1. Belief, God Genes, and the Findings of Science
(Religion/Atheism)

...; this despite the findings of modern science. The Christian and Muslim religion’s view of gays is a typical example where these holy instructions are kept in place in contradiction with modern ...

2. Next week, blasphemy gets its own holiday
(Religion/Atheism)

... Blasphemy Challenge (http://www.blasphemychallenge.com) by uploading their denials of faith to YouTube. A typical recording: “Hi, my name is Ray and I deny the Holy Spirit. (pause) No lightning...

3. Who Started the War on Christmas?
(Religion/Atheism)

... cable news cranks and evangelical moralists, the War on Christmas has become an annual outrage. The story typically goes as follows: secular elements have intimidated stores into replacing the phrase...

4. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda
(Religion/General)

...y for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf. Hence today I believe that I am ...

5. Study: Religion colors Americans' views of nanotechnology
(Religion/General)

...the design and production of materials, structures, devices and circuits at the smallest achievable scale, typically in the realm of individual atoms and molecules. The ability to engineer matter at t...

6. Exorcism undergoes a revival across Europe
(Religion/General)

...tute realized they needed an exorcist on staff after encountering an increase in people plagued by evil. Typical cases, he said, include people who turn away from the church and embrace New Age ther...

7. What would Darwin have made of the Human Genome Project?
(Science/General)

.... To see how the continuity of species is written large in our DNA, just take one of your genes. You can typically find a copy of that same gene in many different species. Look closely at the genes ...

8. Good people doing evil things
(Religion/General)

...offered his daughters' virginity rather than have strangers sodomised in his home. This is behaviour typical of a jealous and wrathful God who flies into a rage whenever his "chosen people&...

9. Atheist sees image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast
(Good news/Humour)

... unusual toast pattern caught his eye. "I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. However the direction and s...

10. The Great Afterlife Debate: Michael Shermer v. Deepak Chopra
(Religion/General)

...ertain conditions (the stress of trauma or an accident, for example) can induce any or all of the feelings typically described in a NDE. Thus, NDEs and OBEs are forms of wild “trips” induc...

11. I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions
(Medicine/Self Help)

...That millions of people take them seriously is rather sobering. We should be troubled by the fact that the typical mass market self-help book, consumed by many college-educated readers, is accessible ...

12. Fish out of water: Your Inner Fish
(Religion/Evolution vs Creationism)

...sense that hiccups are controlled by a central pattern generator, since, as in other rhythmic behaviors, a typical sequence of events happens during a hic. It turns out that the pattern generator res...

13. Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists
(Religion/Atheism)

...t I say will be anything you have not heard elsewhere. My goals here are simply to describe what I think a typical scientist has in mind when confronted with the question of science vs. religion, even...

14. Designer microbes to save us all
(Good news/All)

...p;     Gene Splicing      The science, also called gene splicing, typically involves transplanting a single gene from one cell into another to produce a partic...

15. Devolution
(Religion/Evolution vs Creationism)

...chemical systems, irreducibly complex or not. It’s significant, for instance, that the proteins that typically make up the parts of these systems are often similar to one another. (Blood clottin...