Scientists and Engineers Need Literature
From Prof Jack Lewis | By Troy Camplin | Reading fiction opens the door to innovation. Shortly after clocks were introduced to Japan in the sixteenth century, Japanese inventors used the principles underlying the clock’s movements to create robots. True, those robots were merely mechanical dolls, but they could often do quite intricate tasks, like serving tea and writing Japanese characters. This idea that mechanical objects could—and should—be made animate and even human, is a deep part of Japanese culture. That helps to explain why the Japanese remain at the forefront of robotic technology. You could make the argument that if one were interested in becoming a robotics engineer, an excellent way of doing so would be to become more Japanese. But how does one become more Japanese? The answer is: fiction. When we read a work of fiction, we…
The Unstoppable Secular Students, part 2
Editors Note: Free Think University is about free thinking, not about a specific ideology. The following two part blog repost is being shared with our readership to keep them abreast of any group seeking to promote freedom of thought. FTU is not promoting the SSA,...
New FTU Course: What is the Meaning of Life?
Harvard’s Armand Nicholi compares the life views of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis in filmed discussions between the two. Who persuades you? AVERAGE TIME: 2 HOURS. 1,000 IMPACT POINTS.
The Unstoppable Secular Students, part 1
By Lyz Liddell | A speech delivered at the Freethought Festival 2012 hosted by the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m Lyz Liddell, the Director of Campus Organizing here at the Secular Student Alliance (which for the rest of this post I’ll call SSA). We are, of course, the only national organization in the freethought movement specifically and solely dedicated to the empowerment of secular students – which makes us…
Liberal Academics Despise American Homeschoolers
By Steve Gunn | The leaders of the American homeschool movement are convinced that the liberal education establishment is determined to destroy their traditions and force their children into government schools. If you check out the written comments of several leftist educators, you can see they have a point. It’s not as though the establishment’s hatred for homeschooling is…
How Roe vs. Wade Gave Us Gosnell
By Eric Metaxas | The testimony coming out of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell paints an indelible picture of human depravity. Gosnell is charged with killing a 41-year-old woman patient as well as seven babies who’d been born alive after their abortions...
New Course: Do Free Markets Promote Cooperation?
What does a pencil have to do with my profit in life? Interact with a ground breaking essay from 50 years ago through this video experience. AVERAGE TIME: 2-3 HOURS. 1,000 IMPACT POINTS.
What Few Deny Gay Marriage Will Do
From Prof Jack Lewis | By Robert P. George | Masha Gessen is a talented writer. Her widely praised (and sharply critical) biography of Vladimir Putin is only the most recent of her books across a range of subjects from Russian history, to mathematics, to the social implications of modern genetics. On top of her exertions as an author, she has served as Director of the Russian service of the U.S. government–funded Radio Liberty. She is a self-identified lesbian and a leading activist…
Polls on global warming, energy, and the sequester
By Karlyn Bowman, Andrew Rugg, Jennifer K. Marsico | American Enterprise Institute | The latest issue of AEI’s monthly newsletter on public opinion, AEI Political Report, examines the attitudes toward global warming, how Americans feel about the production and...