ernestine Rose was forgotten after her death. As a Jew, an atheist, a woman, and a foreigner, she did not fit into the standard narrative of US history. Today, however, she is increasingly remembered as a brave pioneer. In this webinar, her life and career will be outlined, and the case for her continued remembrance and celebration will be made.

About the speaker: Bonnie S. Anderson is Professor Emerita of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She was the co-author of A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, published in the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Latin America (revised edition, 2000). She then wrote Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (2000), published in the US and the UK, The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (2016), published in the US and Poland, and a forthcoming memoir, A Broad View of History: My Feminist Life. You can find out more about her and her work, and follow her blog, via her website, here.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below. I can’t wait to see you there.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

The latter book is the main subject of this interview. We discuss common knowledge, what it is, and how it can help to explain phenomena as varied as language, the laws of the road, cancel culture, economic crashes, and political revolutions. This interview was recorded on 4 March 2026.

Find out more about Pinker and his books here.

Originally published in the Freethinker on 16 March 2026.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

[Note: references above to ‘post(s)’ refer only to the original post on the Freethinker website (see below), not to these Substack re-posts.]

Register for Freethought History Webinar #9: Bradlaugh and India: A Trans-Imperial History of Freethought and Republicanism. With Barathy M.G.

The webinar will take place on 14 April 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MT/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) was a gifted speaker and a committed Republican who played a central role in shaping the freethought movement in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1866, he founded the National Secular Society (NSS) in London. Thanks to Bradlaugh and his fellow freethinkers, NSS branches soon appeared across the world. To propagate the messages of freethought and republicanism, he travelled widely throughout his life. Despite poor health, his only visit to India in 1889 cemented his status as a genuinely international thinker. Long before this visit, Bradlaugh had argued that Indians should be treated not as colonial subjects but as fellow citizens of the empire. When Bradlaugh died in 1891, his funeral was attended by a young Mohandas K. Gandhi, who would later become a central figure in India’s struggle for independence.

However, while Bradlaugh’s political commitments attracted widespread admiration among Indian thinkers and activists, his religious, or more precisely, anti-religious, orientation generated considerable unease. Christian missionaries, Hindu reformers and revivalists, and the Theosophists were all troubled by the rise of ‘Bradlaughian’ freethought associations in India. The quick-witted atheists inspired by the NSS were perceived as posing a significant threat to these groups. Importantly, freethought associations in the Indian subcontinent did not merely replicate Western ideas; neither did they uncritically transplant European versions of atheism and freethought. Rather, they articulated their own progressive agendas shaped by the specific conditions of colonial society, taking up issues such as caste oppression, gender inequality, and the promotion of scientific temper and rational inquiry.

What emerges, then, are two Bradlaughs in relation to India: a republican who forcefully articulated the Indian cause, and a freethinker who called for the abolition of religion itself. While such tensions are not unfamiliar to students of history, Bradlaugh presents a unique blend of atheist freethought and republican politics that set off a storm in a colony far removed from his home country. In this presentation, Barathy M.G. will speak about Bradlaugh’s relationship with the Indian subcontinent, with a particular focus on the freethought associations he inspired among the Indian intelligentsia.

About the speaker: Barathy M.G. is a doctoral candidate in History at Ashoka University, India. His research focuses on the intellectual history of religion and unbelief in colonial South Asia, with particular attention to the evolution of modern rationalist thought in the Tamil country between 1870 and 1930. He is a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Short-Term Research Grant and currently serves as an Associate Director of the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism (ISHASH).

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below. I can’t wait to see you there.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

The featured image in the poster above is a photo by Mohammad Moiz Khan of the foundation stone of Bradlaugh Hall, in today’s Pakistan. Bradlaugh Hall was erected in 1900 by Indian nationalists and admirers of Bradlaugh to ‘honour Charles Bradlaugh and provide a venue for nationalists to assemble without requiring permission from the British authorities’, as Andrew Whitehead put it in a 2022 article for the Freethinker, which you can read here. Bob Forder’s Freethought History Webinar on Bradlaugh might also be of interest; see here. And you can find more Freethinker material about Bradlaugh here.

Originally published in the Freethinker on 6 March 2026.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

Register for Freethought History Webinar #8: Annie Besant, Secularist and Feminist. With Lucie Lemieux.

The webinar will take place on 3 March 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MT/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: The webinar will provide a brief overview of Annie Besant’s contribution to freethought, secularism, and feminism, while she was a member of the National Secular Society (NSS), stressing her agency and activism. Examples will be taken from her conferences, essays, and actions related to Freethought and to reforms put forward by the NSS, as well as to her positions on some of the issues Victorian feminists tackled in those years, positions which were not unanimously shared by secularists—or indeed other feminists. Her determination, her courage, and her capacity to act in coherence with her convictions and in spite of ‘mainstream’ beliefs and cultural expectations can make her a relevant example for modern progressives.

About the speaker: Lucie Lemieux is a retired health professional with experience in women’s health and international health, currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in History with a Concentration in Feminist Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Her subject is Annie Besant’s contribution to freethought while she was one of the vice-presidents of the National Secular Society, from 1875 to 1890.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below. I can’t wait to see you there.

Please enjoy this promotional video for the webinar, which was kindly produced by Rod Bradford of The Truth Seeker.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

Originally published in the Freethinker, 27 January 2026.

So I’ve been somewhat out of sorts this past year. I’m much better in many ways, now, but, as I mentioned, there is still a lot going on. One problem I’ve been struggling with is extremely low energy and a lack of motivation. This is not my usual laziness, and I don’t know how much of it is due to my health and other issues. I’m still not even sure what some of my health issues are. The investigations continue.

But I hope all this explains why I’ve been so lax in my writing, for this Substack as well as elsewhere, of late. I would promise that that’s all over and that I’ll be churning out polished, intelligent columns every week from now on, but I shouldn’t make promises I can’t keep. I can only try to do my best to write a bit more here (and elsewhere). The only thing I’ve really managed to keep up with is editing the Freethinker. And I think I’ve done that pretty well, despite everything. It is my job, after all.

And I did do some decent work last year, albeit mostly in the first half when things weren’t so bad. I’m pretty proud of my Freethinker review of a poetry collection about women’s resistance to theocracy in Iran, for instance. Published in May, it contains the following paragraph, which I won’t claim as prescient (yet):

Even amid the self-immolation of the world’s oldest and largest secular democracies (the United States of America and India, respectively), the people of Iran might just be ushering in a new one—and perhaps in doing so they will remind those in the so-called free world who are tired, lazy, and disaffected of the true meaning and value of liberty.

(Indeed, the mullahs quivering in their jackboots has been one of the more heartening sights of the past month and a half-ish.)

I also gave talks to a humanist group in Dundee and the Leicester Secular Society and delivered (in a way) a guest lecture at London Metropolitan University. Plus I interviewed Hamit Coskun, the persecuted and prosecuted Quran burner, and the journalist James Bloodworth. And I enjoyed hosting an (ongoing) series of Freethought History Webinars. A couple of other highlights: my commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo murders and my reflections on the death of Pope Francis. From the latter (indulge me, I’ve been ill):

About the nicest thing I can muster regarding Francis is that he was indeed less vile than his predecessor. A low bar, indeed, but credit where it’s due. It was also good to see him rebuking the Trump administration recently. Still, for all the fluffy words that occasionally came out of his mouth, Francis upheld an explicitly authoritarian, homophobic, and misogynistic institution. Nothing he did or said changed the bigoted core of the Church as enshrined in Canon Law. Fags are still guilty of the ‘foulest crime’ and bound for hell, but at least Pope Francis said some sweet things about us meanwhile.

Worst of all, Francis merely tinkered around the edges of the Church’s child sex abuse problem, doing nothing to fundamentally change a system which encourages abuse and its cover-up to this very day.

So, 2025 wasn’t all bad. And even now, having dragged myself to the keyboard to speedily (and guiltily) scribble out this little piece, I feel a tad more energised. The old wisdom is true: the hardest thing is to begin, but once you have, everything falls into place. I also found this to be true when I penned a New Year message for the Freethinker last month, but then the anomie and the listlessness returned, so let’s not get over-excited. Still, small steps, small steps…

Lots coming up this year, though: another guest lecture, an opening address for ‘Hitchmas’ in April, a wedding (not, alas, my own). And lots of writing and editing to catch up on.

I also just recalled that I turn 30 next week. This is a source of dread and despair and existential anguish, so let’s move on.

I guess we shall just see how 2026 goes, both for me and for the world at large (on both counts, not very well, if we go by one recent sad event; see addendum below). Farewell and ta-ta for now. Thanks for letting me ramble. I’ll try to keep the old spirits up.

Addendum: In Memoriam, Neil Barber

Late last month, I learned of the death, far too young, of Neil Barber, a good man whom I knew slightly a few years ago and with whom I’d sporadically kept in touch. He was a mighty figure in the Scottish secularist movement, leading the Edinburgh Secular Society with great gusto for many years and being a kind of representative of the National Secular Society in Scotland. I was very happy to publish a piece by him in the Freethinker a couple of years ago, which I highly recommend. It is an evergreen defence of the values of secularism and it stands, I hope, as a sort of monument to Neil’s work.

He was more than an activist, of course. He was a beloved partner and friend and music teacher. He will be missed by many.

You can read his obituary here and, if you knew him, contribute messages and memories about him for his loved ones here, as I have done. If you didn’t know him, I hope that by reading his article and browsing those messages you will get to know him at least a little. I for one wish I’d known (and kept in touch with) him better.

In memoriam, Neil Barber, 1961-2026.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

Register for Freethought History Webinar #7: The Trouble with Christ Mythicism. With Bill Cooke.

The webinar will take place on 27 January 2026 at 7 pm UK time via Zoom.

About the webinar: The idea of Jesus not existing is tempting for some atheists and humanists and seems to be plausible, given the paucity of evidence for his life and actions. In this webinar, Bill Cooke will outline the problems with this approach and the downsides that adopting it will pose for the humanist movement. Bill Cooke has a PhD in religious studies and has written on the mythical Jesus theory at doctoral level and in some of his historical works. He gave the first Freethought History Webinar in February 2025 on H G Wells’s ongoing relevance to the twenty-first century.

About the speaker: Bill Cooke is editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Wellsian and is author of H G Wells and the Twenty-first Century (Liverpool University Press, 2023). Among his other works is A Wealth of Insights: Humanist Thought Since the Enlightenment (Prometheus, 2011), a biography of Joseph McCabe, and a history of the Rationalist Press Association. Read his articles for the Freethinker here.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below. I can’t wait to see you there.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

Originally published in the Freethinker, 3 December 2025.