Philosophy for a thoughtful younger generation
by Chris Brockman

Let’s see it would be somewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during my life in the SE Michigan general liberty movement—which at that time still had a decidedly Libertarian Party component, at least for me—Chris and his wife Julie were welcome, sane voices in that not always august milieu. In 1978, Chris wrote a short book What about gods?, which became the modern standard for helping children think intelligently about the phantasmagoric world of deities and religion. [I would like gods? to be required reading for first graders in the government schools… but of course someone on the school board would jump up to shoot down such an ‘irreverent’ book for junior and his friends. “What about moral values!?” they’d exclaim.]

Exactly. Continue reading →

Children’s story on letting go of make-believe
by Chris Brockman
Review by Brian Wright

This marvelous little book came from a very special individual out of a milieu in the young libertarian movement in Michigan in the mid-1970s. There was a certain orthodoxy to that milieu; I remember Chris and his wife Julie seemed on the ‘free spirit’ end of the general ‘rational-libertarian’ structure of our sociology at the time.[1] Chris and Julie were always more antiwar and anticorporate than most of us in those days, and had solid secular-humanist credentials. We in the secular Objectivist-libertarian center had read and heard all the excellent intellectual refutations of the concept of God.[2] I, personally, manifested egoic arrogance in my understanding, to the point of minimizing more humane perspectives. Continue reading →