10th Sep 2007 : A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

9th Sep 2007 : The controversy stirred up by Dawkins's latest book The Fascism Delusion really seem to be heating up. Here is one recent review, from many, that takes him to task

8th Sep 2007 : Why almost half of voters polled say they'd support a God-denier for president

8th Sep 2007 : In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Francis Collins details the potential benefits of recent advances in the field of genetics, explores the question of whether or not religious belief negatively impacts a scientist's research, and talks about his journey from atheism to devout believer.

8th Sep 2007 : Searching for a different kind of riches in the ground, an oil company made a priceless find it never expected.

8th Sep 2007 : The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego agreed Friday to a settlement that would pay nearly $200 million to 144 people who have said they were sexually abused by clergy members under lax supervision from the church.

8th Sep 2007 :

7th Sep 2007 : For years I wished that the intelligent media would show a bit more interest in religion. Be careful what you wish for. The resurgence of the discussion of religion has come, sort of, but forgive me for failing to rejoice in it.

7th Sep 2007 : Richard Dawkins' normal arrogance and contempt for religious belief faded briefly to conciliation today, when challenged by one of his critics.

6th Sep 2007 : The U.S. government cannot trade a parcel of land to private hands to allow a Christian cross to remain in the middle of a vast federal preserve, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.

6th Sep 2007 : TORONTO — Publicly-funded religious schools would be allowed to teach creationism and other theories, says Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory.

6th Sep 2007 : The Catholic writer John Cornwell has written a challenge to Richard Dawkins' the God Delusion.

6th Sep 2007 : To prepare for my BBC Radio 4 discussion with John Cornwell
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/, I read Cornwell's book Darwin's Angel: an angelic response to The God Delusion
(http://richarddawkins.net/article,1595,The-Flea-Circus-moves-to-your-iPod,RichardDawkinsnet). I'm not going to write a proper review of the book, but it set me thinking again about a common phenomenon, which I am finding increasingly irksome.

6th Sep 2007 : There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists ("Of course I don't believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . .").

5th Sep 2007 : Excellent short interview with Polly Toynbee, newly elected President of the British Humanist Association.

5th Sep 2007 : Thirty years ago today, the Voyager 1 space probe — a one-ton robotic craft whose long antennas make it look rather like a spider the size of a school bus — was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a mission to reconnoiter Jupiter and Saturn.

5th Sep 2007 : What's it like to work with relatives who think sex is like a handshake, who organise orgies with the neighbours, and firmly believe females should be in charge of everything?

5th Sep 2007 :

4th Sep 2007 : Thank God I'm an atheist. It's a big step to take, but it was becoming difficult to cling to the agnostic fig-leaf any longer. As Lloyd George once said, if you sit on the fence too long it means that the iron enters your soul. Now, however, I am reassured by Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, that I can "stand tall to face the far horizon". Atheism, he says, "nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind, and indeed a healthy mind".

4th Sep 2007 : By providing wrong but matching views and feelings, scientists mentally "teleport" people outside their own bodies

4th Sep 2007 : The earliest domesticated pigs in Europe, which many archaeologists believed to be descended from European wild boar, were actually introduced from the Middle East by Stone Age farmers, new research suggests.

4th Sep 2007 : The full human DNA sequence of one healthy middle-aged man is a boggling array of genetic quirks, burps and hiccups: There are seven billion more humans to go

3rd Sep 2007 : A nationwide survey of the religious beliefs and practices of American physicians has found that the least religious of all medical specialties is psychiatry. Among psychiatrists who have a religion, more than twice as many are Jewish and far fewer are Protestant or Catholic, the two most common religions among physicians overall.

3rd Sep 2007 : It looks as if The God Delusion may hit the one-year mark on the New York Times Bestseller list!

3rd Sep 2007 : C-Span's BookTV conducted a three hour interview with Christopher Hitchens, with call-in questions from the live television audience.

3rd Sep 2007 : Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen will face criminal charges in India after being accused of stirring up religious enmity.

3rd Sep 2007 : What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy, hyperbolic and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student in neuroscience has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No fewer than five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past two years--Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and now Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great.

3rd Sep 2007 :

3rd Sep 2007 : On Sunday, I was on the last ever Heaven and Earth show on the BBC which, for nine years has been a gentle dale in the noisy world of modern television – pleasurable, tranquil, receptive, candid and at times profoundly revealing of the place of religion in today's world.

3rd Sep 2007 : He went looking for God and ended up an angry agnostic – unable to believe but enraged by the arrogance of militant atheists. It's hard to see the purpose of the world, he says, but don't blame its evils on religion

2nd Sep 2007 :

31nd Aug 2007 : A review of John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God

31nd Aug 2007 : Chris Mooney has a link to this analysis of recent polling data. The analysis was written by David Masci. The subject: How Americans feel about science and faith. Mooney thinks the data supports the Matt Nisbet line that people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens hurt the cause. I disagree.

31nd Aug 2007 : New study shows different regions of the brain kick into action depending on the perceived threat level.

31nd Aug 2007 : Scientists have found the genes of an organism fused wholesale into the genome of an entirely separate species, raising new questions over how evolution works.

31nd Aug 2007 : The chimpanzees, after spotting the humans at the corner of their compound, came over to us with their arms outstretched and their palms turned upward.

31nd Aug 2007 : What happens when a ritual designed to remove sin might itself generate sin?

30th Aug 2007 : Using a novel method developed to identify reliably functional binding motifs, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have performed a genome-wide study of functional human transcription factor binding sites that encompasses nearly ten thousand genes and four hundred known binding motifs.

29th Aug 2007 : John Cornwell struggled with his faith for two decades before finally returning to Christianity. Here he explains why Richard Dawkins, and all those who believe religion is the root of all evil, completely fail to understand what it means to believe

29th Aug 2007 : Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC, 08/28/2007

29th Aug 2007 : Aug. 29, 2007 - … The publication of Mother Teresa's letters, concerning her personal crisis of faith, can be seen either as an act of considerable honesty or of extraordinary cynicism (or perhaps both of the above). These scrawled, desperate documents came to light as part of the investigation into her suitability for sainthood; an investigation conducted by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who is the editor of this volume. And they were actually first published in the fall of 2002, by the Zenit news agency—a Vatican-based outlet associated with a militant Catholic right-wing group known as the Legion of Christ. So, which is the more striking: that the faithful should bravely confront the fact that one of their heroines all but lost her own faith, or that the Church should have gone on deploying, as an icon of favorable publicity, a confused old lady who it knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?

29th Aug 2007 : Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible (and almost certainly fictional) God.

29th Aug 2007 : The God Delusion by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins will be available in Swedish shortly.

29th Aug 2007 : Few people have heard of the mite harvestman, and fewer still would recognize it at close range. The animal is a relative of the far more familiar daddy longlegs. But its legs are stubby rather than long, and its body is only as big as a sesame seed.

29th Aug 2007 : Dawkins seems to be stuck in the last century. He's a very entertaining guy, but he suffers from existential insecurity: everything has to be proven before he'll believe it.

28th Aug 2007 :

27th Aug 2007 : A research team has for the first time ever discovered DNA from living bacteria that are more than half a million years old. Never before has traces of still living organisms that old been found. The exceptional discovery can lead to a better understanding of the ageing of cells and might even cast light on the question of life on Mars.

27th Aug 2007 : A Malaysian newspaper is facing calls to shut down after it published an image of Jesus holding a cigarette and what appeared to be a can of beer.

27th Aug 2007 : The BBC Trust has dismissed a complaint by Opus Dei that episodes of Waking The Dead portrayed a "negative and false" view of the Catholic organisation.

27th Aug 2007 : A demonstration has been held in south- east Afghanistan accusing US troops of insulting Islam after they distributed footballs bearing the name of Allah.