Richard Dawkins defends teaching about religion to British children, but not in a way that will make most religious people very happy.

Courtesy of the Telegraph: 

The evolutionary biologist and confirmed atheist warned that it was virtually impossible to study English literature without knowing the background of Christianity. 

Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, he was asked whether religious studies should be abolished in schools, over fears that schoolchildren were being brainwashed. 

“I don’t think religious education should be abolished,” he said.

“I think that it is an important part of our culture to know about the Bible after all so much of English literature has allusions to the Bible, if you look up the Oxford English Dictionary you find something like the same number of quotations from the Bible as from Shakespeare. 

“It’s an important part of our history. So much of European history is dominated by disputes against rival religions and you can’t understand history unless you know about the history of the Christian religion and the Crusades and so on. 

“I would not abolish religions education, I think I would substitute it for comparative religion and Biblical history and religious history. 

“Comparative religion is very valuable partly because the child learns that there are lots of different religions not just the one they were brought up with. They learn they are all different and they can’t all be right, so maybe none of the are right. Critical thinking is what we need.”

I totally agree with Dawkins on this.

I took Comparative Religious studies in college and it was amazing.

Learning about the history of religions, how and when they were formed, and which other religious faiths they stole from allowed me to put things into a different perspective.

I was already firmly an Atheist, but after that class I had a better understanding of just how easily manipulated people were into believing things that were not only ridiculous but ultimately harmful to their well being.

In my humble opinions classes like this, could obliterate religion in only one or two generations.

A benefit to humanity which cannot be overestimated.

Here is the video that Richard Dawkins sent to the Reason Rally this year.

Religious people described as cowards.

And people say that I'M not diplomatic.

Still he makes excellent points.

P.S. I should probably add that in light of the events that took place in Orlando, this video seemed especially appropriate. Hiding behind religion to camouflage your inhumanity to man may be one of the most prevalent acts of cowardice that we see.

Conversation between Richard Dawkins and biblical scholar Dr. John Huddlestun essentially destroys Christian mythology.

Over thirty minutes long, but well worth your time to listen. Unless of course you like you biblical mythology to remain undisturbed.

I remember back in the 1980's when I first started to learn that the facts uncovered by biblical scholars completely refuted claims made in the Bible.

Even though I was already a non-believer I have to admit that I was stunned by the fact that essentially EVERYTHING in the book is revealed as false by the facts.

I think the two that stunned me the most, was first that the Egyptians did not keep Jewish slaves, and therefore the Exodus of the Old Testament is pure fiction, and second that in the early stages of Judaism there were multiple gods and not one all powerful god.

Remember Christians today are taught that the Jews ALWAYS worshiped the one true God, and that the story of Adam and Eve is revealed truth that has been passed down since the beginning of time.

And all of that is pure biblical bullshit.

Nancy French actually attempts to take on the great Richard Dawkins while wearing the facade of Bristol Palin. This would be laughable if it were not so sad.

"Brancy who?"

Anyhow so Richard Dawkins gave an interview to an Irish media outlet during which he said the following: 

“I’m interested in the cases where religion actually moves people to do horrible things … although they themselves might not be horrible people, they might be actually very righteous people,” Dawkins said. “They believe they’re doing right.” 

That’s when he launched into an example surrounding the September 11 attacks to illustrate his point. 

“I think the 9/11 hijackers all sincerely believed that they were doing the right and proper moral, religious thing,” he continued. “They were not in themselves evil. They were following their faith — and faith is pernicious because it can do that to people. It can do that to otherwise decent people.”

Richard Dawkins is a scientist with an analytical mind and the question of how religious faith can drive people to do both incredibly selfless and incredibly terrible things is of course fascinating.

So how could anybody take issue with his attempt to understand how religion both inspires and condemns people to act in certain ways?

Well if you are Nancy French that question is easily answered, you're an idiot who views the world through the eyes of a child.

Here was French getting her granny panties in a twist over Dawkins' remarks: 

Regardless of your religious beliefs or lack thereof, it’s absolutely ludicrous to say that men who chose to train for years with the sole aim to kill as many people as possible are somehow not evil. I would say their actions are the very definition of evil. 

It is an incredibly dangerous thing to downplay the motives of the hijackers or try to normalize them. They were not normal men. They were radicalized jihadists. And, yes, their actions were evil. If their actions are not evil, then one cannot even fathom something that would actually be evil. 

This is the problem with radical atheists like Richard Dawkins. Their agenda is to attack people of all faiths. And Dawkins has to fit even something as obviously evil as the terrorist attacks on 9/11 into his own radical agenda. 

So the radical atheist ends up defending the radical jihadists, because according to his crazy ideas, they aren’t evil – they were just brainwashed.

There's more but I think this gives you the gist of French's argument, which is "I see the world as simply a struggled between the magical forces of good and evil, and if somebody challenges my childish concept of evil it undermines my entire world view. So just stop it, stop it now!"

And this speaks to the real problem with seeing the world through a primitive superstitious prism.

The same fundamentalism which inspires a person to murder and destroy in the name of their god, even at the cost of their own life, is the same sort of fundamentalism that makes it impossible for a person to see the complexities of human emotion beyond the simple unsophisticated characterizations of "good" and "evil."

The truest statement in this ridiculous rant is the following:

"If their actions are not evil, then one cannot even fathom something that would actually be evil."

EXACTLY!

And the reason for that is because while there are terrible things occurring in the world everyday, simply labeling them as "evil" demonstrates a lazy intellect that does not want to get to the real questions as to why they actually happen.

One of the first things you learn while working in the mental health field is that simple labels are rarely appropriate, and that people's actions and behaviors are often driven by complex biological, developmental, and social issues that are not apparent at fist glance.

Richard Dawkins is a man who is fascinated with learning the truth. Ipso facto he became a scientist.

Nancy French is a person who is defined by a deep faith in a primitive superstition who views the world in stark shades of black and white. Therefore she is a hack writer, attacking her intellectual superiors, while hiding behind the facade of others, in return for money grifted from idiots who fail to recognize that they have been taken advantage of by a con artist.

There is no comparison between the two.

P.S. By the way if you think the above interview upset Brancy, just wait until she gets a load of this one:  

During the exchange, Dawkins was asked if he thought religious people were “mentally ill.” 

“It’s hard to use the word ‘mentally ill’ when there are so many of them,” the Briton responded. “If they believed what they did and they were the only one they would undoubtedly be called mentally ill.”
Oh yeah, that is going to drive her, and her fundie buddies, right over the freaking bend. 

It looks like Richard Dawkins is trolling religious people again.

Richard Dawkins believes that children should be protected from religious indoctrination.

Courtesy of Irish Times:

Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of a public talk at Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday evening, Prof Dawkins said: “There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents… 

“Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.” 

Prof Dawkins, who spent Monday in Belfast, praised the work of Atheist Ireland in campaigning to separate church and state in education. 

Warning against the “power of childhood indoctrination”, he said it was futile debating with people who put the Bible ahead of scientific evidence. “You have to write off those people” but you can try to convince younger people to avoid superstition, Prof Dawkins said. 

His plea for reform was backed by Prof Krauss who said: “Parents, of course, have concerns and ‘say’ but they don’t have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.”

I don't think that my position on this is any secret, I believe that if something is worthy of our faith it should be strong enough to attract that faith when we are old enough to have developed critical thinking skills.

Do any of you disagree? And if so, why?

Quote of the day.

"The original sin was supposed to have been committed by Adam. Who as we now know never existed. So we now have the preposterous idea that Jesus was sacrificed, the scapegoat was sacrificed, for the sins of a nonexistent forebearer."

Courtesy of Richard Dawkins from the documentary "The Unbelievers."

I finally watched this the other day. 

Sarah Palin takes on Richard Dawkins over remarks about aborting children with Down Syndrome. Update!

Palin posted the above graphic and then followed it up with this: 

Mr. Dawkins, I'd let you meet my son if you promised to open your mind, your eyes, and your heart to a unique kind of absolute beauty. But, in my request for you to be tolerant, I’d have to warn Trig he must be tolerant, too, because he may superficially look at you as kind of awkward. I'll make sure he's polite, though! 

Love, 

Sarah Palin & family

On the face of it one would think that Palin is in the right in this confrontation of Dawkins. 

And in some ways she might be.

However what has to be remembered is that Dawkins is a scientist and his thinking is purely logical.

Which he attempted to explain in several tweets following the dust up on Twitter:

I do not for one moment apologise for approaching moral philosophic questions in a logical way. There's a place for emotion & this isn't it.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014

A woman whom I know & like said she'd be uncertain what to do if pregnant with Downs. I said what I'd do & why. Happens to be what most do.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014

If I were a woman with a DS fetus I personally would abort. So do most women in fact. If you wouldn't, good luck to you, it's your decision,
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014

Down Syndrome screening is not eugenic: DS has extremely low heritability. Screening offers a humane moral choice. Majority choose abortion.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 21, 2014

Professor Dawkins made a few rather unfortunate errors.

One is in forgetting that the things he tweets will be seen by EVERYBODY, and not simply the person to whom he is responding.

And the second was in not taking into consideration how the incredibly irrational anti-abortion groups would be in response to his advice.

Now the difference between Dawkins and Palin is that Dawkins is being completely truthful in his response, and she is simply seizing on this as a way to insert herself into a conversation that has nothing to do with her personally and to also kinda play the victim while utilizing on of her favorite props.

My take is that Dawkins should have expressed his feelings in an e-mail instead of on Twitter.

However as somebody who has worked with children who have Downs I can certainly attest to the challenges that they face, the incredible strain on their families, and that I have heard more than one exhausted parent sobbing that if they had it all to do over, they might have chosen not to bring this particular child into the world.

There are many wonderful success stories of children with Down syndrome succeeding belong all expectations. But for every one of those there  are about a hundred others where there was no fairy tale ending, and their lives have been rife with medical problems, frustrating disabilities, and despair.

Those are just the facts, and Richard Dawkins is obviously well aware of them.

Update: It looks like this is going to be a family affair: 

Did you guys see this? Richard Dawkins, probably the worlds’ most famous and influential atheist, just told a woman that it was “immoral” to give birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome. 

Immoral for my Mom not to kill her own son? 

I’ll make this simple: We love Trig. He brings us joy, and I know that he has a joyful life. 

Do you think the fact that they keep hammering home that "immoral" word is a sly shot at little ole me?

Atheists to get their own TV channel. This is a GREAT idea, said no religious person ever.

Courtesy of The Telegraph:

 ....next week sees the launch of America's first dedicated TV channel for non-believers. Atheist TV launches in New York and will broadcast 24 hours a day via Roku, the internet streaming service that allows people to watch internet-based channels on their TVs. Roku only has seven million subscribers, but anyone can watch it streamed online at www.atheists.tv 

Free-thinkers, as atheists style themselves, remain almost bizarrely under-represented in American public life and discourse. There is not a single openly declared atheist among the 535 members of Congress, and it is conventional electoral wisdom that the President of the United States has to be a believer. 

The profile of atheism is very slowly starting to change, with an increasingly vocal atheist community, including high-profile adherents like Brad Pitt and Mark Zuckerberg. Even so, non-belief, is still a very long way from acceptance.

The channel is backed by American Atheists, the civil rights organisation founded in 1963 that takes a pretty confrontational approach to defending separation of church and state, including fighting a legal battle against the "9/11 miracle cross" being placed in the museum commemorating the September 11 attacks 

The organisers tell me the channel will broadcast 24 hours, mostly with licenses and pre-recorded content, such as documentaries by the Richard Dawkins Foundation as well as a talk show titled "Atheist Viewpoint" and a call-in show, "Atheist Experience". 

I don't know what I'm going to enjoy more watching more, interesting thought provoking programming featuring the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and other freethinkers, or simply watching all of the conservatives and fundamentalist heads exploding.

I think they should dedicate an entire day to an "Inherit the Wind" marathon.

Another day could be dedicated to airing clips of religious apologists getting hitchslapped.

And perhaps yet another to  George Carlin comedy routines.

I'd watch that.

This may seem a trivial thing, and perhaps it is. But it is yet another sign for Atheists that it is starting to be okay for us to come out of the closet and proudly proclaim our emancipation from the chains of religious intolerance. 

Richard Dawkins has some advice for Bill Nye to use during his debate with Creationist Ken Ham, and for any of us who find ourselves in a similar debate.

Courtesy of RichardDawkins.net:  

I agree that to do this on Ham's home turf was a mistake, and indeed it is almost always a mistake to give wingnuts the oxygen of publicity, and the respectability of being seen on a platform with a real scientist, anywhere. However, Bill Nye's decision is taken, and a good rule in life is, "Always start from here, not from some hypothetical point in the past." Here are a few suggestions for anyone who, for one reason or another, finds him/herself debating one of these idiots:

Physical scientists (such as Bill Nye) should play to their strengths in physical science and call the wingnut out on the age of fossils, and cosmological evidence on the age of the universe. Radiometric dating of rocks is solid, irrefutable science. The agreement between different isotopes with overlapping time spans is so strong, it is impossible for anyone to wriggle out of the conclusion that the world is billions of years old, not thousands. Astronomical evidence of the expanding universe agrees. 

There are of course gaps in the fossil record. In the case of the Turbellaria, a large, flourishing and beautiful group of free-living flatworms, the fossil record is one big gap – there are no fossils – and not even a Young Earth Creationist thinks they were created yesterday. But although there are gaps in the fossil record, it is a very telling fact that not a single fossil has ever been found in the wrong place in the time sequence. To paraphrase JBS Haldane, not a single fossil rabbit has ever been found in the Precambrian. 

Even if there were not a single fossil anywhere in the world, the fact of evolution would be established beyond any doubt by the evidence from comparing modern creatures with other modern creatures. Comparative anatomy was highly convincing evidence in Darwin's time. Today we can add comparative molecular sequences (DNA and proteins) which are even more convincing, by orders of magnitude. Whichever molecule you look at, and whichever bone system etc you look at, the pattern of animal resemblances turns out to be the same branching tree (given normal, expected margins of error). What could that branching tree be but a pedigree, a family tree, a tree of descent with modification? 

The pattern of geographical distribution of animals and plants is exactly as it should be, on the assumption that slow, gradual evolution has taken place on slowly drifting (plate tectonics) continents and islands. Archipelagoes such as Galapagos and Hawaii are textbook examples, but the same kind of pattern is seen the world over. Species are distributed exactly where evolutionists would expect them to be (the pattern of distribution is not what you'd expect if they had dispersed from Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat!) 

It's never ideal to argue from authority, but the fact is that the VAST majority of scientists working in relevant fields accept the fact of evolution and the fact that the universe is billions of years old. The mutually corroborating evidence spans zoology, botany, microbiology, bacteriology, genetics, geology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, anthropology, geography . . . the list goes on. As for Ken Ham's biblical alternative, Genesis is not accepted as literally true by any reputable theologian or ancient historian. And that is hardly surprising when you consider the obscurity of its authorship, and its obvious status as just one of thousands of origin myths from all around the world..

All these points, and more, can be found in books such as The Greatest Show on Earth and Why Evolution is True. 

Richard

Many excellent points offered here. 

You know this reminded me of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig, a man who constantly misrepresents his opponents arguments, creates his own straw man argument, and then dares the opponent to call him out on it in the public forum, that I watched recently.

As I watched that debate I was struck that Hitch missed a couple of opportunities to really spike the ball as it were, and I think he did so because it would have been perceived as cruel and he was trying to appear respectful.

One of the opportunities that he missed was the chance to disprove the existence of the Christian God completely, which Craig claimed was an impossibility, and Hitch maintained was not the burden of the Atheist.

Now while I agree with Hitchens that the burden of proof is on the individual claiming something exists despite lack of evidence, I vehemently disagree that it is impossible to do so.

In fact I have done it. A number of times in fact.

So I cannot help but wonder why it never seems that the Atheist in the debate is willing to adopt that scorched earth approach? Is it too extreme? Are they not comfortable shaking an entire audience's hold on reality all at once? Or do they simply not know how to approach it?

Thoughts?

Richard Dawkins states the obvious.

The The Times printed an article about the changing demographic in England and Wales.

In it they made the following observation:Almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim, a breakdown of census figures shows. 

The percentage of Muslims among the under-fives is almost twice as high as in the general population. In an indication of the extent to which birthrate is changing the UK’s religious demographic, fewer than one in 200 people over 85 is Muslim.

This resulted in the following Letter to the Editor from Dawkins.

Dawkins is of course completely correct in making this point.  However since we know giving birth to new adherents is one of the primary ways that religions compete on this planet for dominance, it is not a change that will be adopted any time soon.

Personally I hope to live long enough to see the day when it is illegal to indoctrinate children into any religious belief until they are at least in their teens and they have developed the critical thinking skills to evaluate what they are being told is the "truth" behind whichever religion is making its sale pitch.

How long do you think I need to live to see that? Twenty years? Fifty years? Yeah, probably a lot longer than that.

Oh well, one can dream can't they?

(H/T to The Friendly Atheist.)

The reality of you.

Years ago I took a behavioral science class.

As part of the syllabus were handed papers on different mental illnesses and psychosis.

One of them was a list of thinking errors that allow sexual predators to victimize the helpless.

On that list was the "I'm special" delusion, which allows these people to believe that normal rules and limitations do not pertain to them. Because, after all, they are "special."

After reading that I could not help but ponder all of the other people who also share that belief.

Burglars, murderers, arsonists, and then the ones that are not necessarily among the criminal class, actors, politicians, evangelists.

Then taking that concept to its natural conclusion I realized that on some fundamental level, ALL of us have a little bit of that thinking error in our DNA.

It is how religions are formed. People are made to feel that they are chosen by God, identified as special, and that all they have to do is follow a certain series of special guidelines to earn a special reward, that is reserved for those deemed special enough to earn it.

In that case the "I am special" assertion is expanded to the "we are special" thinking error, and that is how those of various religions, all self identifying as "religions of peace," can murder each other with impunity.

After all they don't have to bother themselves with the laws of man, they are following a higher law.

A "special law."

Given to them by a special entity, who chose them, and helped them to see themselves as "special."

Imagine how much more peaceful our planet would be if we realized our reality.

That we are all the same. And in being the same we are ALL special enough to deserve love, special enough to give love, and special enough to live free of violence and strife, and instead to celebrate this moment when our matter came together to form us.

Just something to think about.

Interview with Richard Dawkins about his campaign to coax Atheists out of the closet.

Here is what it says over at the OUT Campaign website:  

Atheists have always been at the forefront of rational thinking and beacons of enlightenment, and now you can share your idealism by being part of the OUTCampaign. 

Come Out 
Atheists are far more numerous than most people realize. COME OUT of the closet! You'll feel liberated, and your example will encourage others to COME OUT too. (Don't "out" anybody else, wait for them to OUT themselves when they are ready to do so). 

Reach Out 
The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows. 

Speak Out 
As more and more people join the OUT Campaign, fewer and fewer people will feel intimidated by religion. We can help others understand that atheists come in all shapes, sizes, colours and personalities. We are laborers and professionals. We are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and grandparents. We are human (we are primates) and we are good friends and good citizens. We are good people who have no need to cling to the supernatural. 

Keep Out 
It is time to let our voices be heard regarding the intrusion of religion in our schools and politics. Atheists along with millions of others are tired of being bullied by those who would force their own religious agenda down the throats of our children and our respective governments. We need to KEEP OUT the supernatural from our moral principles and public policies. 

Stand Out 
We have many exciting activities and plans for the OUT Campaign, so be sure to watch for the latest developments. Help RDFRS expand the OUT Campaign and continue to help thousands of people to find strength in numbers and a voice that must be heard.

I cannot tell you how much I love this.

All I want is for people without a religion to feel that they can be as open about their lack of belief, as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jewish people are about their adherence to theirs.

That may seem like a small thing, but tell that to the gay community who is just now beginning to feel real acceptance for who they are. 

Like Dawkins I too believe that there are millions of us who are too timid to reveal that we exist, and in fact that we may outnumber our religious brothers and sisters. But until we remove the stigma we will never know.

Somebody made a video out of one of my favorite Richard Dawkins answer. I love it!

You know one of the things that always bothers me about religious apologists is the notion that they support religious freedom. When in fact if it were possible in America they absolutely would not.

A person of faith believes that they have made the correct choice in who and how they worship.

In fact they believe that EVERYBODY else, who is not an adherent to their faith, is dead wrong. And what's more that their choice will result in the other person being denied the rewards offered to them and condemned to an eternal punishment which they believe they will be spared.

Now many of them will sugarcoat this, but that is only because it is considered socially unacceptable to challenge the faith of others in public. In private, among their own, they do not hold back when condemning and even ridiculing the religious beliefs of others.

This is often my thought when I hear religious people say that Atheists are "arrogant." As if there were ANYTHING more arrogant than a person who believes that THEY, with their seemingly massive intellect, have deduced, out of the thousands of possibilities, not only which god truly exists but also exactly by which methods one can garner his, or her, favor and thereby reap the rewards for their supplication.

World War 2 codebreaker, and "Father of Computer Science," Alan Turing to be pardoned for the sin of being a homosexual.

Courtesy of The Guardian:

 Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon. 

The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing, who died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in 1954 after he was subjected to "chemical castration". 

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a government whip, told peers that the government would table the third reading of the Alan Turing (statutory pardon) bill at the end of October if no amendments are made. "If nobody tables an amendment to this bill, its supporters can be assured that it will have speedy passage to the House of Commons," Ahmad said. 

The announcement marks a change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. They include Oscar Wilde. 

Ahmad told peers: "Alan Turing himself believed that homosexual activity would be made legal by a royal commission. In fact, appropriately, it was parliament which decriminalized the activity for which he was convicted.

Allan Turing was also instrumental in developing the notion of a 'Universal Machine,' the harbinger of the modern day computer. Which means that every homophobic redneck that calls somebody a "faggot" on Twitter is doing so on a device that owes its very existence to a homosexual.

How's that for irony?

While there are some applauding this action by the British government there are others who find even this to be an insult to the memory of this great man.

It is an insult to the memory of Alan Turing to talk about "pardoning" him, when he never did anything wrong in the first place.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 21, 2013

If there is any "pardoning" to be sought, it should be of the English judicial system, which hounded Alan Turing to his death.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 21, 2013

The man has a point.

Margaret Doughty awarded citizenship after USCIS retracts request for proof of religious affiliation.

For those of you who may not remember, we covered the USCIS's bizarre request of Margaret early this month.

Courtesy of Divided Under God:

Ms. Doughty’s case was brought to the attention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, who wrote a letter to the USCIS on her behalf, as well as the American Humanist Association, who did the same. Ms. Doughty’s local Congressman, Blake Farenthold, also got involved, helping to get her case escalated to the highest levels of the USCIS for review. 

Today, she received an email from the congressional office with the following message from the USCIS included: 

“This Service hereby withdraws the request for evidence (RFE) issued on June 7, 2013. This Service accepts your detailed statement in satisfaction of the information requested by the RFE. Your application for naturalization has been approved.” 

Margaret Doughty’s case can be seen as a victory for the non-religious in the U.S., many times referred to as the “nones” (based on religious affiliation questionnaire categories). Often called the fastest growing demographic in the country, those not affiliated with a religion are said to make up about 20% of the population. Atheists fall into this category, are widely misunderstood, and just as in this case, often discriminated against by the religious majority. Recent polls have shown atheists to be the least trusted group in America.

This is a huge victory for those of us who self identify as Atheists, and really everybody in this country if you think about it. 

The idea that just because you do not find anything reasonable about suspending your disbelief to embrace one religious faith or another it makes you a less trustworthy person is completely bizarre to me.

Of course I see it as quite the opposite, but recognize that I remain in the minority.

While we are on the topic I thought I would share with you Richard Dawkin's observations about Atheism and the people who embrace it.

We still have a long way to go, but I see the movement for the acceptance of Atheists in this country to be ultimately as important as the acceptance of the homosexual community.

Asking Richard Dawkins to justify the scientific method. Watch until the end.

Excellent!

Just a suggestion, but if you are going to attack a scientist for being an Atheist, you might want to get your scientists straight first.

I leave you with the tweet of the year..."Dumb athiest. Why quote @richarddawkins? He just a retard in a wheelchair with a robot voice"

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) May 18, 2013

Personally I am troubled that Richard Dawkins seems to have absconded with Stephen Hawking's wheelchair as well as his computer based communication system.

That seems unnecessarily rude to me.

P.S. By the way Ricky Gervais loves to rattle the cages of some of his more ignorant critics on Twitter and often retweets some of the most ridiculous things you have ever heard. This one was particularly funny.

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss are interviewed about their upcoming film "The Unbelievers."

Two heroes of mine, doing incredibly important work while courageously enduring a never ending onslaught of threats from those claiming to embrace peaceful religions.

I am going to watch the hell out of this movie.

Atheist Richard Dawkins named as the world's "top thinker."

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

When Prospect magazine listed Britain's leading public intellectuals in 2004 and invited readers' votes, it was Richard Dawkins who emerged as No 1. Nine years on, the biologist, author and campaigner has bettered that by topping its "world thinkers" rankings, beating four Nobel prize winners (and another contender regarded as certain to receive one soon) in a poll based on 65 names chosen by a largely US- and UK-based expert panel. 

Joining him in the top 10 are the psychologists Steven Pinker (3) and Daniel Kahneman (10), the economists Paul Krugman (5) and Amartya Sen (7) and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (6), who all, like him, figured in the magazine's first list of world-class thinkers in 2005. 

To qualify for this year's world thinkers rankings, it was not enough to have written a seminal book, inspired an intellectual movement or won a Nobel prize several years ago (hence the absence from the 65-strong long list of ageing titans such as Noam Chomsky or Edward O Wilson); the selectors' remit ruthlessly insisted on "influence over the past 12 months" and "significance to the year's biggest questions". 

As for Dawkins, the continuation of wars of religion and terrorist atrocities informed by it means his atheist crusade remains relevant to the year's biggest questions, despite the end of the Bible-bashing, war-mongering Bush era in which he first raised his banner – this week his 670,000 Twitter followers could find him (between musings about socks) rejoicing in France's legalisation of gay marriage, ridiculing a journalist's Muslim beliefs, and retweeting a story that the older Boston bomber "was angry that the world pictured Islam as a violent religion". On Monday, no doubt manfully resisting efforts to deify or idolise him, the world No 1 will attend the premiere in Toronto of a documentary about his roadshow (with Lawrence Krauss) promoting science and reason.

I personally have a great admiration for Richard Dawkins, and his courage in the face of incredibly vicious attacks and attempts to marginalize him or shut him up.

I think that what Dawkins, and of course Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennet, and the late great Christopher Hitchens as well, have done is to place themselves firmly on the front line, fully accepting the volley of anger and hatred directed toward them, in order to clear a path for those who will come behind them.

In many ways I think they can be given some credit for the increase in atheism among the younger generation, and perhaps their work will someday be seen as instrumental in ushering in the end of  organized religion's grip of terror on this country, and on many developing countries around the world.

That would be a legacy well worth celebrating.

Here is what Professor Dawkins identifies as the "Problem with Religion" in his own words.

I think the world that he envisions is infinitely more beautiful than the one we enjoy today.