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Oprah and the AtheistsTrent Horn October 23, 2013 | Members of the atheist community are outraged, but not at their usual targets, such as conservative politicians or pastors. Instead, they have set their sights on Oprah Winfrey.This past weekend on her show Super Soul Sunday, Oprah interviewed Diana Nyad, the 64-year-old marathon swimmer, to discuss her amazing feat of swimming from Cuba to Florida in 53 hours. During the course of the interview the following exchange occurred:Nyad: I can stand at the beach’s edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist, go on down the line, and weep with the...

As headlines go, it's certainly an eye-catching one. "Scientists Prove Existence of God," German daily Die Welt wrote last week. But unsurprisingly, there is a rather significant caveat to that claim. In fact, what the researchers in question say they have actually proven is a theorem put forward by renowned Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel -- and the real news isn't about a Supreme Being, but rather what can now be achieved in scientific fields using superior technology. When Gödel died in 1978, he left behind a tantalizing theory based on principles of modal logic -- that a higher being must...

The atheist community hailed last year’s scientific confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, for which the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs was co-recipient this past week of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Higgs had theorized, all the way back in 1964, that there must be something that gives subatomic particles their mass, which enables them to form atoms, which, in turn, form molecules, all of which is integral to creation as we know it. That something turned out to be the Higgs boson. And its discovery, declared Dan Barker, co-president of the so-called Freedom From Religion Foundation, an...

Self-proclaimed Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill has written a book in which he claims that Jesus was fabricated by a little-known group called the Flavians. He also claims he has some sort of “smoking gun” type of “confession” from these ancient people that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they entered into a conspiracy with the Roman government of the time to fabricate a character called Jesus as a “gentle Messiah” figure to wage psychological warfare on, and control, the masses so they would pay Caesar taxes without complaining. He is apparently going to present this evidence at a...

'Female figurines and inscribed prayers to a "divine couple" found in temples in Israel suggest that the “one God” of the Bible may not have been entirely alone. A recent excavation in Tel Motza, not far from Jerusalem, found what archaeologists believe to have been a ritual building - with clay figures of animals and men from the time of the First Temple, according to Israel's Haaretz news site. The find suggests that Iron Age religion in the area around Jerusalem may not have been monotheistic just before the time the Hebrew Bible – the basis of the Old Testament...

The little human being living inside a pregnant mother turns out to be a lot more capable than previously known. Kathy Drummond describes the research that led to the startling finding that newborns can recall words they heard in the womb in The Verge: ...new research offers provocative evidence that an unborn fetus can not only hear sounds from the outside world, but is actually capable of recalling specific words in the days following birth. In a study out of the University of Helsinki that builds on previous investigations, a team used EEG scans on 33 newborn babies to reach...

The "near-death experience" reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide may be grounded in science, according to research at the University of Michigan Health System. Whether and how the dying brain is capable of generating conscious activity has been vigorously debated. But in this week's PNAS Early Edition, a U-M study shows shortly after clinical death, in which the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain, rats display brain activity patterns characteristic of conscious perception. "This study, performed in animals, is the first dealing with what happens to the neurophysiological state of the dying brain," says lead study...

<p>JERUSALEM — Scientists using American space technology have started a huge project to digitally photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of the Hebrew Bible, and post it on the Internet for all to see, Israeli authorities said Wednesday.</p>

Campaigner who urged state of Maharashtra to pass anti-black magic bill killed by motorbike assailants in Pune A prominent campaigner against religious superstition has been shot and killed while out for a morning walk in the western Indian city of Pune. Narendra Dabholkar was at the forefront of a long-running campaign to ban superstitious religious practices by getting the state of Maharashtra to pass an anti black-magic bill. He died on Tuesday after being shot by two gunmen riding a motorcycle. Police said four shots were fired at Dabholkar from close range as the rider slowed behind him on a...

An American man, who woke up speaking Swedish but with no idea of his identity, has travelled to Sweden in the hope of restoring his memory. Michael Boatwright was discovered unconscious in a motel room in Palm Springs, California, in February.

Amid escalating violence against Egypt’s Copts, churches in Minya, located in upper Egypt, cancelled Sunday Mass for the first time in 1,600 years. Other churches in Minya also didn’t hold prayer services. "We did not hold prayers in the monastery on Sunday for the first time in 1,600 years,” Priest Selwanes Lotfy of the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram Monastery in Degla, just south of Minya, told the al-Masry al-Youm daily. He said supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi destroyed the monastery, which includes three churches, one of which is an archaeological site. “One of the extremists wrote on the...

Minya churches canceled on Sunday the second mass, holding only a brief one. Meanwhile, prayers did not take place at other churches which were attacked. Priest Selwanes Lotfy of the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram monastery in Degla, south of Minya, said, “We did not hold prayers in the monastery on Sunday for the first time in 1,600 years.”

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Raising the dead may soon become medical reality. According to critical care physician Sam Parnia, modern resuscitation science will soon allow doctors to reanimate people up to 24 hours after their death.At some point, everyone's heart will stop. For most, this is when they begin to die. Doctors succeed in very few cases at bringing the clinically dead back to life. However, more patients could be saved if medical professionals put existing knowledge about the treatment of cardiac arrest to better use, argues critical care physician Sam Parnia, 41, who is leading a revival of research in this field at...

In the new, liberated Egypt, leading imam Abu Islam explains that Christianity originated in penis worship:...

Reza Aslan, a religious scholar with a Ph.D. in the sociology of religions from the University of California and author of the new book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” went on FoxNews.com’s online show Spirited Debate to promote his book only to be prodded about why a Muslim would write a historical book about Jesus.

Reza Aslan, author of the new book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” has been interviewed on a host of media outlets in the last week. Riding a publicity wave, the book has surged to #2 on Amazon's list. Media reports have introduced Aslan as a “religion scholar” but have failed to mention that he is a devout Muslim. His book is not a historian’s report on Jesus. It is an educated Muslim’s opinion about Jesus -- yet the book is being peddled as objective history on national TV and radio. Aslan is not a trained historian.

SCIENCE has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a bit, then take it apart to see how it was put together. As I became older, I applied the same scrutiny to a movie projector and an antique automobile. At one point I became particularly intrigued by an old telescope, with which I would study the heavens. One night while looking at the moon I realized that there were shadows on its surface. I corralled my two main tutors to show...

Nothing like a good old anti-Semitic movie to watch after a long day of fasting for Ramadan. Get some popcorn, kick your feet up, and shout ‘Allahu Ackbar’ as Jews are getting their heads chopped off. Refreshing! CBN NEWS – Film makers are promoting an anti-Semitic mini-series on the Muslim massacre of Jews as “family entertainment” for Ramadan. During Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, families and friends share an evening meal and fellowship after fasting from dawn till dusk. The 30-day holiday began Tuesday, July 9, and ends Aug. 7. This year features a mini-series entitled Khaibar, referring to a...

He found the Titanic. Now Robert Ballard hunts the quarry of a lifetime July 21 issue — Ten thousand years ago, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake in the middle of a vast, low-lying basin. Its fertile valleys and lush pastures would have given Neolithic hunter-gatherers a perfect opportunity to make the leap to a more settled, agricultural society. But then disaster struck. ABOUT 7,500 YEARS ago the ice age ended, the world’s climate warmed and the seas rose. The Aegean Sea breached a narrow strip of land, where the Strait of Bosporus is today, like a dam bursting....

The Real Ten Commandments By Richard Carrier I keep hearing this chant, variously phrased: "The Ten Commandments are the foundation of Western morality and the American Constitution and government." In saying this, people are essentially crediting Moses with the invention of ethics, democracy and civil rights, a claim that is of course absurd. But its absurdity is eclipsed by its injustice, for there is another lawmaker who is far more important to us, whose ideas and actions lie far more at the foundation of American government, and whose own Ten Commandments were distributed at large and influencing the greatest civilizations...