20th Nov 2009 : Who should win the 2009 Bad Faith Award? Vote now using the poll at the top right of this page - see shortlist below for more on the challengers.

19th Nov 2009 : Richard appeared on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2

19th Nov 2009 : Chase is giving out $5 million to various charities

18th Nov 2009 : If the wingnuts show up on your campus distributing Bananaman's version of Origin of Species, go out with as many friends as possible, and snap up as many copies as you can. Do everything possible to waste Bananabrain's money.

18th Nov 2009 : The final phase of the atheist bus campaign will challenge the idea that children can be labelled with their parents' religion
[UPDATE]added link to an article in politics.co.uk

18th Nov 2009 : A new Nashville organization classifies itself as non-religious, but the group's billboard has stirred up a religious debate

18th Nov 2009 : Debate - Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett vs Dinesh D'Souza, Shmuley Boteach, Nassim Taleb. Neutral: Robert Wright. La Ciudad de las Ideas 2009 Re-evolution

17th Nov 2009 : Trust rules that Radio 4 programme does not breach impartiality by not including views from atheists, secularists and humanists

16th Nov 2009 : ...CFI is pleased to announce that Ken Peters of California is the Grand Prize winner of its Blasphemy Contest...

16th Nov 2009 : Debate - Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett vs Dinesh D'Souza, Shmuley Boteach, Robert Wright.

14th Nov 2009 : In the wake of multiple, significant threats, the downtown billboard that says “Don’t Believe In God? You are not alone” came down early Thursday morning.

13th Nov 2009 : An interview with a Taliban trained Suicide Bomber With English Subtitles.

11th Nov 2009 : Dan Dennett's talk at the AAI 2007 Conference in Washington, D.C.

11th Nov 2009 : Richard Dawkins talks about "The New Atheism" at the AAI 2007 Conference in Washington, D.C.

11th Nov 2009 : Please take a moment to fill in a short website survey.

10th Nov 2009 : The ways of the Lord, they say, are infinite, but will nevertheless not be able to hide ALL of the billboards that the UAAR of Pisa has posted around the city

10th Nov 2009 : Iran is about to execute three men for the crime of atheism…well, specifically, apostasy, rejecting the Islamic faith.

8th Nov 2009 : U.S. critics of evolution help translate their ideas for a society already torn between Islam and secularism

8th Nov 2009 : Is the Catholic church a force for good in the world?

6th Nov 2009 : The billboard went up Sunday on eastbound Memorial Boulevard near Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

5th Nov 2009 : Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth, scientists still can’t agree on whether evolution and religion can happily coexist

5th Nov 2009 : The Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, has stirred up controversy in the German media with his All Saints’ Day sermon, in which he compared the ideas of Richard Dawkins to those of the Nazis.

5th Nov 2009 : Lord Sacks said that Europe was the world?s most secular region and the only one experiencing population decline

4th Nov 2009 :

4th Nov 2009 : European court of human rights rules crucifixes that hang in classrooms violate religious and educational freedoms

3rd Nov 2009 : Creationism is growing in the Muslim world

2nd Nov 2009 : Egyptian Clerics Encourage Martyrdom in Gaza

2nd Nov 2009 : There's a schism alright, and I seem to find myself on the unfashionable side of it.
The question: Is there an atheist schism?
[UPDATE] - links to articles by PZ and Jerry Coyne

1st Nov 2009 : Can people be good if they don't think Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist in the English language?

30th Oct 2009 : PORTUGAL: Bible Is "A Catalogue of Cruelties," Says Saramago

29th Oct 2009 : How governments decide whether a religion is real or not.

29th Oct 2009 : "Good Without God?" posters in the Boston subway.

28th Oct 2009 : Richard Holloway's `third way' approach has riveted the U.K.

28th Oct 2009 : Jerry Coyne's post on the book 50 Voices of Disbelief (released yesterday 26-Oct in the US) by Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk

27th Oct 2009 : The Paul Haggis news has gone viral. (Scientology)
[UPDATE]links to a few more news articles added

26th Oct 2009 : Norman Levitt (1943-2009)

26th Oct 2009 : British Council poll finds UK adults overtake Americans in wanting science teaching in schools to include intelligent design.

25th Oct 2009 : ...The pope has parked his tanks on the Church of England’s lawn; Rome has made a hostile takeover bid for Canterbury....

24th Oct 2009 : 'It is business as usual," said the Archbishop of Canterbury at the press conference announcing the Vatican's latest attempt to poach disaffected Anglicans. And how right he was. The Roman Catholic Church is a giant multinational corporation, differing from its business equivalents only in that they pay their taxes.

23rd Oct 2009 : Last month, atheists marked Blasphemy Day at gatherings around the world, and celebrated the freedom to denigrate and insult religion.

22nd Oct 2009 : Let's move beyond faith versus reason.

21st Oct 2009 :

20th Oct 2009 : I have just witnessed a rout – tonight’s Intelligence Squared debate. It considered the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry,...

19th Oct 2009 : Atheism is coming to the subway — or at least subway ads promoting it are.

17th Oct 2009 : A convicted murderer faces execution in Texas after jurors consulted the Bible while deliberating on his sentence.

17th Oct 2009 : Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, to the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

17th Oct 2009 : [UPDATE]- important video links
From 5-10 July 2009, in its 800th anniversary year, the University of Cambridge hosted a major international Festival to mark 200 years since Charles Darwin's birth and 150 years since the publication ofOn the Origin of Species.

16th Oct 2009 : Tribunal rejects claim that far-right Dutch politician's presence could 'lead to inter-faith violence'

16th Oct 2009 : Problem of Evil held at the University of Melbourne last month. Speakers: Russell Blackford, Barney Zwartz, Peter Adam, and Lyn Allison.

16th Oct 2009 : All right, England, enough is enough. Every Christmas, those people over there get some fabulous secular midwinter celebration, and what do we godless Americans get?

15th Oct 2009 : A science writer who is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association is to fight on after a preliminary judgment against him was overturned on appeal today.

15th Oct 2009 : The anti-Mormon backlash against Proposition 8 supporters is analogous to the treatment of Southern blacks during the civil rights movement, said a high-ranking leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Tuesday

12th Oct 2009 : Although their number remains insignificant and most of them hid their identity, the fact that some people are leaving Islam and becoming atheists is a troubling news in conservative Iraq.

10th Oct 2009 : ...we've compiled some of our best ideas as well as a few places to find and share more ideas...

7th Oct 2009 : A “triumphalistic, self-righteous atheism” inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is winning a following among American young people, leading to “atheist clubs” in high schools, according to Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.

6th Oct 2009 : Basava Premanand, one of the greatest rationalists and skeptics of our time, passed away earlier today at Podanur in India.

5th Oct 2009 : ...I wanted to post a brief report on the AAI meetings...

5th Oct 2009 : Film Review: The Invention of Lying (3 stars)

3rd Oct 2009 :

2nd Oct 2009 :

2nd Oct 2009 :

1st Oct 2009 :

29th Sept 2009 : As you may know, Richard has been invited to present AAI’s ‘Richard Dawkins Award’ at their convention in Burbank this weekend.

29th Sept 2009 :

29th Sept 2009 : The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was "busy cleaning its own house" and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

29th Sept 2009 : Subversive US cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose take on the Bible is about to be released worldwide, says people are "totally nuts" for taking the book so seriously for so long.

28th Sept 2009 : Update - Open letter from DI

27th Sept 2009 : The Charlotte Pop Fest '09 is a music festival taking place in Charlotte's Myers Park area this weekend. The event features some well-known local and national bands.

27th Sept 2009 : Professor Richard Dawkins' speech at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth, UK - 20th September 2009

25th Sept 2009 : Discussion and interviews begin about 2min in.

25th Sept 2009 : 'Creation' film finds US distributor

23rd Sept 2009 : We would like to hear from you, so get your web cams rolling!

22nd Sept 2009 : Are you a none?

21st Sept 2009 : The Great Faith Debate at UCF in Orlando FL on September 17, 2009. This debate is between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'souza.

21st Sept 2009 : One in every 33 women who attend worship services regularly has been the target of sexual advances by a religious leader, a survey released Wednesday says.

18th Sept 2009 : Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, was celebrated for performing “miracles” by President Bartlet and an African leader in “The West Wing” (see the video clip below). He was described as history’s “greatest human being” by Penn and Teller

14th Sept 2009 : Indonesia's province of Aceh has passed a new law making adultery punishable by stoning to death, a member of the province's parliament has said.

13th Sept 2009 : An urgent request for help from Maryam Namazie, spokesperson for Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, and winner of the National Secular Society's 2005 Secularist of the Year award.

Hussain Muradi, an ex-Muslim atheist, is facing imminent deportation to Afghanistan:

12th Sept 2009 : A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.

12th Sept 2009 : From Richard Dawkins' lectures to the polemics of Christopher Hitchens, atheism has never been so stridently asserted.

9th Sept 2009 : PermaneThis year's Charlotte Pop Fest compilation CD and bonus CD features 34 songs by 34 different artists performing at this year's event.

8th Sept 2009 : None of us at Science Central was able to get along to Friday's conversation between Richard Dawkins and Brian Eno at the Oxford Playhouse. But one of our readers, Zoe McDougall, has sent us this review:

6th Sept 2009 : Posted here as this event is today, just a few hours from now in Trafalger Square.

The father of natural selection, Charles Darwin, will be on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square today at 6pm as part of Antony Gormley's One And Other project.

1st Sept 2009 : On Sunday, Parsons watched Joseph play with nearly 40 other kids on an 18-acre farm in Princeton that she had helped convert into Camp Quest Texas, the state's first camp for the children of atheists, agnostics and other "free thinkers."

30th Aug 2009 : Let's call honour killing what it really is.
Call it terrorism.

29th Aug 2009 :

29th Aug 2009 : The atheist is A. C. Grayling; the bishop is Richard Harries. This is the second of three 45-minute radio programmes "in which an atheist and a bishop come together to apply their own philosophies to the experiences of people they meet, with Jane Little chairing the discussion."
The highlight is a visit to a London Academy faith school to talk with three of the students - a Muslim, an atheist and a Roman Catholic - and A. C. Grayling asks the Muslim what will happen to the atheist when she dies. They also speak to Samantha Stein, director of Camp Quest UK.

YouTube of the Camp Quest UK portion of the discussion.

29th Aug 2009 : A great, long article on Randi that touches on many subjects including his illness, truth, atheism, skepticism, and of course charlatans.

28th Aug 2009 : This is an intriguing, impressive album that results from a brave and unlikely collaboration. Back in March, eight singer-songwriters from the UK and the US came together to compose new songs that had a "resonance and relevance" to Charles Darwin, who was born in Shrewsbury 200 years ago.

28th Aug 2009 : Anti-Muslim prejudice is finding expression in more hate crimes. We need to tackle the problem at a nationwide level

27th Aug 2009 : Noah's Ark farm denies allegations, saying it promotes debate between science and religion over evolution

27th Aug 2009 : I must admit that I quite like the subtitle for this new anti-atheist lament in the New Yorker by James Wood: "A don defends the Supreme Being from the new atheists." I just picture a gigantic graying gentleman in academic robes, his sleeves flapping as he swats aside the helicopter gunships piloted by Dawkins and Dennett and Harris and Hitchens as they swoop in to take out a cowering, defenseless, and semi-transparent Bronze Age patriarch behind him.

27th Aug 2009 : The problem: People on both sides of the political aisle often work backward from a firm conclusion to find supporting facts, rather than letting evidence inform their views.
Note from Severalspeciesof "I'm submitting this as this is right up the alley of "a clear thinking Oasis"..."

25th Aug 2009 : I send this one because of their use of the word "belief," which points to a similarity between this phenomenon and belief in fantastical creatures like gods. Look how many times the article talks about right wing americans "believing" in "myths." This is worth posting for RDers to pick over. Something bad is happening in people's minds and in our culture. We need to figure it out.

- Lucas

25th Aug 2009 : Atheists are attacking the idea that science and faith can be compatible, but confrontation won't spread the truth of evolution.

25th Aug 2009 : Novelist whose new book features student drawn into Islamist terror cell, and who has been quoted attacking the Qur'an, apologises for any offence caused

24th Aug 2009 : Brian Eno discusses his newly-released 77 Million Paintings, which sees the continued evolution of his exploration into light as an artist's medium and the aesthetic possibilities of "generative software." This groundbreaking release features an exclusive interview DVD, limited-edition deluxe packaging that includes a hard-bound book with an essay by Eno covering his career as a visual artist, fully illustrated with previously unseen images and a generative software disc.

24th Aug 2009 : A Malaysian Muslim woman who had been sentenced to be caned for drinking beer in a hotel has been granted a reprieve until after Ramadan, religious official have said.

23rd Aug 2009 : The legislation which gives statutory partnership rights to gay and lesbian couples has been criticised by Cardinal Sean Brady. (Ireland)

22nd Aug 2009 : When Kenneth Kistner, 85, died in February, his wife, Carmen, didn't call any clergy.

At the Detroit memorial service for the Marine veteran and retired educator, Kistner's family read a eulogy — one that Kistner himself approved years earlier, when it was drafted by a secular "celebrant" near their retirement home in Largo, Fla.