13th May 2008 : Democrats, Republicans agree on need, disagree on issues; health care tops list

26th Apr 2008 : FORT RILEY, Kan. — When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

14th Apr 2008 : Is it important? Well, if you want to stop America's seemingly inexorably decline, it might be absolutely critical.

8th Apr 2008 : Well said Mr. Olbermann.

7th Apr 2008 : The governor of Illinois has been playing some games with state money, shuffling a million dollars to benefit a Baptist church, and an atheist dared to testify to the legislature against this. The response from one legislator was unsurprising: she shrieked at the atheist to get out.

3rd Apr 2008 : Supporters rally behind Republican caught up in YouTube controversy

31rd Mar 2008 : For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

21st Mar 2008 :

6th Mar 2008 : After an acrimonious debate in which the bogeyman of secularism was repeatedly invoked, the House of Lords on Wednesday March 5 2008 accepted the amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that abolishes the common law of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.

4th Mar 2008 : Quentin Letts' new BBC Radio 4 series "What's the Point Of..." kicked off today with a 30-minute investigation into the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with particular reference to Dr. Rowan Williams' recent suggestion that sharia law should be operating in Britain.

1st Mar 2008 : Christopher Hitchens was one of the guests on Real Time with Bill Maher on Feb 29th, 2008.

29th Feb 2008 : Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch activist facing death threats for her outspoken criticism of Islam, is to come under national police protection anywhere in the European Union, the top justice official in Brussels said tonight.

28th Feb 2008 :

28th Feb 2008 : Public policy decisions should be based on evidence. So why are taxpayers funding faith schools and alternative therapies?

27th Feb 2008 : Don't answer that, Mister Huckabee. And the pandering is on both sides of the aisle. This video from The Interfaith Alliance proves what I said in December of 2006, that athiest author "Sam Harris and company will have to hold their noses when Obama gives his acceptance speech in Denver…"

25th Feb 2008 : ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Conflicting reports emerged out of Pakistan on Tuesday over the duration of a Pakistani government block on the video-sharing Web site YouTube for showing a "highly blasphemous Dutch" video. The video, which the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority described as "highly provocative" and "anti-Quranic," featured Dutch politician Geert Wilders and had "the potential to cause more unrest and possible loss of life and property across the country," PTA said in a statement on its Web site.

24th Feb 2008 : 'What they call my trial lasted just four minutes in a closed court. I was told that I was guilty and the decision was that I was going to die'

21st Feb 2008 : Former CIA official, now an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, argues that a 9/11-type attack would have been likely anyway

10th Feb 2008 : 'Sharia is nothing but a human concoction of medieval religious opinion

10th Feb 2008 :

5th Feb 2008 : The West screwed up badly when the denunciation of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was not closer to unanimous. (I will never forget or forgive the shameful silence of some writers who shunned the invitation to join in a firm but not hostile rebuke.) The West screwed up badly again when the Danish cartoons were not reprinted world-wide. What many didn't understand was that the staged riots were a political strike against moderate Muslims, not non-Muslims. The "tolerance" urged by many voices outside the Muslim world played into the hands of the radical Islamists. Now we get a third chance to come to the aide of moderate Muslims all over the world, but so far, I haven't heard much outcry. Several days ago I sent the following letter to the Boston Globe, which has not yet indicated that it will publish it:

4th Feb 2008 :

4th Feb 2008 : Twelve Irreligious Questions for the Candidates Before "Tiw's Day's" Elections

29th Jan 2008 : Richard Dawkins discusses the role of religion in schools with other panel members on The Big Debate.

23rd Jan 2008 : KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.

22nd Jan 2008 : Pat Condell on Islam.

20th Jan 2008 : Jan. 11 - Flush with last year's success in passing H.Res. 847, "Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian Faith," Christian nationalists -- those who would have the United States be governed as a Christian theocracy -- are pushing H.Res. 888, another resolution which promotes a false and distorted Christian nation reinterpretation of our history. Generally, we do not take action regarding resolutions because they are ceremonial in nature and express the non-binding opinion of one chamber. They do not have the force of law.

19th Jan 2008 : We've got to find a way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.

16th Jan 2008 : (I)n Warren, Michigan on Monday, Huckabee declared his personal crusade to amend the Constitution by copying and pasting from the Bible

15th Jan 2008 : Unlikely as it sounds, an extinct Canadian fish with foot-like fins is set to make a serious splash in the U.S. presidential race.

Tiktaalik roseae -- a 375-million-year-old fossilized "fishapod" discovered on Ellesmere Island in 2004 -- has been hailed as an "evolutionary icon" because it represents the crucial transition from sea to land for some of the Earth's most primitive creatures.

9th Jan 2008 : Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris will tomorrow table an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill calling for the abolition of 'blasphemous libel'. Here, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society explains why such a crime has no place in a liberal society

3rd Jan 2008 : God and rock'n'roll were invoked by the Republican Mike Huckabee in his final campaign rally in Iowa, with quotes from the Book of Isaiah and calls for tonight's caucus-goers to get on their knees to ask for God's wisdom.

2nd Jan 2008 : Mitt Romney crafts a solution that, if nothing else, works really well for him.

16th Dec 2007 : EDINBURGH — We may never know exactly why 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was strangled in Msissauga this week. Her father, Muhammad, has been charged with murder, and he is, by all accounts, a very religious man, whereas his daughter didn't want to cover her head in the style favoured by Muslims in his native Pakistan.

13th Dec 2007 : Our priorities in the West are wrong. Secularism is what we should be spreading across the globe

10th Dec 2007 : Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we, the undersigned, call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy.

7th Dec 2007 : MITT ROMNEY'S WINDY, WORTHLESS SPEECH.

7th Dec 2007 : "Thank you, Mr. President, for your kind introduction.

"It is an honour to be here today. This is an inspiring place because of you and the first lady and because of the film exhibited across the way in the presidential library. For those who have not seen it, it shows the president as a young pilot, shot down during the Second World War, being rescued from his life raft by the crew of an American submarine. It is a moving reminder that when America has faced challenge and peril, Americans rise to the occasion, willing to risk their very lives to defend freedom and preserve our nation. We are in your debt. Thank you, Mr. President.

6th Dec 2007 : On one side of the Atlantic sits Lord Black. On the other, Judge Luigi Tosti. Both are convicted criminals, both proclaim their cause and their innocence.

4th Dec 2007 : OVERWORKED nurses have been ordered to stop all medical work five times every day to move Muslim patients' beds so they face towards Mecca

2nd Dec 2007 : No one is happier than I am about the latest development in stem-cell research. Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin have independently figured out how to turn ordinary human skin cells into something like pluripotent stem cells. These are the cells that have caused so much excitement in recent years because they are like a biological gift certificate that can be turned into other kinds of cells as needed. These cells have also produced much controversy because they are derived from human embryos. I have the disease — Parkinson's — for which stem cells hold the most immediate promise. The hope is that they can be turned into the type of brain cells that produce dopamine, the missing ingredient in Parkinson's patients.

30th Nov 2007 : Crowds of people have marched in Sudan's capital Khartoum to call for a tougher sentence for a British teacher imprisoned for insulting religion.

29th Nov 2007 : KHARTOUM, Sudan (CNN) -- A Sudanese court found a British teacher guilty of inciting religious hatred and sentenced her to 15 days imprisonment Thursday for allowing a teddy bear to be named "Mohammed," British authorities and her lawyer reported.

28th Nov 2007 : A young woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang-raped. The Western world has expressed outrage – which has, in turn, provoked anger among the Saudi establishment. Now, for the first time, the woman tells her story. By Daniel Howden

27th Nov 2007 : WHY ROMNEY NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT HIS FAITH.

25th Nov 2007 : Tony blair has sparked controversy by claiming that people who speak about their religious faith can be viewed by society as "nutters".

20th Nov 2007 : From the Fox News program "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

20th Nov 2007 : The world's scientists have done their job. Now it's time for world leaders, starting with President Bush, to do theirs. That is the urgent message at the core of the latest — and the most powerful — report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists who collectively constitute the world's most authoritative voice on global warming.

17th Nov 2007 : America's founding fathers would not have been impressed with the holy alliance of Pat Robertson and Rudy Giuliani

16th Nov 2007 : An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.

15th Nov 2007 : I'm trying to find the extended 'Expelled' trailer which was online a few weeks ago. It supposedly went up, and then quickly disappeared. It featured Richard being grossly misedited. This version has now disappeared from the internet and only the abbreviated trailer remains. Does anyone have a copy of the original? I'd really like to find it so we can repost and bring attention to it. Can anyone help us out with this request?

13th Nov 2007 : After their notorious legal defeat, intelligent design proponents are resurfacing with insidious new assaults on science.

11th Nov 2007 : The head of the Muslim Council of Britain does not mince his words on integration, report Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson

9th Nov 2007 :

1st Nov 2007 : Faith will unsettle politics everywhere this century; it will do so least when it is separated from the state

25th Oct 2007 : Here is Eddie Tabash's brief to the California Supreme Court in the same-sex marraige case, with an argument based on church/state separation. The Chief Justice approved the brief on October 4th.

25th Oct 2007 :

23rd Oct 2007 : Eddie Tabash's talk at AAI 07 titled "The Present Threat of the Religious Right to Our Modern Freedoms."

23rd Oct 2007 : TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - The rapid spread in Latin America of the virus that causes AIDS is made worse by the Roman Catholic Church's stand against using condoms, a U.N. official said on Monday.

22nd Oct 2007 : There is no reason for the head of the British army to air his religious ideas - they have no relevance to his job or our troops.

15th Oct 2007 : The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report submitted in court earlier this week which questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram.

11th Oct 2007 : Prominent Muslim scholars are warning that the "survival of the world" is at stake if Muslims and Christians do not make peace with each other.

9th Oct 2007 : 'Message Of Submission'

The group that 12 years ago fought vehemently for the rights of students who wore a hijab in Quebec's public schools is now trying to ban their teachers from wearing the Islamic headscarf and other "ostentatious" religious symbols while at work.

9th Oct 2007 : In the place where I grew up – a particular square in one of the nicer Northern housing estates – there was a young Muslim doctor who lived with his wife and children.

4th Oct 2007 : And what has secularism done to Norway? The Global Peace Index rates Norway the most peaceful country in the world. The Human Development Index, a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living, has ranked Norway No. 1 every year for the last five years.

2nd Oct 2007 : I am advocating for a Presidential Debate solely on the subject of science, and I hope you will join me in trying to bring this about. Had such a thing occurred during the election in 2000, perhaps we would have discovered that George W. Bush believed "the jury is still out on evolution." In this election, we have been provided with an excellent reason to ask for a scientific debate by the fact that three Republican candidates for president, Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo indicated that they do not believe in evolution. For them the jury seems not to be out, but to have rendered a verdict against the theory.

24th Sep 2007 : At last, there are signs the shameful censoring of Saudi critics in this country is to be challenged

24th Sep 2007 : The community college instructor says the school sided with students offended by his explanation of Adam and Eve.

24th Sep 2007 : For 25 years, evangelicals have voted Republican. But the Democrats are courting, and their efforts may have a prayer.

23rd Sep 2007 : Headteacher is told establishing non-religious education would be 'politically impossible'

21st Sep 2007 : Norm posts these Bill Maher clips all the time over at onegoodmove.org if you'd like to see more. I thought this one was pretty good. The Constitution says there is no religious test, but there is. Bill has a word or two to say about that.

21st Sep 2007 : A DUP proposal that Lisburn Council should write to local secondary and grammar schools encouraging them to teach alternative theories to evolution is set to face stiff opposition when it is debated next week.

19th Sep 2007 : A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.

19th Sep 2007 : If the Catholic church is prepared to ban Amnesty because of its stance on abortion, what other rights might it censure?

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

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

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

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."

19th Aug 2007 :

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.

12th Aug 2007 : Channel 4's controversial documentary Undercover Mosque was great investigative journalism. That the CPS thought it incited racial hatred beggars belief

7th Aug 2007 : ikey Weinstein is a very specific kind of gadfly. When he believes that church and state are intermingling in the military, he goes in with a sting. On Friday, he hit a bull's-eye when the Inspector General's office of the Department of Defense released a report concluding that a former Pentagon chaplain and several generals inappropriately loaned the prestige of their positions — and that of the Pentagon and the U.S. government — to make a fundraising film for a non-governmental evangelical group, the so-called Christian Embassy. The report identified Christian Embassy as affiliated with the group Campus Crusade for Chri

6th Aug 2007 : August 6, 2007. Lou Dobbs, CNN. Top generals in the Pentagon formed a Christian proselytizing organization called, "The Christian Embassy", to work within the ranks of the US military.

6th Aug 2007 : It used to be said that the Labour Party was shaped less by Karl Marx than Methodism. No longer, if the annual survey of MPs' summer reading is a bellwether. This guide into the beliefs of our senators shows they don't have many - beliefs in God, that is.

5th Aug 2007 : Where last year a fluffy thriller would do, this summer seems to have been set aside for serious reading by holiday-going MPs. A survey of the books they have packed in their travel bags suggests that they are more interested in the abolition of the slave trade or whether God exists, than in lighter subjects such as the adventures of teenage wizards.

2nd Aug 2007 : When the next US presidential debate airs, voters should swiftly reject any
candidates who flaunt their scientific illiteracy, says Lawrence Krauss

22nd Jul 2007 : THE probing about his Mormon beliefs has by now become familiar to the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But when Mary Van Steenis, a teacher at a local Christian school, took the microphone at a recent "Ask Mitt Anything" forum in Pella, Iowa, to ask her question, it still felt as if some sort of unspoken boundary of social etiquette had been breached.

20th Jul 2007 : The most unpredictable presidential race for a generation is well under way in the US, and so far, issues of personal faith have never been far from the headlines.

18th Jul 2007 : Among the most durable myths of American public life is that conservatives are more authentic in their religious faith than liberals and progressives. Certainly this arrogant presumption prevails on the religious right, where commentators and politicians routinely denigrate the sincerity of Christians such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, whose irredeemable sin is that they also happen to be Democrats and candidates for president.

16th Jul 2007 : GORDON Brown is under pressure to block a £75million "mega mosque", amid claims one of the suspected Glasgow Airport bombers belongs to the radical Islamic group behind it.

14th Jul 2007 : In Pakistan, the bloody battle between the government and the Taliban wannabes holed up in the Lal Masjid "Red Mosque" is over, with hundreds dead, including Maulana Abdul Ghazi, one of the two brothers who mobilized radical students to push for Islamic revolution. But the aftermath is tense. Will President Musharraf's decision to crack down inflame tensions between the fundamentalists and the state, or convince the jihadis that martyrdom is overrated? The importance of the question can hardly be overstated. Pakistan has the bomb.

13th Jul 2007 : The sight of a Hindu clergyman saying the US senate's traditional morning prayer was too much for members of a Christian group, who yesterday tried to shout him down before being arrested.

13th Jul 2007 : IN A BRIEF ceremony in the East Room of the White House on June 2, President Bush vetoed legislation permitting federally funded embryonic stem cell research, declaring, "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical."

12th Jul 2007 : Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona's testimony has once again highlighted the extent to which the Bush administration suppresses and manipulates science to fit their narrow ideological view. Whether it's stem cell research, global warming, the Plan B contraceptive, or abstinence-only education, they consistently put appeasing their extremist, fringe base over the interests of the country at large. CNN's Christine Romans details the many battles in Bush's War on Science.

11th Jul 2007 : Looking for God? Well this is where best to find Him in America.

8th Jul 2007 : COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa, July 3 — Dell Collins teaches an adult Sunday school class at his evangelical church in central Iowa, and he recently took his students through a series of lessons on the Book of James and its repeated exhortations to put faith into action.

27th Jun 2007 : Today, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke at Pat Robertson's Regent University. In the opening of his speech, he congratulated Robertson for the "influence" Regent has.

26th Jun 2007 : The government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.

25th Jun 2007 : Supporters of President George W Bush say it's one of his greatest achievements: encouraging religious organisations to help with the provision of basic social services.

25th Jun 2007 : (MADISON, WIS.) The U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision today in Hein v. FFRF granting the executive branch the freedom to violate the separation of church and state without court review spells "imperial presidency," charges the Freedom From Religion Foundation.