atheism

Why finding the middle ground between purely secular materialism and crazy religious fanaticism has never been more important

Readers write on senior’s discounts, atheism, and Rob Ford

Emma Teitel on the problem of modern atheism

Egyptian atheist Alber Saber is today out of jail, free on bail pending the results of an appeal against a three-year-sentence imposed on him last week for blasphemy and contempt of religion.

Hugo Chávez looks to Castro for care, J-Lo and Marc Anthony call it quits, and Shaq gets a new job

If there was a God, he wouldn’t let me post this.

Squabbling persists over who’s smarter, liberals or conservatives. Maybe a better question is: who cares?

A Beltway colleague attempts a contrarian defence of Fox News panelist Brit Hume, who aroused widespread wrath a week ago by suggesting that troubled Tiger Woods should abandon Buddhism because it doesn’t offer “the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” The Hume imbroglio is funny when viewed from the standpoint of the convinced atheist: if you regard the major religions as a buffet of indistinguishably nonsensical self-help regimens, Hume’s “proselytizing” appears no more dangerous than recommending some particular book about sex addiction or suggesting that Tiger go on a program of Graham crackers and cold showers. Hume was asked what he thinks Woods ought to do, and gave his best answer. What is objectionable about this?

The year’s most heated feuds

We were delighted this afternoon to find some rare vintage Barbara Kay on the National Post‘s Full Comment blog, where she suggests that “belief in God is a prophylactic against superstition.” (This, surely, is one of the more mind-boggling contentions an atheist is ever likely to read.) Kay’s evidence comes (second-hand) from a new book from the Baylor University Press, What Americans Really Believe, which is based largely on the absolutely fascinating survey data collected by Gallup on behalf of the university’s Institute for Studies of Religion. We haven’t read the book, we should stress—though we’ve gone through much of component data from the 2006 survey, which is available on the Institute’s website—and neither has Kay. She acknowledges that she’s getting her data from “a review in the September 19th Wall Street Journal,” by which we can only conclude she means an opinion column by one Mollie Ziegler Hemingway.