Last Wednesday, Jim Dickey, the president, started out by asking his fellow student atheists (there are a few agnostics, too) whether they wanted to put together an all-atheist Ultimate Frisbee team for a charity event.

“We can pay the entry fee from the club treasury,” said Michael Creamer, the atheists’ faculty adviser, who urged them to take part.

Club members discussed what to do about Faith Week. Rutherford High’s two Christian clubs will be sponsoring a series of before-school prayer circles around the flagpole this week, and several of the atheists felt a need to respond in some way. “We can set up informational tables near the flagpole and do our own speeches,” said Mr. Creamer, who suggested waiting a few weeks. “Remember, we’re not trying to be confrontational; this will be a counterpoint.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/education/04winerip.html?_r=2

Organized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

It won’t die out completely, but “religion will be driven toward extinction” in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

It will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland, they anticipate.

They can’t make a prediction about the United States because the U.S. census doesn’t ask about religion, lead author Daniel Abrams told CNN.

But nine other countries provide enough data for detailed mathematical modeling, he said.

“If you look at the data, ‘unaffiliated’ is the fastest-growing group” in those countries, he said.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/23/religion-to-go-extinct-in-9-countries-experts-predict/#comments

The two men disputed religion in Toronto Friday night at the Munk Debates before a sold-out crowd of 2,600 — scalpers outside were asking as much as $500 a ticket — as thousands more watched online.

Blair argued for the proposition that religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it.

Preliminary results on the Munk website said 68 per cent of the votes backed Hitchens and 32 per cent Blair. Both men gained about 10 percentage points from the pre-debate standings, when 21 per cent were undecided.

Hitchens argued that religion is divisive and causes conflicts or makes them worse.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/11/26/blair-htichens-religion.html#ixzz16Xeli74f

http://tinyurl.com/39h9ks8

(Black and white photo – Priests giving the Hitler salute at a Catholic youth rally in the Berlin-Neukolln stadium in August 1933.)

Link below: Photos provide a pictorial glimpse of Hitler, how his Nazis mixed religion with government, and the support for Hitler by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm

In his new book, “The Grand Design,” scheduled for a September release, Hawking argues that the universe didn’t need divine inspiration to come into being.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” writes Hawking. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists why we exist.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,” he writes, according to excerpts published in the Times of London today.

Hawking, who co-wrote “The Grand Design” with Leonard Mlodinow, a U.S. physicist, has come to this position fairly recently.

In June, when ABC News’ Diane Sawyer asked him about the biggest mystery he’d like solved, Hawking said, “I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.”

“What could define God … as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a humanlike being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking told her, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

Our question to you today: Do you agree or disagree with Stephen Hawking about the role of God in creation?

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/stephen-hawking-god-create-universe-question-day/story?id=11542128

Professor Dawkins has hired a team of lawyers to see if Pope Benedict XVI can be charged over his handling of the sexual abuse scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church, according to The Sunday Times.

Professor Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, claims that the Pope has shielded paedophile priests from the authorities.

However, he and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens believe they can make a case for arresting the Pope during the Pope’s planned visit to Britain in September.

Among the human rights lawyers they have hired is Australian-born barrister Geoffrey Robertson.

They do not believe the Pope will be able to claim diplomatic immunity because he is not recognised as a head of state by the United Nations.

“This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence,” Professor Dawkins said.

http://tinyurl.com/ybdfc7s

Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.”

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
http://richarddawkinsfoundation.org

Atheist Alliance International
http://atheistalliance.org

By Marc KaufmanWashington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 8, 2009

 ISTANBUL — Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students’ ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

See the original Shroud of Turin compared to the one created by scientists.

The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping out of nailed hands and feet, and believers say Christ’s image was recorded on the linen fibers at the time of his resurrection.

Scientists have reproduced the shroud using materials and methods that were available in the 14th century, the Italian Committee for Checking Claims on the Paranormal said.

The group said in a statement this is further evidence the shroud is a medieval forgery. In 1988, scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine it was made in the 13th or 14th century.

Continue here…  http://tinyurl.com/y8uxz6h

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.

The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed “Ardi.”  

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin’s time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today’s apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.

Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi’s key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.

Continue here…  http://tinyurl.com/yd7w8t6