JANUARY & FEBRUARY 2011

REGULARS 5 Editorial It isn’t natural 6 Parish news 10 Yours sceptically Readers’

letters 49 Chris Maslanka’s Quiz 50 Endgame Laurie Taylor goes hell for leather

FEATURES 8 Bad Faith Award 2010 Who has been crowned the past year’s leading enemy of reason? 12 Careless Talk? Some secularists believe that communication with believers amounts to collaboration. Paul Sims isn’t so sure 14 Playing God Philip Ball looks at the timeless fascination of the monster myth 17 It’s the faith, stupid! Olivier

Roy talks to Caspar Melville about the rise of holy ignorance 20 Hot type Andrew Mueller revels in the vituperative opinions of HL Mencken 22 A many splendour’d thing

Dangerous delusion or heart of humanism? Sally Feldman searches for the essence of love 26 Prophet motive Michael

Bywater revisits the sacred texts of Scientology’s L Ron Hubbard 28 Quite contrary Is there more to the Institute of Ideas than hollow liberalbaiting? asks Richard Wilson 31 Delusions of grandeur

Information systems professor Ian Angell tells Laurie Taylor where science has gone wrong 34 Solitary Sharon Shalev goes inside America’s super-maximum security prisons

[12]

Is there any point in talking to the godly?

[38]

A man of breeding

38 Rationalism’s dirty secret

John Appleby unravels the history of humanism’s dalliance with eugenics 42 Behind the couch Was Freud a humanist? asks Alfred Tauber

COLUMNS

37 Chown’s Cosmos Saturn’s two-faced moon

[22]

Do you believe in love?

BOOK REVIEWS

45 Ophelia Benson climbs

Karen Armstrong’s 12 steps 46 Louise Foxcroft has good news and bad news for two neuroscience writers 48 Jake Wallis Simons uncovers the God instinct 49 Philip Womack is uninspired by the end of the world

[14]

The fascination of Frankenstein