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Minnesota Atheists are taking their message to the air waves with a new radio program that will debut in January on the talk station Air America Minnesota. Called "Atheists Talk" -- the same name as a show the organization airs on cable access television -- the live radio broadcast featuring news, interviews, listener call-ins and special guests is believed to be the first show of its kind in Minnesota, said August Berkshire, a spokesman for the Minnesota Atheists. The show will air Sundays from 9 to 10 a.m. on AM 950 starting Jan. 13 when Oxford professor, evolutionary biologist and...

Christian kids are typically sent to Sunday school for lessons on the Bible and morals. For nonbelievers, there's atheist Sunday school. With an estimated 14 percent of Americans professing to have no religion, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies, some are choosing to send their children to classes that teach ethics without religious belief. Bri Kneisley sent her 10-year-old son, Damian, to Camp Quest Ohio this past summer after a neighbor had shown him the Bible. "Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared," said Kneisley, who...

(IsraelNN.com) Professor Richard Dawkins, a senior British evolutionary scientist and outspoken atheist, drew fire on Monday for saying that Jews “more or less monopolize American foreign policy.” Religious Jews are a small group, Dawkins said, but are “fantastically successful” in lobbying the US government. Dawkins, who is currently in the US in an attempt to promote atheism and fight religious influence, expressed hope that atheists would be similarly successful in determining government policy. A number of Jewish leaders responded immediately, with ADL head Abe Foxman calling Dawkin’s remarks “classic anti-Semitism.” Malcom Hoenlein, a senior official in the Conference of Presidents...

Our most celebrated atheist, the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, has briefly turned his attention away from bashing people who believe in God. Instead, he is about to bash people who subscribe to 'new age' therapies which he says are based on 'irrational superstition'. In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, 'angel therapists', 'aura photographers', astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from...

I'm so worried about Richard Dawkins' daughter, Juliet. I shake my head. Shake, shake. Why does he set himself up this way? Perhaps we can help. I've made similar gaffes. Christians are fairly good at driving their children away, but it breaks the heart to see secularists following the path. Here is some of what Richard wrote Juliet when she was just ten. Ten. He did sign it, "Your loving Daddy." That was good. Love is good. Just before that, though, he exhorted her, "Next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: `What kind...

In July 1941, a political prisoner escaped from Auschwitz. As a punishment, ten others were chosen by the Nazis to be killed in a starvation bunker. One of these men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began lamenting what his death would mean for his wife and children. Upon hearing these cries, another prisoner, a Franciscan friar named Maksymilian Kolbe—who had run afoul of the Nazis after sheltering refugees, including hundreds of Jews, at his friary—volunteered to take Gajowniczek’s place and was sent to the starvation bunker in his stead. In the bunker, Kolbe became the leader of those awaiting death, whom he was...

While many Americans know Oxford professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for The Selfish Gene, the 1976 science bestseller that portrayed all life as a struggle to propagate DNA, they may be less familiar with his other identity as a crusading atheist. Yet last fall Dawkins made news with a new book, The God Delusion, dismissing all religious faith as “insanity.” Arguing that “natural selection and other scientific theories are superior to a God hypothesis in explaining the living world,” Dawkins says he wrote the book as a “consciousness-raising exercise,” in the hope that “religious believers who open it will...

Years ago I had a series of debates with the literary scholar Stanley Fish. Our topic was political correctness. I portrayed Fish as the grand deconstructor of Western civilization, and he fired back in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, several chapters of which are an answer to my arguments. As I got to know Fish, however, I recognized that although he defended some of the practices being promoted in the name of multiculturalism and diversity, he was not himself a politically correct thinker. We became friends, and in 1992 he and his wife attended my wedding. Fish has...

C.S. Lewis, the former atheist and famous Oxford scholar, once said "Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...." There are a myriad of eminent scholars (like Lewis) who understand the folly of atheism. I will list a few others in this second part of my treatise to expose atheists' agenda to ban Christianity from the courts of culture. In my last article I discussed "step 1" of their plan. In this discourse I will address steps 2 & 3. Step two: target...

ROOT OF ALL EVIL? THE God Delusion - based on Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion - is the best documentary I've ever seen. And, I imagine, will ever see. No jokes. No smart-arse cracks. No witty asides. Dawkins is a scientist and passionate atheist who has produced a stunning, thoroughly researched and expertly executed work that flatly denies the existence of God and illustrates what a destructive force religion is. Even in its mildest form. This provocative and entertaining ride will have some believers coming out the other end as atheists. And every Bible basher, Torah toter and Koran...

Every generation has a few atheists who seem eager to tell the world how much smarter they are than everybody else.  The fact that such individuals still exist, and that they are still producing popular tracts in defense of their disbelief, is no surprise.  Nevertheless, because ideas have consequences, one cannot ignore the recent push by big-name skeptics to persuade Americans that there is no God and that we should therefore adopt a new set of ethical standards.  In previous times, most people had a solid enough understanding of moral truth that they were not easily persuaded by atheist...

There is scant reporting on the anti-religious zeal with which many atheists promote Darwinism. February 12 used to be known in classrooms across the nation as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. But over the last decade, an increasing number of schools and community groups have decided to celebrate the birthday of the father of evolution instead. The movement to establish February 12 as “Darwin Day” seems to be spreading, promoted by a evangelistic non-profit group with its own website (www.darwinday.org) and an ambitious agenda to create a “global celebration in 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the...

Scientists' interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design. . . . Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length...

In bestselling books, on websites, and with a national lobbying effort, atheists and other nontheists are challenging the growing religious influence in government and public life. Some are attacking the foundations of religion itself. Two particularly provocative books, in fact, hit the top of Publishers Weekly's religion bestseller list in December. No. 1, "The God Delusion," by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and No. 2, "Letter to a Christian Nation," by writer Sam Harris, are no-holds-barred, antireligion polemics that call for the eradication of all manifestations of faith. "I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever...

This time of year makes atheists especially cranky; O Little Town of Bethlehem, played in a shopping mall, does nothing to lift the spirits of an unbeliever. But even by seasonal standards, the letters attracted by my column last week on The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, demonstrate astonishing vehemence. They leave the impression that atheists are sensitive about their non belief and easily hurt by criticism. A friend of mine, who used to run a radio program about religion, noted recently that "militant atheists were our most intolerant and angry listeners." The atheists I've lately heard from bring such...

Reviewers have not been kind to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, professor of something called "the public understanding of science" at Oxford. Critics have found it to be the atheist's mirror image of Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism - long on in-your-face rhetoric and offensively dismissive of all those holding an opposing view. Princeton University philosopher Thomas Nagel found Dawkins's "attempts at philosophy, along with a later chapter on religion and ethics, particularly weak." Prof. Terry Eagleton began his London Review of Books critique: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is...

In the downstairs loo of Richard Dawkins’s house in Oxford there’s a framed award from the Royal Society; to remind visitors, or maybe Richard himself, that here lives a man of some purpose, some gravitas and intellectual clout. ... he holds the Simonyi chair in the public understanding of science at Oxford University. ... He is probably more famous these days for kicking God around than for the hard science of his earlier work (a fact he accepts, with some misgivings); he is our most belligerent and brilliant atheist. Show him a deity — Jehovah, Allah, Sat Guru, whoever —...

by Dinesh D'Souza - Republished with his permission. In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as End of Faith author Sam Harris puts it, "the most potent source of human conflict, past and present." Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. "The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries."In his bestseller The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins contends that most of the world's recent conflicts — in the Middle East,...

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

How do you answer critics who say your book ignores the evils of anti-religious ideologies such as Stalinism? It's a misunderstanding. I never simply list evil deeds by evil people. There are evil deeds done by the non-religious as well as the religious. But that's not really the point. The point is whether religious faith is more likely to make people evil — and I suspect it is. Of course, not every religious person does bad things. But I think if you are brought up to think there is something called faith that cannot be questioned, and that it is...