Atheism

Numerous studies showing that decision-making appears to occur well before we believe we’ve made the decision, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on free will just yet.

One of our premier interviewers, host of KQED’s Forum, talks to RD Senior Editor Lisa Webster about atheists, God, his parents’ Judaism, and writing a book without answers.

Humanity may be a mystery, but what about the human who virtually enters a spec of dust and is able to learn the mysteries of dustness? Doesn’t this kind of leap require us to adopt a kind of awe and reverence for the mysteries outside the human as well?

Sam Harris latest, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is undermined by poor scholarship, ad hominem attacks and an obsession with religion.

The humanist community assembled many of its leading lights recently to award Richard Dawkins a prize for furthering rational thought. A secular humanist convention is not the witches’ coven that some sheltered theists might expect. I did not see anyone smoking and never heard a profane word. Drinking at the reception was modest by anyone but a teetotaler’s standards, and far less than at the Episcopal fundraiser I’d attended the previous week. Also unlike the Episcopal affair, I did not spot a single same-sex couple. I began to wonder how much fun these people, freed from religion’s rules, were having with their liberty.

The week in religion, poetically.

Strippers and Churchgoers at odds, Rand Paul and Aqua Buddha, Tim Tebow and his monk’s hairdo.

When I was told that Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer and that this has sparked a discussion about whether people ought to pray for him, my first reaction was a stupefying bewilderment. I can’t say that I’ve entirely recovered.

The week in religion, poetically.

Are Christians stigmatized in the United States?