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.

27th Aug 2007 : The Rev. Ted Haggard, who left the 10,000-member megachurch he founded after admitting to 'sexual immorality,'has asked supporters for financial help while he and his wife pursue studies in counseling and psychology.

27th Aug 2007 : The new public school at 2620 Hollywood Boulevard stands out despite its plain gray facade.

25th Aug 2007 : There is an old Glasgow story about a Rangers fan who blunders into the wrong end of an Old Firm match. He is rumbled by three Celtic fans who threaten to expose him unless he fetches their Bovrils.

25th Aug 2007 : I had been looking forward to Richard Dawkins' appearance at The Edinburgh Book Festival for quite some time.

24th Aug 2007 : An on-line outdoor retailer in the United States is selling camouflaged Bibles, a curious product which says a lot about American culture.

24th Aug 2007 : Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who may be canonised as a saint by the Vatican later this year, had a deep crisis of faith in God for the last 40 years of her life, according to a new set of her letters.

24th Aug 2007 : Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there.

24th Aug 2007 : Health scares are almost a religion for the media - but this summer we are in danger of overdosing.

23rd Aug 2007 : The Pentagon has a disturbing relationship with private evangelical groups.

23rd Aug 2007 : Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

23rd Aug 2007 : KSLA News of Shreveport, La., is standing by its report on "Clergy Response Teams," trained by the federal government to pacify an angry citizenry in the event of martial law. The idea being, as far as we can tell, that religious leaders are ideally suited to the task of explaining to people why they should give up their freedom for the "better good."

23rd Aug 2007 : Diamonds more than 4 billion years old -- nearly as old as the Earth itself -- have been discovered in Western Australia, giving scientists vital clues about the early history of our planet.

22nd Aug 2007 : Last April, I received this nice letter from Mark Mathis.

22nd Aug 2007 : LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers working in Ethiopia have unearthed the fossils of a 10-million-year-old ape, a discovery they say suggests that humans and African great apes may have split much earlier than thought.

22nd Aug 2007 : CNN has posted a form requesting "thoughts about faith and the state of religion in the world."

22nd Aug 2007 : Episodes 1 & 2 Enemies of Reason

22nd Aug 2007 : Michael Shermer recently wrote an article for Sciam which covers the same issues he spoke about while on our show.

22nd Aug 2007 : It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar's whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal ('Beyond the troubled relationship' Nature 448, 131–133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature's coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful — to the point of obscurantism.

22nd Aug 2007 : After turning millions of Internet users into virtual explorers of the world with Google Earth, the Internet search giant is now hoping to turn many of them into virtual stargazers.

22nd Aug 2007 : Larry King's website currently has a poll asking "Which religion do you associate with?" Interestingly, over 70% of the participants so far have answered "Atheism."

21st Aug 2007 : An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens

21st Aug 2007 : On the "CBS Sunday Morning" news program (8/19/07), there was a segment on atheists. Interviews included Christopher Hitchens, Julia Sweeney, and Ellen Johnson. With clip of the late Madalyn Murray-O'Hair.

21st Aug 2007 : MARK LILLA DOESN'T GIVE US ENOUGH CREDIT FOR SHAKING OFF THE DIVINE.

21st Aug 2007 : Offering insight into how evolution progresses inside a gene, scientists have pinpointed mutations in an ancient protein that transformed its shape and function more than 400 million years ago.

21st Aug 2007 : The reason he had picked me from the audience, Apollo Robbins insisted, was that I'd seemed so engaged, nodding my head and making eye contact as he and the other magicians explained the tricks of the trade.

21st Aug 2007 : PZ Myers, Ph.D., Division of Science & Math, University of Minnesota, Morris, says: I'm in an interesting situation. I wrote a very negative review of two versions of a book [Lifecode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization] by Stuart Pivar here and here. He claims to have a revolutionary idea for how evolution works, but his ideas have no connection to reality, and these lovely elaborate drawings he made look nothing at all like actual embryos. The bottom line is that I said his work was more about the evolution of balloon animals than biology.

20th Aug 2007 : The parents of a Sikh girl want to convert her to Roman Catholicism to win a place at the school of their choice.

19th Aug 2007 : Scientists Around World in Race to Create Artificial Life; Success Likely in 3 to 10 Years

19th Aug 2007 :

19th Aug 2007 : Why is no one questioning the rise of new-age nonsense in the name of science, asks David Colquhoun

19th Aug 2007 : Bill Maher is making a new documentary on religion which is tentatively to be titled, "Religulous", as in "RIDICULOUS", for release just prior to Easter.

19th Aug 2007 : Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

17th Aug 2007 : The author's book tour—for God Is Not Great—takes a few miraculous turns, including the P.R. boost from Jerry Falwell's demise, a chance encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and surprising support for an attack on religion.

17th Aug 2007 : Author Christopher Hitchens discusses his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" as a part of the Authors@Google series. The author of Why Orwell Matters and Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor, a Slate columnist, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. He has also written for The Nation, Granta, Harper's, The Washington Post, and is a frequent television and radio guest. Born in England, Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. He now lives in Washington, D.C., and he became a U.S. citizen in 2007. This event took place on August 16, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

17th Aug 2007 : Actor Stephen Baldwin, the youngest member of the famous Baldwin brothers, is no longer playing Pauly Shore's sidekick in comedy masterpieces like Biodome. He has a much more serious calling these days.

17th Aug 2007 : These are difficult times for rational people, particularly in the United States.

17th Aug 2007 : The Out Campaign--we interview organizer Josh Timonen, who is working with Dr. Richard Dawkins on a new campaign aimed at getting atheists to acknowledge their lack of religious belief. We will talk with Josh about why he and Dr. Dawkins started the campaign, and where he thinks that it will go from here.

15th Aug 2007 : Superstitions like astrology, Tarot reading, crystal-gazing and mediumship may be fun, but they are not harmless.

15th Aug 2007 : IN the last months of 1990, a property dispute sparked a series of bloody riots across India.

15th Aug 2007 : SIXTY years ago, British India was granted independence and partitioned into Hindu-majority India and my native nation, Muslim-majority Pakistan. It was a birth of exceptional pain.

15th Aug 2007 : There's a modern brand of militant atheist that can appear horribly smug and superior.

14th Aug 2007 : The religious right deliberately distorts the truth when it says the United States was founded on Christ

14th Aug 2007 : Christopher Hitchens, contrarian atheist and slayer of all beasts fascistic and theocratic, will be in Madison, Wisconsin, this fall to present the keynote address at the Freedom From Religion Foundation's fall conference. Anyone who is familiar with Hitchens' substance and style will expect a speech that is irreverent and uncompromising and totally worth the price of admission.

14th Aug 2007 : A series of botanical landscapes that go back in evolutionary time are to be built in the desert of Saudi Arabia as part of an ambitious project to design the world's biggest indoor gardens.