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Police have released CCTV images of a white gunman who shot dead nine people in a cold-blooded race-hate crime at an African-American church in South Carolina on Wednesday night.

Father’s Day, that wonderful occasion when we celebrate our dads, is a time when all of us who have terrific dads need to feel sorry for atheists. It’s not such a happy day for them. That’s the take-away from a book called Faith of the Fatherless: the Psychology of Atheism by psychology professor Paul Vitz who examines the lives of militant atheists and concludes that at the heart of their disbelief lies a disappointing and sometimes abusive experience with the atheist’s earthly dad. Having felt no love from their own dads, they just can’t believe in a God the Father...

Email Print Anne Nicol Gaylor, one of the founders of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, died Sunday. Gaylor, 88, formed the group with her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor in 1976 in Madison and is credited with expanding the small group to a large national association of atheists and agnostics while serving as its president from 1978 to 2004. The foundation often courted controversy and filed lawsuits challenging religion in schools, government and social programs. She died at a Fitchburg hospice after she was hospitalized May 30 following a fall at her Madison apartment, according to a news release posted Monday...

Monckton said that Schnellnhuber will be standing by the side of Pope Francis when they announce the encyclical next week. “The fact that Schnellnhuber is going to be there is an extremely bad sign,” he declared.

Sometimes it feels like the whole world is collapsing around us. It’s not. But you can see why it looks like it is. • Ireland rejected what every major religion and every major civilization in history has said about marriage. (Marriage is the state’s protection and encouragement of potential parents. Marriage in Ireland is the state’s registry of “official” sexual partners.) • In America, public opinion has changed drastically to reject commonsense morality: big majorities say you can kill yourself through physician-assisted suicide, turn your descendants into science projects through embryonic research, and that pretty much any kind of sex with...

Is there nobody of any intellectual stature left in our English church, or the Roman church, to frame the argument against same-sex marriage? I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature. Moses had come down from Mount Sinai bringing God’s commandments...

Imagine a president of the United States proclaiming in his or her inaugural address, “I do not believe in God. I do not believe in a hereafter…There is no hope, save in ourselves.” If something like that ever happens, writer Jeffrey Tayler’s dream will have come true. Tayler, who routinely trashes religion for the liberal online magazine Salon, complained in a Sunday article that several recent announcements of presidential candidacies have brought about “a media carnival featuring, on both sides, an array of supposedly God-fearing clowns and faith-mongering nitwits groveling before Evangelicals and nattering on about their belief in the...

This Season of Unreason will end with the elections of November 2016, but its consequences – validation of the idea that belief without evidence is a virtue, that religion, and especially Christianity, deserves a place in our politics, our Constitutionally enshrined secularism notwithstanding – will live on and damage the progressive cause. But it does not have to be this way. There will almost certainly be no (declared) atheist or even agnostic among the candidates. This is scandalous, given the electorate’s gradual, relentless ditching of religion. A survey just out shows that 7.5 million Americans have abandoned their faith since...

Atheists should drop their easily dismissed scientific, philosophical or historical arguments against Christianity, and instead quiz believers about Old Testament violence and hell, writes John Dickson.

Who Are the Atheists? [excerpts] For reporting purposes at Barna, we often combine atheists and agnostics into one group, which we call skeptics. Skeptics either do not believe God exists (atheists) or are not sure God exists, but are open to the possibility (agnostics). Skeptics represent one-quarter of all unchurched adults (25%). Nearly one-third of skeptics have never attended a Christian church service in their lives (31%). That’s nearly double the proportion of “virgin unchurched” who are not skeptics (17%)... Five Demographic Shifts among Skeptics They are younger. Skeptics today are, on average, younger than in the past. Twenty years...

Who says you can’t make money off religion, even if you aren’t a believer yourself? After all, isn’t that what some of the most famous Evangelical Christians do? You might think that an atheist selling Bibles is a contradiction in terms, and definitely an oxymoron, and you might be right. However, that hasn’t stopped Trevor McKendrick from making $100,000 a year selling the “Word of God.” The whole Bible-selling thing all started for Trevor back in February 2012 when he was out for dinner with his family and learned that a relative of his was making $8,000 to $10,000 a...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - North Carolina prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a man who police say kept detailed notes on parking at his condominium complex before gunning down three young Muslims in a neighboring unit, according to documents released on Monday. Craig Hicks, 46, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the Feb. 10 shooting deaths of a newlywed couple and the wife's sister about two miles from the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill.

David Barton critics beware: There’s now a price to pay if you want to defame the popular historian, author and speaker with false and outlandish charges. Barton won a $1 million defamation judgment in August against two left-leaning candidates for the Texas State Board of Education. The pair, Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Judy Jennings, charged in a 2010 campaign video that Barton, a consultant to the Board, was “known for speaking at white-supremacist rallies.” That highly charged claim stems from two 1991 speeches Barton gave to groups linked to the racist and anti-Semitic “Christian Identity” movement. Barton, recognized as a strong...

Do you find it difficult to believe in God or accept the claims of Christianity? I did, when I was an atheist, but I changed my mind, and my reasons for doing so may be of interest to you in your own personal journey and attempts to make sense of life. I am a freelance writer and lecturer. Since graduating from Oxford in 1973, with a degree in politics and philosophy, I have spent most of my professional life in politics and journalism, loving, as I do, the world of books, ideas and debate. Two questions in particular have always...

Dawkins: Islam is ‘one of the great evils in the world’ February 9, 2011Acharya S/D.M. Murdock470 Comments Richard Dawkins (Photo: Cstreet/Christopher G. Street, Bransgore, Dorset, England, UK)Richard Dawkins says it outright. One wonders why so few other atheists are speaking out in the same way. Note that he does not hasten to qualify his comment by saying, “Islamic extremism” or “radical Islam.” Dawkins: “I’m reasonably optimistic in America and Europe. I’m pessimistic about the Islamic world. I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and I fear that we have a very difficult struggle there.” Narrator:...

Censor of the Year: Neil deGrasse Tyson Broadcast His Photoshopped Narrative of Science to Millions David Klinghoffer February 12, 2015 2:58 AM | Permalink Today is Darwin Day, celebrated by us as Academic Freedom Day. That means it's time to announce the winner of this year's Censor of the Year Award. As you already know from the headline, our recipient is Neil deGrasse Tyson. COTY, as it's called for short, recognizes achievement in thwarting an open and informed discussion of science and scientific controversies. It is a serious thing -- since censorship is serious and often but not always casting...

A man who posted anti-religious sentiments online has been arrested after three Muslim students were shot dead close to the University of North Carolina campus on Tuesday. Craig Stephen Hicks, who describes himself as a vehement supporter of atheism, has been charged with three counts of murder after the trio were shot dead in Meadowmont around 5pm. Dentistry student Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, of Chapel Hill, his new wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, of Chapel Hill and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh, all died. Hicks, 46, of Chapel Hill, turned himself in 'without incident' and is currently being...

Creation Conversion: From Atheist to Creationist by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. * I have always loved science, partly due to the influence of my engineer father, who was heavily involved in research and development. While growing up, my free-time diet consisted of Mr. Wizard, Disney nature films, and doing science experiments. At Wayne State University, where I earned my bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees, I was exposed to evolution. Influenced by my atheist father and my professors, I accepted this worldview, as did most of my peers. We also accepted the atheist philosophy that came with it. The university invited a...

I come from a Jewish family hardwired to Socialist ideas and to atheism for four generations. The last one in my lineage to believe in God must have died in the beginning of the last century. Christmas is to me a date with no special significance, even though I have learned to respect those who celebrate the birth of Jesus. But I wish to take the opportunity of this Christmas Eve to make a confession. A year and a half ago, I wrote for Opera Mundi one of the most flawed articles of my journalistic career. The title says it...

And the bells chimed for victory at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. The so-called War on Christmas, says overpaid bloviator Bill O’Reilly, has been won by his god-fearing, flag-flourishing side. “We won the war,” the Fox News personality proclaimed last week. “I have to confess, you know, I’m like a guerrilla fighter in the War on Christmas…We did this War on Christmas thing for about 10 years. This is the first year I didn’t get one call or letter saying, ‘This store has said it won’t say [“Merry Christmas”].’” Hallelujah.