22nd May 2007 : COMMUNICATING with God or other spirits can improve your physical health, Australian researchers suggest.

22nd May 2007 : That a book so forthrightly titled (no subtitle necessary!) and forcefully argued as The God Delusion could reach and make an extended stay on the upper strata of the best seller lists over the past months may tell us something about a shifting cultural climate. It may be a changing Zeitgeist (a term the author employs late in his book for just such welcome raisings of consciousness) to counter the excesses of those who have aggressively pushed a narrow religious agenda upon the mainstream.

22nd May 2007 : He has denounced God as an ethnic cleanser. He has described faith as the biggest obstacle to peace in the 21st century.

21st May 2007 :

21st May 2007 : The Indian state of Punjab has been set alight by some of the worst rioting in a decade after a newspaper advert placed by the leader of a controversial religious sect sparked outrage in the region's Sikh community.

21st May 2007 : Faith makes people want to kill each other--but it's the best thing we've got.

21st May 2007 : Most of us feel a rush of righteous certainty in the face of a moral challenge, an intuitive sense of right or wrong hard to ignore yet difficult to articulate.

21st May 2007 : Tuesday is fight night at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Raleigh. The pre-bout buzz suggests two likely scenarios: Either we'll see the lamb to the slaughter or an upset on the order of David and Goliath. In one corner will stand Christopher Hitchens, the famous columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate who has used his vast erudition and slashing wit to eviscerate subjects from Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa. Pugnacious and polemical, he believes that the only thing the meek will inherit is the wind.

21st May 2007 : One of the writers whose courage and polemical force I highly admire is Christopher Hitchens. He gives frequent proof of a passionate honesty, which sometimes has obliged him to criticize ideological soul mates when he thinks they are wrong on some important matter. Many of our colleagues today pretend publicly to have no enemies on the Left out of a panicky fear that they might "help the wrong people" on the evil Right. Though always a man of the Left, Hitchens will have none of that.

20th May 2007 : The Catholic Church has ruled that, contrary to previous church doctrine, unbaptized children do not spend time in limbo until the End of Days. Here are other doctrine decisions the church has made recently.

20th May 2007 : The National Association of State Boards of Education will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution.

20th May 2007 : When Napoleon asked the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace why there was no mention of God in his latest book, the French savant loftily replied: "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis."

20th May 2007 : Atheism is the "in" thing this spring. Not since Time magazine's infamous "Is God Dead?" cover in 1966 has non-belief been such a popular topic for debate.

20th May 2007 : BAGHDAD, IRAQ (CNN) -- Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested four people in connection with the "honor killing" last month of a Kurdish teen -- a startling, morbid pummeling caught on a mobile phone video camera and broadcast around the world.

20th May 2007 : I was actually surprised to hear writer Christopher Hitchens' attitude toward Reverend Jerry Falwell's death, given the good sense this liberal has exhibited on the war issue.

20th May 2007 : Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters.

18th May 2007 : "In recent years, the search for the fundamental laws of nature has forced us to think about the Big Bang much more deeply."

18th May 2007 : The origin of religion is in our heads, explains developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. First we figured out how to make tools, then created a supernatural being.

18th May 2007 : Yesterday the New York Times ran this interesting piece about Wiccans—a.k.a. witches.

18th May 2007 : Slate has started publishing excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' new book (so very cleverly titled God Is Not Great), the first of which is here. The argument he advances is certainly not new, nor does Hitchens say that it is.

17th May 2007 : Iran is to start manufacturing "Islamic bicycles" for women that conceals their figure, the government newspaper Iran reported on Thursday.

17th May 2007 : God, they say, is love, but the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who died May 15, hit the jackpot trafficking in small-minded condemnation. The controversies Falwell generated followed a predictable loop. 1) Falwell would say something hateful or clownish about some person or group associated with liberalism. 2) A public outcry would ensue. 3) Falwell would apologize and retract the offending comment. 4) Falwell would repeat the comment, slightly rephrased.

17th May 2007 : An extraordinarily diverse array of marine life has been discovered in the deep, dark waters around Antarctica.

17th May 2007 : Forget the hate crimes bill -- it's time for a bill that would prohibit intolerance of the intolerant.

17th May 2007 :

17th May 2007 : Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn't realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

17th May 2007 : The most influential man in the Republican base, James Dobson, has been interviewing a foreign policy expert about our approach to the Middle East.

17th May 2007 : Jerry Falwell's foul rantings prove you can get away with anything if you have "Reverend" in front of your name.

17th May 2007 : More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as "indecent" due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.

17th May 2007 : Christopher Hitchens has attacked modern-day saints like Mother Teresa and Princess Di, but his new book takes aim at the most sacred cow of all: The Almighty.

17th May 2007 :

16th May 2007 : Here is your chance to send Richard a question about his book The Selfish Gene.

16th May 2007 : Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project's new web site. The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

16th May 2007 : SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI lamented the deep divide between rich and poor in Latin America but told priests to steer clear of politics as they work to reverse Roman Catholism's waning influence in the region.

16th May 2007 : BRASILIA - Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict's "arrogant and disrespectful" comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and a revival of their religions would be a backward step.

16th May 2007 : Religion serves two functions. It explains the mysteries of life. It helps overcome life's difficulties.

16th May 2007 : Evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin thought the voyage of the Beagle was a "magnificent scheme" allowing him to spend time "larking round the world".

16th May 2007 : At a certain point in reading God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens' broadside against religion as a false, immoral, man-made construction, I half-expected Hitchens to write that if God were real and omnipotent, and consequently Hitchens so wrong, then God should have arranged things so as to prevent him from writing his book. But the book exists! So God couldn't stop it. And why couldn't he stop it? The simplest answer is that he does not exist!

16th May 2007 : Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him.

16th May 2007 : The death of Dr. Jerry Falwell brings an end to one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. In so many ways, Jerry Falwell became one of the most recognizable faces for conservative Christianity in America.

16th May 2007 : Jerry Falwell spent a career demonizing others. Upon his death, what else could he expect in return?

15th May 2007 : LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) -- The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University. He was 73.

15th May 2007 : State Darwin museum.

15th May 2007 : The Creation Museum, opening May 28, 2007, presents a "walk through history." Designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director, this state-of-the-art 60,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life.

15th May 2007 :

15th May 2007 : A look through the newspapers might persuade one that the "anti-theist" Christopher Hitchens is on to something.

15th May 2007 : The trouble with columnists, besides the fact that there are too damn many, is that after a period of great verve, most fall prey to boredom, complacency, solipsism and, finally, irrelevance.

15th May 2007 : To Hell With All That. It doesn't take a lot of deep research, all you have to do is start looking around. On an average day not long ago, for example, one can find this news item from benighted and religion-scarred Mesopotamia: 23 Iraqis traveling on a bus in the north of the country—members of a small, angel-worshipping Kurdish sect called the Yazidis—were separated by gunmen from Christian passengers before being themselves driven off, lined up against a wall and shot.

15th May 2007 : Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, debates Sean Hannity on the existence of God.

15th May 2007 : In what is perhaps one of the stranger reviews from The New York Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley writes adoringly of Christopher Hitchens, the man and the phenomenon, but little about the book in question.