Kiosk

With the decentralized SETI program now running quietly on thousands of PCs, futurists think that we'll discover extraterrestrial intelligence in our lifetimes. Is the whole "first contact" crowd little more than a cargo cult of lonely island peoples or is there something to this whole SETI thing?

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -- the U.S. governmental agency that regulates the airwaves -- decided recently to revisit its standards for granting non-commercial educational (NCE) broadcast licenses, fundamentalist televangelists who stand to lose their subsidy attacked the agency. Now religious right allies in Congress have come to the televangelists' aid with two new bills.

Although the problem of suffering has been written about for millennia, with great detail and sophistication, and by some of our world's greatest minds, Dale Proctor revisits the issue with a simplicity that allows all to grasp the insurmountable difficulty it continues to pose to the believer.

Of the many mad destinies we create in our mythologies, McRandle explores the notion of incarnational thinking whereby we separate the mind from the body. When this happens, religious and political exploitation of the body cannot be far behind.

A second generation atheist, Kim Walker explores the distinguishing characteristics of two common perspectives within the atheist community: that resulting from being born and bred with religion and later suffering a crisis of faith and the perspective of those who are raised as freethinkers from the onset.

It seems problematic that there are four (and only four) gospels in the NT canon. Barefoot seeks to provide a more objective reason for thinking that Ezekiel's mysterious "four faces"—the man, lion, ox, and eagle—play a hand in the selection of the canonical four gospels in the early history of the Church.

A touching account of how an atheist was able to support a religious family after the tragic loss of their daughter.

This is a season of myth, legend, folklore, fantasy, make believe and superstition. In the interest of mental and spiritual health a few historical facts need to be kept in perspective.

On October 12 we celebrated the arrival of the six-billionth person on this small planet. Much of the media used the event to educate listeners on the disastrous effects of such large numbers--poverty, starvation and ecological damage. Unnoticed, however, (or at least unremarked) was the Pope's complicity in this situation. No one noted the irony that the "Holy Father" is responsible for fathering millions of those births!

We can ask the regular AM/FM stations that broadcast hate radio programs some questions. We can ask them to discuss responsibility, ethics, morality and the role of radio in the most violent industrialized nation in the entire world, this United States of America.

When I was reading the hysterical testimony of the Christian fundamentalist ministers before the Kansas Board of Education, my mind/brain went into rewind back to 1925. The Scopes trial in the fundamentalist town of Dayton, Tennessee was held that year over the same issue. Militant biblical and religious ignorance demanded to be heard.

Most of us treasure our individuality and our freedom to decide just what to believe. This, after all, is the American way. It started with our founding fathers who saw the trouble European nations experienced from church interference with the state, and opted for a strictly secular government in this country. By maintaining strict neutrality toward religion, this new government could assure freedom of religion to all. Americans would be free to believe or not believe, as they chose.

There is a sin among a large segment of the Christian clergy that I find despicable. It is the sin of omission, the sin of silence. It is the sin of promoting falsehoods in order to hold your job. It is the sin of not sharing with a congregation what you know to be true about the bible and Christianity.

July 21, 1999 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Robert G. Ingersoll (b.1833). Called "The Great Agnostic" by newspapers of the day and, by all accounts, the nation's most oft-heard orator, Ingersoll was an enlightened, humane freethinker, a visionary, an advocate for unpopular causes such as womens', childrens', and minority rights, and a combatant against superstition and hypocrisy.

It is religion that, historically, has always produced violence. From Moses to the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Hitler, Kosovo. Today, in our own time, it is those countries without religion that are the LEAST vilolent. America is the most 'religious' of the world's industrialized nations, and yet is the most violent nation in the world.

Lowder argues that the physical dependence of minds upon the brain, along with the argument from evil, can be used to construct an empirical case for metaphysical naturalism.

For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead. . .Romans 1:20 For secular scientists and moderate Christians alike, there can be few developments of modern fundamentalism more perplexing and unfortunate than that of religious […]

Madalyn Murray O'Hair's essay "Agnostics" is, unfortunately, just the "tip of the iceberg" of anti-agnostic bigotry among the most "fundamentalist" of atheists. In this essay, Bill Schultz hopes to show that this bigotry is based on a total misunderstanding of how the word "agnostic" came to be invented, and what that word was originally intended to mean. It's an unfortunate fact of life that other people will frequently twist our words to mean things they were never intended to mean.

Is there anything which unbelievers should be thankful for, on a day normally associated with giving thanks to God?

Who must assume responsibility for creating an environment that stimulates and promotes such ignorant and brutal violence?

The recent vote in the U.S. Congress on the Religious Freedom Amendment (RFA) should be a wake-up call that there are forces determined to make this a religious government. Despite the fact that every war occurring in the world today involves sectarian conflict, some elected leaders want to abolish our country's tradition of nonreligious civil rule and allow government to promote religious beliefs in this country.

The Southern Baptists claim that the American family is in crisis, and they want women to "submit graciously" to male leadership. Is there any reason to believe that things were better when men had a monopoly on making decisions? Was America a utopia that has been destroyed by women in thirty short years? And has anybody else noticed that most national and world leaders still are men? So how come everybody's talking about how bad things are?

The Pope recently viewed the Shroud of Turin and asked scientists to respect both the "scientific methodology and the sensibility of the faithful." But is there any evidence at all--scientific, historical, or otherwise--which supports the claim that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial shroud of Christ?

For almost the last two thousand years, there has been one single institution which has had a significantly powerful realm of control and oppression over the everyday lives of the majority of individuals, especially women, in Western Europe and subsequently North America. This insidious institution is the Roman Catholic Church, or, in fact, Christianity in general (henceforth written xianity).

The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 13, Number 2. Stephen Jay Gould makes the extraordinary claim in March’s Natural History Magazine that there is no conflict between science and religion. According to Gould, science and religion occupy distinct domains or magisteria. Science covers the empirical universe; religion deals with questions of […]

"I was contacted by an individual who wanted to know if I could answer a few questions on astronomy. Although the way the questions were worded made me suspect I was dealing with a creationist, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and tried to answer his questions as honestly as I could ... I thought you all might be interested in seeing how the conversation has gone."

"I am thoroughly convinced that gnostic atheism is true; knowledge, rather than just another belief. I say so at every opportunity, and I encourage you all to do likewise. I am equally convinced that anyone else who has all the known facts, if they do not permit emotion to override reason, will reach the same conclusion. And I am convinced that a society which embraces materialism, naturalism, and atheism will be safer, stronger, and more productive than one which embraces metaphysics and idealism."

"[T]he National Religious Broadcasters and the Oklahoma Christian Crusade began a rumor that Madalyn O'Hair had filed the petition with the FCC and that it had contained 27,000 signatures. THIS WAS A BALD FACED LIE."

[The following is the full text of an address delivered by Dr. Madalyn O’Hair, founder of American Atheists, at Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee, on October 22, 1986.] Hopefully, everyone in this state is fed up on hearing about the Scopes trial. Even though the most famous reporter there, H. L. Mencken, was an Atheist; […]

According to O'Hair, "The agnostic is gutless and prefers to keep one safe foot in the god camp."

O'Hair vs. Huxley - A Totally Misdirected Attack (1999) by Bill Schultz

In a very real sense, it takes even more "guts" to proclaim oneself to be "agnostic" because it immediately subjects one to attack from both theists and atheists, many of whom in each camp prefer to see agnostics as members of "the enemy's camp."