12th May 2008 : This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics.

29th Apr 2008 : Author of The God Delusion in person is a lot more open-minded than his critics would have you believe

20th Apr 2008 : Everyone should take the opportunity to see "Expelled" — if nothing else, as a bracing antidote to the atheism-friendly culture of PC liberalism. But it's far more than that. It's a spotlight on the arrogance of this movement and its leaders, a spotlight on the choking intolerance of academia, and a spotlight on the ignorance of so many who say so much, yet know so very little.

30th Mar 2008 : My plan for de-baptism started to formulate when travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

25th Mar 2008 : Austin Dacey serves as a representative to the United Nations for CFI, and is also on the editorial staff of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times. His new book is The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life.

23rd Mar 2008 : The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark Mathis, duplicitous producer of the much hyped film Expelled, shot himself in the foot so spectacularly that the phrase might have been invented for him.

23rd Mar 2008 : At Easter I, a longstanding atheist, find myself feeling affinity with religious folk

23rd Mar 2008 : Simon Jenkins replies to John Gray's challenge to Dawkins et al

5th Mar 2008 : Is it OK to switch religions, change denominations, even split from God entirely? Jesus says: Sure!

1st Mar 2008 : You know a book is good when you lug the hardback about with you religiously, even when you start to get shoulder strain. Except with this book, religiously is the wrong adverb.

27th Feb 2008 : The atheist lobby, in the blond, pregnant person of Jennifer Lange, waited with diminishing patience for the elevator in the Legislative Office Building.

22nd Feb 2008 : How I went from Jesus-loving Christian to a fun-loving infidel... in one afternoon

11th Feb 2008 : The Archbishop has unwittingly pointed us towards a vision of a better Britain

10th Feb 2008 : I FIND THE GOD DELUSION BY RICHARD Dawkins particularly relevant to Kenya's current political impasse: Why has it been felt necessary to call in religious leaders to broker peace? Have their pleas to the gangs of the discontented and dispossessed to put down their machetes helped? Of course not. Even the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu failed to achieve anything.

2nd Feb 2008 : The curse of monotheism.

29th Jan 2008 : Books advocating atheism have recently been enjoying a modest boomlet. Sales are solid, book readings are sold out, and their authors grace the highbrow talk shows and op-ed pages in prestigious newspapers and periodicals.

5th Jan 2008 : Six Reasons to be an Atheist from The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Comte-Sponville

2nd Jan 2008 : More-modest voices are reclaiming the debate over faith from the bomb throwers.

2nd Jan 2008 : Near the end of his life Charles Darwin invited for lunch at Down House Dr Ludwig Büchner, President of the Congress of the International Federation of Freethinkers, and Edward Aveling, a self-proclaimed and active atheist. The invitation was at their request. Emma Darwin, devout as ever, was appalled by the thought of entertaining such guests and at table insulated herself from the atheists with an old family friend, the Rev. Brodie Innes, on her right and with her grandson and his friends on her left. After lunch Darwin and his son Frank smoked cigarettes with the two visitors in Darwin's old study. Darwin asked them with surprising directness: "Why do you call yourselves atheists?" He said that he preferred the word agnostic. While Darwin agreed that Christianity was not supported by evidence, he felt that atheist was too aggressive a term to describe his own position.

30th Dec 2007 : We should recognise and celebrate good wherever we come across it, while being ready to acknowledge and counter the darker side of human nature

25th Dec 2007 : How should faith respond to the onslaught of atheism?

21st Dec 2007 : It was a single-word answer, which is rare for a politician. And it was a question he wasn't expecting.

21st Dec 2007 : The seasonal attack on secularists harbours a poisonous suggestion that 'our way of life' is threatened by foreigners

17th Dec 2007 : I thought I'd post a little full-quality clip of The Four Horsemen discussion on Christmas.

17th Dec 2007 : What with all the crowds and the shopping and the formulation of complex family Christmas treaties, you may have missed the enchanting news about Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. In a good mood Professor Dawkins dismisses all faith as "harmless nonsense... the great cop-out". In a bad mood he tends to call it a wicked, "infectious virus". He is not shy to air his views on the subject.

17th Dec 2007 : Scientist Richard Dawkins, an atheist known worldwide for arguing against the existence of God, has described himself as a "cultural Christian".

15th Dec 2007 : December 25th is a date to celebrate not because it is the disputed birthday of the "son of God" but because it is the actual birthday of one of the world's greatest men

10th Dec 2007 : It's rare a newspaper actually manages to kill people, but Sir David King believes the Daily Mail may pull it off.

10th Dec 2007 :

8th Dec 2007 : Colin Tudge is full of praise for God's Undertaker, a sharp riposte to scientists from John Lennox

8th Dec 2007 : Norm had this one as well on onegoodmove.org, so I thought I'd share it. Keith Olberman talks about the Romney speech.

6th Dec 2007 : Note to radical Muslims: I've now named my favorite coffee mug 'Muhammad.' Hope that helps

4th Dec 2007 : THE HOLIDAY CELEBRATES THE TRIUMPH OF TRIBAL JEWISH BACKWARDNESS.

1st Dec 2007 : I've been reading through Richard Dawkins' books and am currently half way through The Blind Watchmaker (2006 paperback edition) and on page 119 he writes:

29th Nov 2007 :

29th Nov 2007 : "Is sex outside of marriage a sin? Is it a public matter? Is it forgivable?"

26th Nov 2007 : It is one thing to correct Michael Behe (some structure guy) with zero HIV-1 research experience on HIV-1 evolution. But considering the sheer number of DI 'fellows' who are lawyers, and the fact Im just a biology student with zero experience in law... I found it rather strange that I caught something the DI lawyers evidently had no problem with...

25th Nov 2007 : If European Muslims are treated like children, is it surprising that some should act so irrationally?

25th Nov 2007 : Look, I'm busy. I'm writing a script and I won't be disturbed. Except that because I'm writing about terrorism and Islam, I keep being distracted by Martin Amis. He prowls the thickets of my research like a demented flasher. Sometimes Christopher Hitchens pops up, too, and flashes along with his friend. They rail against Muslims. They're obviously daft. But people take them seriously.

16th Nov 2007 : Beliefs, and believers, come in many shapes and sizes, and not all of them can be described as 'religious'. This program provides an introduction to a fascinating range of non-religious people and their beliefs. Features an interview with Richard Dawkins.

16th Nov 2007 : Critics say the brand of literalist religion Richard Dawkins condemns is limited to a small minority of believers -- but in fact it's all too common

15th Nov 2007 : One of the methods used by the religious to marginalize atheists and our increasing visibility is to accuse us of becoming that which we originally opposed, or in other words, just like them. It's even better if they have the convenience of one experience with these so-called "secular fundamentalists" from which they can draw unfounded conclusions as to the validity of this argument and, ultimately, the character of all those who have no belief in gods, goddesses, or other mythical creatures.

15th Nov 2007 : 'Defenders of the faith' on Cif should reflect that we atheists are only injuring their sentiments - unlike their predecessors in the cause

13th Nov 2007 : In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal God (Larson and Witham 1998). While the percentage is undoubtedly greater in the U.S. scientific community as a whole, it is probably safe to say that the majority of American scientists are nonbelievers, in marked contrast to the general public.

12th Nov 2007 : One is continually told, as an unbeliever, that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away.

10th Nov 2007 : Here's another provocative article from the New Humanist titled "Holy Communion", a critique of two of the "New Atheists". It has an incredibly offensive illustration to go with it, but the article isn't quite that bad. It's not that good, either.

10th Nov 2007 : I'm mentioned considerably in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine about Antony Flew's new book. Fans will want to know about this, and hear some of the backstory from me, filling in some of the blanks left by the article, which was good but inevitably brief for so complicated a story. So here you go.

9th Nov 2007 : ATHEISM is the "new black". Of course, in Australia, we've always had atheists aplenty. Now, however, it is acceptable to come out of the closet of disbelief. The poster boy for this new atheism is British academic Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion is a bestseller.

9th Nov 2007 : The question of the nature of reality is one that likely will never go away. There will always be those who support the belief that this mysterious "something" exists, and there will be those on the opposing side. We must work with the tools available to us, and those just happen to be limited to our five innate senses and the knowledge that we have gained through science and reason.

7th Nov 2007 : In 2007, Richard Dawkins' scarlet "A" campaign is making coming out as a nontheist easier for so many people than it had been just a few years ago. I like to hope that the existence of the Secular Coalition for America ( http://www.secular.org ) has also helped during the two years that the SCA has been lobbying Congress explicitly representing nontheists (atheists, humanists, naturalists, brights, rationalists, agnostics, and people claiming dozens of other personal identifiers with one thing in common – they do not rely on the existence of any god or gods.) I know it feels easier for me to talk about my godless beliefs now, than it did on my first day as the Director of the Secular Coalition for America, September 19, 2005, when I "outed" myself to a few million people on Fox's Big Story.

6th Nov 2007 : In Book 10 of Milton's "Paradise Lost," Adam asks the question so many of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? ("Ah, why should all mankind / For one man's fault… be condemned?") He answers himself immediately: "But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved?" Adam's Original Sin is like an inherited virus. Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the crime – they did not eat of the forbidden tree – its effects rage in their blood and disorder their actions.

6th Nov 2007 : The New Atheism deserves our cheers. This is not a time for hyper-scrupulous misgivings about how robustly religion should be criticised, even leaving aside the relative mildness that the New Atheists actually display. Books like The God Delusion and God is Not Great should give confidence to anyone who embraces secularism and deplores the political influence of religion. These books will convince at least some intellectual opponents, or play a role in doing so, expose the population to the idea (doubtless shocking for some) that there are alternatives to theism, and provide a rallying point for opposition to religious influences on public policy.

5th Nov 2007 : As the nights lengthen and the mist swirls, as the first frost crinkles and the bones begin to chill, we are entering the season of scary movies. The sides of buses right now are decorated with pictures of severed heads and disgorged entrails by way of promotion for the latest offering of slasher porn.

5th Nov 2007 :

5th Nov 2007 :

4th Nov 2007 : Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the Thames an hour west of London.

3rd Nov 2007 : I'm riding a rush hour #7 train from Queens to Manhattan when suddenly: I sense danger. My eyes dart to the left. No more than 15 feet from me, a woman is in possession of that common haven for misplaced trust: a bible.

3rd Nov 2007 : The Vatican is doing its utmost to frustrate him, but the Spanish PM's reforms are marching on, and they're going to be taught in schools.

2nd Nov 2007 : At a stronghold of Roman Catholic doctrine, Christopher Hitchens debates a renowned Theologian and emerges as the more persuasive orator, by far.

1st Nov 2007 : To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

1st Nov 2007 : MYTHOLOGY can be a fascinating subject, consisting as it does of traditional stories emanating from a culture, largely concerned with how that culture began and how various matters progressed through time.

31st Oct 2007 : Sacred texts, argues Carlin Romano, deserve to be approached politely even by those who see no merit in claims about their divine origins

31st Oct 2007 : Recently, the popular and successful books of atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens having been receiving some public criticism from religious quarters, with the most recent coming from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

28th Oct 2007 : Do you need to be religious to truly experience wonder at the world? This question lurks behind much of the ongoing debate about atheism. If everything can be explained by science, what is worthy of awe?

26th Oct 2007 :

26th Oct 2007 : Let's be positive.

21st Oct 2007 : Can we be good without God? That's a very old question believers like to ask because, I suspect, the answer is very pleasing to them.

21st Oct 2007 : God is back in the discussion about life, the universe and everything, Jill Rowbotham writes. After decades of peaceful coexistence, Christians and non-believers are at each other's ideas ... and throats

20th Oct 2007 : Conventional wisdom says that the primary reason why so many people do not accept Darwin's theory of evolution is that they find it threatening to their religious beliefs. There is no question that religion is a big part of the reason behind the large number of people who reject evolution. But I am convinced that just as often, the cause and effect is reversed: people hold onto their fundamentalist religious beliefs because evolution by natural selection -- the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator -- is so counter-intuitive to so many.

19th Oct 2007 : The US may be one of the most religious countries in the West but is it undergoing a period of doubt, asks Tim Egan.

19th Oct 2007 : Christopher Hitchens talks about his recent tour and takes questions at the AAI 07 conference in Washington, D.C.

18th Oct 2007 : When hundreds of practitioners of Humanistic Judaism convene in Michigan this weekend, the absence of their movement’s founder, Rabbi Sherwin Wine, is sure to be deeply felt.

12th Oct 2007 : The event had been sold out for weeks. Tickets were being offered on the black market for three times their face value. With 30 minutes to show time, the crowds were forming outside, some wolfing down sandwiches in the parking lot. For this much excitement, people around here generally expect some serious football.

11th Oct 2007 : The Western liberal media had a laugh in August when China's State Administration of Religious Affairs announced Order No. 5, a law covering "the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism."

11th Oct 2007 : THERE has been fierce debate over the past several decades about the role of religion in American politics. From the late 1970s and on, religious conservatives played an increasingly vociferous public role and were important in pushing the country to the right--much to the chagrin of both secular and religious liberals. Now there seems to be a shift in mood. A number of prominent authors and scientists have published books in the past year that advocate a "New Atheism." The books, which include Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great, have sparked considerable public controversy across the political spectrum. Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen weighs in on the phenomenon in a recent interview with the left-wing Berlin weekly Jungleworld. Cohen is professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His article on the current state of French politics ("France: Red Rose, Blue Grip") appears in the Dissent's Fall 2007 issue.

9th Oct 2007 : In mid-August, Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed something called the "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act" into law. Although the new law has an innocuous-sounding title, it's really a ticking time-bomb, opponents say.

8th Oct 2007 : IF THE DUTCH GOVERNMENT ABANDONS AYAAN HIRSI ALI, AMERICA SHOULD WELCOME HER.

7th Oct 2007 : John McCain was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last year for very long - the senator, who once referred to Mr. Falwell and Pat Robertson as "œagents of intolerance," was there to receive an honorary degree - but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood.

7th Oct 2007 : Speech in honour of Dan Dennett, presenting him with the Richard Dawkins Award for 2007 at the Crystal City conference of the Atheist Alliance International

2nd Oct 2007 : To begin, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge just how strange it is that a meeting like this is even necessary. The year is 2007, and we have all taken time out of our busy lives, and many of us have traveled considerable distance, so that we can strategize about how best to live in a world in which most people believe in an imaginary God. America is now a nation of 300 million people, wielding more influence than any people in human history, and yet this influence is being steadily corrupted, and is surely waning, because 240 million of these people apparently believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the world with his magic powers.

2nd Oct 2007 : On October 3, two Oxford University professors will go to the mat at the Alys Stephens Center to debate that classic (some would say tired) question, "Is there a God?"

2nd Oct 2007 : Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on.

1st Oct 2007 : Listening to Start the Week yesterday I was startled to hear the theologian Karen Armstrong blaming Richard Dawkins for Islamic fundamentalism.

1st Oct 2007 : Sir: Professor Richard Bowen thinks I should engage with serious academic theologians rather than the fundamentalist "McDonald's" version of Christianity. He and the Rev Richard Hall (Letters, 19 September) agree with Peter Stanford ("Doubts about Dawkins", 14 September) that I should read theology.

1st Oct 2007 : It is like Daniel going into the lions' den, though Professor Richard Dawkins might not appreciate the biblical comparison.

29th Sep 2007 : It has become fashionable in certain smart circles to regard atheism as a sign of superior education, of highly evolved civilization, of enlightenment. Recent bestsellers by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others suggest that religious faith is a sign of backwardness, the mark of primitives stuck in the Dark Ages who have not caught up with scientific reason.

24th Sep 2007 :

24th Sep 2007 : Today, dissenting Muslims have to wear virtual body armour in case someone decides to take offence

23rd Sep 2007 : Today's arguments between science and religion are not constructive. Worse, they could result in some unforseen consequences for both sides

20th Sep 2007 : It's easy to get annoyed, but Christians really ought to listen to and take seriously what Richard Dawkins has to say. With his high profile books, articles, television programmes and general media coverage, he has become the number one scourge of religion and religious believers of all and every stripe. He is articulate, passionate, an excellent speaker and a formidable intelligence. He has made important contributions to his particular discipline of evolutionary biology, most famously with his first book The Selfish Gene, but no less impressively with the follow-up volume The Extended Phenotype, and a series of subsequent books. He is a major player in his discipline.

15th Sep 2007 : Richard Dawkins stoked the fires of religious debate with the publication of The God Delusion, but denied it made him a fundamentalist. Here's a selection of the 700 comments we received in response to his defence of atheism.

15th Sep 2007 : Our attention was demanded yesterday by headline "news" that, thousands of miles away in Zimbabwe, Archbishop Pius Ncube has tendered his resignation to the Pope after rumours of sexual derrings-do – even though, in his case, his alleged partner was adult, female and consensual; hardly, therefore, an earth-shattering story except, possibly, to the small minority of Britons who are Roman Catholics.

14th Sep 2007 : Review of Darwin's Angel by John Cornwell.

Anyone who writes or cares about religion will have questioned of late whether they should attempt some sort of answer to the current bout of God-bashing dominating the bestsellers' chart.

11th Sep 2007 : Last week, scientists reported having found a possible — emphasis on possible — cause of the collapse of honeybee populations reported in the past year.

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

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.

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".

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 : 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