29th Dec 2008 : Next year's anniversaries of this great British scientist must explore beyond the usual squabbling over faith

29th Dec 2008 : Since this is the season for warmed up leftovers and presents not entirely appreciated, I thought I would try to define the New Atheism that I, and others, so dislike.

27th Dec 2008 : It is neither emotionally nor spiritually deficient to reject religions that seek to infantilise us with impossible beliefs

26th Dec 2008 : God has had a lot of bad press recently. The four horsemen of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, have all published books sharply critical of belief in God...

20th Dec 2008 : As long as religion is a danger to the lives and liberties of others, secular liberals will never relent in their protests

20th Dec 2008 : The comedian tells how the Oxford don and evolutionary biologist made him question his faith

18th Dec 2008 : The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas.

7th Dec 2008 : Britain has become an "unfriendly" place for religious people to live, according to the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

30th Nov 2008 : I am convinced that this injection of atheism into the culture is directly responsible for the increase in drug-abuse, in crime and, most specifically, in the five-fold increase in suicide that we have seen in these islands over the last 25 years.

24th Nov 2008 : While people still cling to beliefs from the dark ages, more scientists must publicly defend rational, secular society

22nd Nov 2008 : Proposition 8 passed because of religious folk. There is no question about it.

14th Nov 2008 : Karen Armstrong, a religious thinker I can admire and support, has begun a project called the "Charter for Compassion." The aim of the project, as far as I can tell while observing it in its initial stages, is to promote the golden rule.

5th Nov 2008 : The Obama presidency is great news for almost everyone. It's bad news for some odd ideological bedfellows: the Religious Right and the so-called New Atheists.

30th Oct 2008 : All the signs are there: religion will die. I'm just sorry I won't be around to see it

27th Oct 2008 : When we are young we use our fantasy world of magic and myth to grapple with fears about life, death and danger

23rd Oct 2008 : It's the smell I remember. Shahnaz's face – what was left of it – reeked of a day-old barbecue, left out in the rain.

19th Oct 2008 : AC Grayling and the Council of Ex-Muslims are distorting the picture and undermining efforts to bring change

19th Oct 2008 : At a gathering of courageous ex-Muslims, the value of rational thought and personal choice were triumphantly reaffirmed.

17th Oct 2008 : Skeptics unite: You have nothing to lose but your inhibitions.

17th Oct 2008 : This is the Apocalypse of St. Bill the Stoned.

11th Oct 2008 : "A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently.

6th Oct 2008 : Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion has been a phenomenon. Taking even its author by surprise, it has outstripped all expectations and has been a run-away best-seller for many months.

2nd Oct 2008 : When you see yobs bullying or beating someone up, should you go to the victim's assistance? News of Frank McGarahan's death at the weekend while trying to do just that prompts a mixed reaction: we admire his courage; but his tragic death adds to the fear that inhibits many people from helping others.

28th Sept 2008 : In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins boasted that he once told a child that Santa Claus didn't exist. The argument was that Santa couldn't possibly visit all the world's deserving homes in a single night, quite apart from the physical difficulties of flying reindeer, narrow chimney stacks, and so on.

13th Sept 2008 : These narcissistic adolescent halfwits should not fill us with fear, says Rod Liddle. The aircraft plot trial showed yet again that those who wish to murder us with fizzy pop and peroxide are a bunch of cowards

12th Sept 2008 : Teachers need to accommodate the differing world views of students from Jewish, Christian or Muslim backgrounds - which means openly discussing creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolutionary theory

31th Aug 2008 :

22nd Aug 2008 : As the Channel 4 series The Genius of Charles Darwin drew to an end on Monday, the usual chorus of insults reined down on the head of its star, Richard Dawkins. Despite the fact that Dawkins went out of his way to avoid bad-tempered arguments or overt proselytising on atheism, his critics saw only what they wanted to see - and often that was not what appeared on the screen.

14th Aug 2008 : This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

7th Aug 2008 : It's not a simple choice between God and evolution: none of us can know that there is nothing out there

20th Jul 2008 : On 1st November 2007, Professor Antony Flew's new book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind was published by HarperOne. Professor Flew has been called 'the world's most influential philosophical atheist', as well as 'one of the most renowned atheists of the 20th Century' (see Peter S. Williams' bethinking.org article "A change of mind for Antony Flew"). In his book, Professor Flew recounts how he has come to believe in a Creator God as a result of the scientific evidence and philosophical argument.

16th Jul 2008 : Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried 'Ecrasez l'infâme!'. Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and which thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud and strident in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany. The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently? Surely, those who oppose religion in the name of gentleness have a duty to be gentle, even with – especially with – their foes?

7th Jul 2008 : I believe in God. It seems that this isn't a very popular thing to admit lately what with Dawkins, Hitchens and others repeatedly naming religion as the root of all evil.

3rd Jul 2008 : In a moment, I am going to say some words, and I want to know if you begin to drift into a coma. The periodic table. Bunsen burner. Photosynthesis. Eyelids heavy yet? Teat pipette. Petri dishes of mould. Magnezzzzzzzium.

1st Jul 2008 : There is a surprising - and encouraging - gap in the government's new Equality Bill, which I columnized on yesterday. Discrimination on the basis of age, race, gender and sexuality will be outlawed - but not discrimination on the basis of religion.

27th Jun 2008 : We owe it to our children.

19th Jun 2008 : The problem with using scientists' words to support religious beliefs.

14th Jun 2008 : Why is faith still so important in the modern world? How has it confounded the many thinkers and commentators who, for the past 200 years and more, have predicted that religion would wither away and die? Why, on the contrary, is faith still flourishing?

18th May 2008 : Larry Buttrose still marvels at the hypocrisy of a system he says violated generations of Catholic children.

16th May 2008 : This storm in a teapot deserves little time or attention from me, and less from anyone else, so I hope this can be the last word.

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.