The Catholic Church, hijacked into a militaristic system by a mad emperor in the 4th Century, is anchored in 6000 year-old anxieties of desert tribal culture

if Dennett and LaScola are right that belief is mostly aspirational for most people, it follows that few people actually do believe but merely wish they could

Richard Dawkins’ speech about his new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, was recorded for ABC’s for Big Ideas. Here are a couple of brief excerpts

they voluntarily clap on their chains, hood their heads and lock their prison doors, while offering up a prayer of gratitude for their relief from uncertainty

Children do what is natural because they are human. Then religious parents turn their “sinful” natural lives into a horror story in which they are the monster.

So what’s next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes?

There is no point in attempting to support your theories with quotations, chapter and verse, from a vaguely anthropologically interesting, self-contradicting, xenophobic, hate-inciting, ignorance-insisting, genocide-approving, terror-inducing, fantastical artefact of an ancient Sand People,

Harlan Ellison on religion: Ellison is a Sci-Fi writer with a boxfull of credits. He’s proof not every Sci-Fi writer is a religious nutcake like Elron Hubbard.

PZ MYers says, “religion should be strong enough to stand against academic rudeness and mockery without this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism.”

The Liberals and Nationals are positioning themselves way to the far looney right of Australian politics, like the teminally-twitching Republicans in the US.

Transparency International has released its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009. There are some very surprising results

Bertrand Russell recognised this problem and devised a solution; a clunky one, admittedly. His example was a replacement for the sentence, ‘The Golden Mountain does not exist’