Brian Trent
Brian Trent is an award-winning novelist, journalist, poet, and screenwriter working in more genres than there are names for. He has been a professional writer for more than fifteen years, and is the author of novels Remembering Hypatia, and Never Grow Old: The Novel of Gilgamesh.
Trent´s work has frequently appeared in The Humanist, The Copperfield Review, Populist America, World Sentinel, Writer's Digest, and many other venues. He is a frequent guest on radio and podcasts, and a fierce proponent of the freethinker stance.
Trent´s work has frequently appeared in The Humanist, The Copperfield Review, Populist America, World Sentinel, Writer's Digest, and many other venues. He is a frequent guest on radio and podcasts, and a fierce proponent of the freethinker stance.
Articles by Brian Trent
August 17, 2008
Science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card wants to overthrow of the American government if it decides to support gay marriage. He wants to see people killed over it, shot in the streets, the blood running into gutters. Is he right?
July 14, 2008
Today´s warhawks consider a prolonged war a form of economic output, or a shopping day for the military-industrial complex. Sun Tzu would remind us that this is short-sighted to the point of ruin.
May 04, 2008
Imagine what America´s legacy will look like in a history book some 500 years hence. I can easily see some golden opening chapters where the dream of a democratic Republic – straight from Greco-Roman ideals – is realized. The nation which began bold and bright – breaking away from the tyranny of the British crown, rising to global dominance, and becoming a leader the rest of the world looked to, then comes to the 21st century.
December 23, 2007
Across five thousand years of human civilization, fathers and husbands and mothers and wives, children and cousins, siblings, crowned royalty and downtrodden peasant, have enjoyed the notion of a new year. The turning of a page onto a clean canvas… while bearing in mind yesterday’s lessons of headli...
October 28, 2007
On October 11, a letter from the global Muslim community was sent to numerous Christian leaders. This wasn’t just a Hallmark greetings card; in-process for more than three years, it boasts 138 signatures from every branch of Islam in multiple countries. It’s titled, “A Common Word Between Us and Yo...
September 24, 2007
The following is a true story in two episodes, occurring some two weeks apart, with no formal relation to each other aside from the stunning light it shines on partisan “thinking.”
Two weeks ago, I met some friends at a local coffee shop. We had taken two tables, and between sips of our chosen ...
August 12, 2007
During the July 12 meeting of the U.S. Senate, Rajan Zed, a director of interfaith relations, read a Hindu prayer. It was the first time in the Senate's history that a Hindu prayer was recited.
During this prayer, three Christians (Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar) screamed and sh...
July 29, 2007
When I suggested in my article “You are Destroying America. Yes, You” that the American public was responsible for allowing the current White House “Executive Privilege” culture to get away with chilling abuses of the Constitution, I received a flood of email. Most were from people who expressed ...
July 27, 2007
Sooner or later (as all great civilizations through time have dealt with) America will be attacked by terrorists again. There are too many people out there hopelessly addicted to extremism, to acting as pawns in a game of supernatural Risk, to blind fanaticism for it not to happen.
But that won’...
July 16, 2007
It’s not something that’s talked about in the media, probably due to the “doesn’t bleed doesn’t lead” mantra of journalism. And amid all of today’s “discussions” on Iraq (which primarily consist of liberal and conservative cult members bashing heads against each other like the rage-zombies from 28 W...
June 22, 2007
A couple weeks ago, I rented Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter, the very first film based on Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon. It had been a favorite film of my teenage years; my own copy was a grainy VHS tape which, like the modern equivalent of stone tablets on which scribes would commit informat...
May 16, 2007
A Temple to Zeus is perfectly American. It's not only allowable, but would showcase that powerful liberty which Americans acknowledge: Religious freedom. Within every U.S. city, a citizen is entitled by First Amendment rights to select whatever house of worship he or she pleases. As long as religio...
April 29, 2007
I still remember the strange little sentence drilled into my head by elementary schoolteachers:
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.
That was the third-grade way of remembering the planets -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Bellowing those...
April 24, 2007
According to a notorious Kansas church group, the victims of Virginia Tech's tragedy are roasting away in hell.
"The evidence is they were not Christian," declared Shirley Phelps-Roper of Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), a Topeka-based congregation. "God does not do that to his servants. You don't n...
April 18, 2007
Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia is 587 miles away from me. I've never visited its campus, nor had my thoughts wandered its way over the years. The 135-year-old school has more than 25,000 students, a distinguished faculty, and a varied map of educational offerings. Like many colleges, too, it...
April 03, 2007
If you could, would you?
Death is natural, but not everything natural is good. We choose to imagine the natural world as a sort of Disney character filled with benevolence and tenderness, and in doing so we evade the more brutal, red-in-tooth-and-claw reality. In fact, we forget exactly how bruta...
March 29, 2007
There’s a lesson in the Aesopian tale of the man who wanted to cook a frog. When he tossed the amphibian into a pot of boiling water, it leapt out to safety. The thwarted cook then changed tactics. He placed the frog in cold water... and slowly brought up the heat.
In much the same way, American ...
March 20, 2007
A gladiator match between freedom, technology, and government is on the horizon, and there’s no guarantee the America we know will survive it.
Consider Radio Frequency Identification tags, or RFIDs. A long-standing practice of biologists is to tag animals with tracking devices so their location...
March 12, 2007
Have you heard the one about the cancer vaccine which evangelicals oppose because it would encourage “promiscuity?”
When Texas became the first state to require all 11- and 12-year-old girls be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV) there was an outcry from religious groups. Since HPV...
March 04, 2007
Are you a warhawk or peacenik?
If you answered yes to the above question, you’ve probably succumbed to cultism. In the modern era of American politics, it seems to be the favored tool to replace courage, integrity, and intellectual honesty. The pre-war debate over Iraq was a great example of this...
February 28, 2007
In a debate at the Cato Institute between evolutionist Michael Shermer and so-called Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells, the latter was asked point-blank what his alternative to the evidence for natural selection was.
“I don’t think I’m obligated to propose an alternate theory,” Wells p...
February 19, 2007
A day after Darwin’s 198th birthday, the Kansas state Board of Education decided to evolve once again. Guidelines which had assailed not only evolution but the very definition of science, were jettisoned last Tuesday in favor of, well, science.
Since 1999, Kansas has been a chief battleground of ...
February 12, 2007
Propaganda is deadlier than bullets, because it creates no martyrs. Those who died at Tiananmen Square for democracy’s sake are remembered for their courage, yet no statues are erected to commemorate the loss of debate, discussion, and dissent in the modern world... where independent voices are buri...
February 05, 2007
Cultures - and the civilizations which give rise to them - don't remain frozen in time. They transform. They progress or revert, grow or retract, reach golden pinnacles of accomplishments or implode. On lengthy enough timelines, they can do all of the above.
And like a cast of vibrant charact...