Atheism and Religion

Freethought Blogs has lots of great bloggers and PZ is one of the most prolific.

A Patheos blogger who always seems to have his finger on the pulse of the atheist community in America.

Summary: An interview-driven article looking at the consequences of a lack of faith amongst priests, and how some manage to continue as ministers without it. We'll chase down other priests, rabbis and imams who've lost their faith and managed to continue in the role - whether they're in the open ...

What happens when an Oscar acceptance speech thanks God.

Yikes! Selling church assets for a swimming pool? When religion looks bad in any light.

Nicely done....

However, I'd like to add to that list. There are several things I think Christians should stop saying. Let's start with what the author said in his original article though, before jumping ahead to my commentary. The original author (Scott Dannemiller) makes the case that Christians should stop saying they're 'blessed' when they have good fortune.

A report from the Greater London Authority yesterday ( discussed here by one of its authors) found that the media in the UK are overwhelmingly negative about Muslims. One week in May 2006 was chosen for detailed scrutiny and out of 352 articles referring to Muslims, only four per cent were judged to be positive.

So not sure that Megan Kelly "shredded" David on this. I think she belittled the impact that Christian consecration of a terror site can have on those who do not believe. I feel a blog coming ....

The Irish star of films such as The Sapphires and Bridesmaids says he grew up respecting people of faith despite his atheist views, but has become "less liberal" as he ages. Now he says religious doctrine is halting human progress and brands it "a weird cult".

The eight young people who gathered recently at a popular restaurant in central Lahore looked like any others, laughing over samosas with tangy chutney sauce as a table of older ladies in hijab looked on from a nearby table. But the jokes the boisterous twenty-somethings were sharing were about the ...

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of "The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion."

Someone wrote and flatly stated she was an atheist and I was a believer. Since I most often meet up with believers who think I'm a heretic or apostate, I wondered what she meant by atheism and why she believed I'm a believer. She didn't respond.

Posted: Print Article Religion Helps People Cope With Anxiety There is a market for religion just as there is a market for material goods. The primary function of religion is to help people feel better about their lives. Competing feel-good products include psychotherapy, anti-anxiety drugs, and entertainment.

The Irish star of films such as The Sapphires and Bridesmaids says he grew up respecting people of faith despite his atheist views, but has become "less liberal" as he ages. Now he says religious doctrine is halting human progress and brands it "a weird cult".

Doesn't it seem like the plethora of interactive electronic means for communication available to us has made it harder and harder for us to make time in our daily schedule to be truly attentive to those things that matter most in our lives: our relationships; the issues that are important to us; the values we seek to live by?

Richard Dawkins once compared organizing atheists to herding cats; while this is an amusing and realistic analogy, I think it is something we should work on.

Sometimes talking to a theist feels like talking to a banana. Some theists just seem to lack the basic critical thinking and communication skills that would allow for any decent dialogue. Every theist should avoid the following comments when engaging in discussion with atheists.

As an atheist, it gets a little tiring hearing the same old generalized accusations over and over again. By going over some of them, perhaps some theists might learn to stop making such generalizations about atheists. Here are the top ten I've encountered.

CANTERBURY, England (RNS) Attendance figures released by the Church of England show that Sunday worship attendance continues its downward slide and now stands at about half of what it was 45 years ago. The report from the Archbishops' Council Research and Statistics Department, released Friday (March 21), shows that on average in 2012, 800,000 adults, or about 2 percent of the adult population, attended church on Sunday.

This week I had the pleasure of taking a three-day writing workshop with Kathleen Norris at the beautiful Transfiguration Spirituality Center north of Cincinnati. Thirty women writers came to hear from the author of The Cloister Walk and about the nitty-gritty of writing ("The details of how writing happens, like the details of sausage-making, are often better left unsaid," was one of her many tweetable asides).

Posted: Print Article The leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is tired of "a few rogue Klansmen" ruining the group's reputation, and argues that the group is a non-violent Christian organization. "We don't hate people because of their race, I mean, we're a Christian organization," Frank Ancona, the group's Imperial Wizard, told Virginia's NBC 12 on Thursday.

The BBC scrapped a debate on homosexuality that was to be aired from a live panel discussion taking place at Birmingham Central Mosque, after the mosque's authorities objected to the same.

Years before it went up in flames, something good happened at the Edmonton Indian Residential School. Between its closure in 1968 and destruction 32 years later, a group of Edmonton-area aboriginals gave it a new purpose, turning the red-bricked, green-roofed building into a fledgling substance abuse recovery centre.

Nathan Phelps, the estranged atheist son of anti-gay Kansas pastor Fred Phelps who died Wednesday, is asking people to look beyond his father's legacy of hate. "I ask this of everyone," the younger Phelps said in a statement issued Thursday about his father's death at age 84. "Let his death mean something.