Culture
Are we better off without religion? | Sue Blackmore | guardian.co.uk
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Popular religious belief is caused by dysfunctional social conditions. This is the conclusion of the latest sociological research pdf conducted by Gregory Paul. Far from religion benefiting societies, as the “moral-creator socioeconomic hypothesis” would have it, popular religion is a psychological mechanism for coping with high levels of stress and anxiety – or so he [...]
9Dec2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
White House Pushes Science and Math Education - NYTimes.com
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By KENNETH CHANG
Published: November 22, 2009
To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.
President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle [...]
Row erupts over humanist poster in Belfast
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THE war of words between atheists and religious believers has entered a new chapter with the launch of Northern Ireland’s first ever humanist advertising campaign.
The British Humanist Association (BHA) yesterday unveiled a billboard with the slogan:
Please Don’t Label Me. Let Me Grow Up And Choose For Myself.
Located on one Belfast’s busiest routes, the poster is [...]
BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Girls ‘becoming Facebook addicts’
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Parents fear their daughters are becoming addicted to social networking sites, a girls’ school leader says.
Girls seem to be “permanently connected” to sites like Facebook and Bebo, president of the Girls’ Schools Association Jill Berry said.
This issue now tops the list of parents’ worries by some way, she told the association’s annual conference.
Mrs Berry also [...]
Skeptic » Reading Room » A Tribute to Carl Sagan: Our Place in the Universe
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Carl Sagan was a scholar and a visionary. He changed the world. His work still does. As I think back on the time I got to spend in his classes, I realize now what made him the best science communicator of his day. He loved discovery, he encouraged exploration, and he celebrated science. That last [...]
17Nov2009 | will | 0 comments | Continued
Godless Children and the Future of Atheism: Raising Godless Children - How Can Godless Parents Today Affect the Future of Atheism?
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Question:
What does raising children in a godless, irreligious environment mean for the future of atheism in America?
Response:
It’s a simple fact that the godless children being raised by atheists today are likely to be at the forefront of atheism in the future. What’s not so simple is what godless parents are going to do about this [...]
Red Bull Faces German Ban Following Positive Cocaine Test
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Red Bull Faces German Ban Following Positive Cocaine Test - International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News - FOXNews.com
BERLIN — Six German states have told retailers to stop selling Red Bull Cola energy drinks after a test found a trace amount of cocaine.
The bans started Friday after [...]
Woman who sees Christ in snack may put it on eBay | The Reason Project
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Woman who sees Christ in snack may put it on eBay | The Reason Project
Preston Hollow resident Sara Bell recently stopped by this newspaper’s office with a unique discovery: a Cheeto that she thinks looks like Jesus.
Bell came across the strange snack a few weeks ago while she and her husband, Dan, were driving home [...]
‘Faith Fighters’ Developers Launch Sequel to Controversial Game
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A team of game developers has put back on its Web site a video game that pits major religious figures such as Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha against one another in head-to-head combat.
On top of that, they have also added a sequel to “Faith Fighters” that “teaches the universal values of tolerance and respect,” though most [...]
Not a very bright idea
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When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Sun newspaper, a British tabloid, took to calling him ‘Bambi’, presumably in the hope that the nickname would become established in the public consciousness. It did not, of course, for it lacked any kind of resonance with what people could believe about [...]
9May2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
An Amazon tribe converts the missionary
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By Lynn Harnett
April 12, 2009 6:00 AM
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Daniel L. Everett
Pantheon
The Pirahã are the “Show me!” tribe of the Brazilian Amazon. They don’t bother with fiction or tall tales or even oral history. They have little art. They don’t have a creation myth and don’t want [...]
23Apr2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss
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Author Bruce Sterling is one of the most respected writers of science fiction. He is also a web activist, columnist, teacher and one of the most anticipated speakers at the South by South West Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, at which he will give a talk entitled: The state of the Cybersphere.
The difficulty with interviewing [...]
More Americans say they have no religion
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Study finds percentage of Christians in the nation has declined
A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.
Fifteen percent of respondents [...]
The Fight for the Soul of Secularism
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The “old” New Atheism consists of writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and, of course, Christopher Hitchens. It was Hitchens’ mega-best seller in 2007, God is Not Great, that brought atheism to mass consciousness in a way previously unknown in America. All of the New Atheists placed opposition to religion at the heart of [...]
5Mar2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Evil Gays, Atheists Force Scouts into Unethical Logging
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The Boy Scouts of America are supposed to teach boys the virtues of understanding and properly caring for nature. They may not be quite an “environmentalist” organization, but they have portrayed themselves as generally “conservationist” for promoting a better appreciation for nature. All the while, though, Boy Scout troops have been making lots of money [...]
27Feb2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Do People of all Cultures Believe in Free Will?
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Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before. So the things that happened at the very beginning of the universe caused the things that happened next, which caused the things that happened after that… right up until the present day. Now imagine that human decision making [...]
25Jan2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Roger Ebert Watches Ben Stein’s “Expelled” So You Don’t Have To
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And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary [...]
15Jan2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Learn Resilience and Endurance from Nature
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Pantheism, unlike many other belief systems, provides its practitioners
with an earthly understanding of how species cope with
crisis. As humans we sometimes separate ourselves from the
natural world, believing that the rules of nature do not apply to
us. Fact of the matter is that what we require to survive are the
very same things that other species require [...]
UK housewives rule in online time
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A survey of more than 27,000 web users in 16 countries has shown that the Chinese spend the largest fraction of their leisure time online.
However, UK housewives spend even more than China’s average - 47%.
Germans are the most likely to meet someone in real life that they first met online; more than three quarters have [...]
Breaking up With God
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The most damaging relationship I ever had in my life, was the one with religion. Born into a fundamentalist christian family, I knew that being gay was bad, before I even had a chance to think about what being gay was. When I was in middle school, I began to question my sexuality, but I [...]
29Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
An Atheist’s Thoughts At Christmas
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As your atheist husband/son/friend/uncle (etc…), I promise to help you when you need help, love you when you need love, challenge you when you need to be challenged, forgive you when you ask for it, ask for forgiveness when I need to, and be there for you in any other way I possibly can.
I [...]
Kenneth Hutcherson: Let Them Sleep on the Streets & Starve
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One of the positive aspects of Christianity is supposed to be its teachings about charity and providing for the less fortunate in society. Many Christian apologists regularly tout this as a reason why atheists are wrong to argue for an end to religion (as if charity wouldn’t exist without their religion) and, to be perfectly [...]
21Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Priest: Playboy cover resembling Mary ‘desperate,’ ‘blasphemous’
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Playboy magazine issued an apology Monday for the cover of its Mexican edition, which features an Argentine model in what many observers say is meant to be a depiction of the Virgin Mary.
Playboy Mexico has said the cover was not meant to portray the Virgin Mary, despite being printed just days before the Feast of [...]
Amazing Water Show
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19Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
Rick Gervais on Atheism and More
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One of the new pieces of stand-up material that Gervais will be airing this month ridicules - hot in the footsteps of Eddie Izzard’s riff on the same subject - the inherent implausibility of Noah’s Ark. ‘I’ll be reading from a children’s version of Noah that I was awarded when I was four years old [...]
8Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedTranslate
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The Center for Naturalism
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Snapshot of the International Space Station
On March 13, 2008, the International Space Station passed across the field-of-view of Germany's remote sensing satellite, TerraSAR-X, at a distance of 195 kilometers, or 122 miles, and at a relative speed of 34,540 kilometers per hour, or more than 22,000 mph. In contrast to optical cameras, radar does not 'see' surfaces. Instead, it is much more aware of the edges and corners which bounce back the microwave signal it transmits. Smooth surfaces such as those on the station's solar generators or the radiator panels used to dissipate excess heat, unless directly facing the radar antenna, tend to deflect rather than reflect the radar beam, causing these features to appear on the radar image as dark areas. The radar image of the station therefore looks like a dense collection of bright spots from which the outlines of the space station can be clearly identified. The central element on the station, to which all the modules are docked, has a grid structure that presents a multiplicity of reflecting surfaces to the radar beam, making it readily identifiable. This image has a resolution of about one meter (about 39 inches). In other words, objects can be depicted as discrete units--that is, shown separately--provided that they are at least one meter apart. If they are closer together than that, they tend to merge into a single block on a radar image. Since this image was taken, the station has expanded and is more than 90 percent complete, including a full complement of solar arrays. Image Credit: DLR
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