Free Republic

Did you know that the English-speaking world is in the midst of an Atheistic revival? It is fueled by a small but widely celebrated group of authors and thinkers who call themselves “the Brights”, and who lecture, debate and write best-selling books which have a wide following among young college and University students. These are not your father’s atheists either. They are articulate, impassioned, and effective at the use of the media, and the internet. The “new Atheists” believe that the old atheists were too tolerant of religion, and not aggressive enough in their attacks upon it. To them, religion...

As an aside to their article Atheism Appears to be Significantly Less Appealing to Women; Conservapedia notes that atheism is primarily a young white male phenomenon: More evidence that atheists quite often tend to be white, unmarried, socially challenged nerds! An atheists' meeting was organized in the United States concerning the future direction of the atheist movement and 370 people attended. The New York Times described the attendees as "The largely white and male crowd — imagine a Star Trek convention, but older..."1 For more information, please see Atheism appears to be significantly less appealing to women…Survey data and website...

Reza Aslan is no stranger to controversy: Iraq should look to Israel for a model that combines democracy and religious belief. But now the Daily Beast columnist is taking on the “new atheists” and their “peculiarly evangelistic” sermons. On The Washington Post’s website he states: There is, as has often been noted, something peculiarly evangelistic about what has been termed the new atheist movement. The new atheists have their own special interest groups and ad campaigns. They even have their own holiday (International Blasphemy Day). It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins,...

The Anti-Defamation League, the country's leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers?...

For the opening interview on Friday's Real Time, leftist talk show host Bill Maher interviewed fellow secularist Sam Harris, noted author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris was on to promote his new 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation The Reason Project, of which Maher is a member of the advisory board.I was delighted by this opening interview. In the summer of 2007 I wrote a three-part series on the "New Atheists" for WTHR. I interviewed secularists, believers, and those who find themselves falling somewhere between the two. I end up in the third category, thus I...

The so-called New Atheists are attacking the mantra of science and faith being compatible. Others in the science community question the value of confrontation.This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will inform and regale us with the stunning "evidence for evolution," as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United...

FP: Tell us about some of the vital contradictions you have found in the atheist position. Alexis: Let us start with Richard Dawkins, because he claims to follow logic and reason. In chapter two of The God Delusion, he writes, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Those are interesting words—coming from the pen of a person who believes that God does not exist,...