By Mattias Lehman Often I hear people claim that they are 'Agnostic.' However, this is a misnomer, due to misunderstanding of Agnosticism. What such people mean to claim, is that they are weak atheists, or negative atheists, who lack belief in god. Such a description applies to babies, or people who have never heard of the idea of a god. Some would argue that it applies to people who simply don't know what they believe yet. However, not knowing implies a lack of conviction. A belief is a conviction in some thing's truth. If they lack that conviction in the existence of god, that means that they are at least an implicit atheist. Furthermore, that claim of simply lacking a belief in a god, does not take somewhat of a middle ground. The fact that they lack belief in all gods they know of, means that they have rejected all the gods possible, which is a position of strong atheism, or disbelief, at least of all gods they know of. Therefore, all people who have no specific bel...

From The Hellbound Alleee Network Click here to get your own player. Godless Thanksgiving: Who Do We Thank? Author: Austin Cline There's a common belief among many American Christians that the American Thanksgiving holiday is somehow religious. Aside from the apparent desire to turn everything into an expression of their religion, the primary reason behind this seems to be the idea that the whole point must be to give thanks to their god – not any other gods, just theirs, thus making it a Christian holiday too. If this is true, then it makes no sense for non-Christians, or at least non-theists, to celebrate Thanksgiving. Having a Godless Thanksgiving: It is a plain, undeniable reality that non-Christians and non-theists all over America participate in Thanksgiving observances. This proves that the insistence on the religious or Christian nature of Thanksgiving is false. It simply can’t be true, but this doesn’t tell us why it isn’t true. For that, it must be shown that giving thank...

By Daniel Intro : I simply want to lay out a fair representation of the positive case for intelligent design (ID) in this article, and examine why the case has been ruled a failure by the greater scientific community. Because ID is so vague, eg defined by the Discovery Institute as , The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Therefore, making an argument for such a claim is going to be difficult from the outset. "Some features"? "An intelligent cause"? We see the vagueness of the definition come back to haunt ID advocates in their inability to put forth convincing arguments which line up with "this is best explained by an intelligent cause" versus "random mutation/natural selection". For example, some of ID's cosmological arguments in The Privileged Planet (largely the anthropic princ...

Mentalist Derren Brown poses as James Lawrence who claims to be able to convert atheists into believing in God with a touch of his hand. Derren makes the following statement at the beginning of each episode of 'Trick of the Mind': "This program fuses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. I achieve all the results you'll see through a varied mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used in the show." Part I: Part II:

Michael Shermer takes us on a hilarious romp through the strange claims we humans put forth as truth — from alien encounters to Virgin Mary sightings on pizza pies, to hidden messages revealed while playing "Stairway to Heaven" backwards — and explains the evolutionary and cognitive basis for these lapses in reason. Don't miss the one-minute challenge testing your own observational skills...

I've been reading news articles and commentaries on the Ted Haggard episode and have been surprised to find that the majority of stories haven't been all that condemning. Although no one is denying Haggard's homosexual lifestyle or his drug use, almost without exception the articles contain phrases such as "We are all subject to falling to temptation" or "Satan attacks successful Christians" or "Ministers are just people too" and "We should remember David and Bathsheba" or "We must seek for his restoration and forgiveness" or similar banal rhetoric. And these trite phrases have been weaved into columns written by secular and Christian writers alike! In fact, the general timbre seems to be that although Haggard initially denied the allegations and only later admitted he’d been disingenuous, his fall from grace is supposedly only evidence of human frailty or Original Sin or something. Perhaps I'm just jaded, but the man i...

This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, by Valerie Tarico, www.lulu.com/tarico The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. —Isaiah 11:6–7 HUMBLED AND ENTHRALLED, THE WRITER OF PSALMS MARVELED AT THE GLORIES of God displayed before mortal men in nature’s grand design. His poems of worship pay tribute to God’s awesome handiwork. Not only is God the maker of heaven and earth, he is involved in the tiniest details of the natural world. “Every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine” (Psa. 50:10–11). A later psalmist, St. Francis of Assisi, wrote: “All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing...

Michael Moore goes after Fred Phelps with his gang of gay men.

Jesse James is a punk band from London, England. They formed in 2000 and have since toured the UK, Europe and Canada. Their first release, the Shoes EP was a hit on the UK, due to repeated TV play of the video for the song 'Shoes'. Later releases include the Hotwired EP, Punk Soul Brothers LP, and the Mission LP, recorded in San Francisco with the infamous NOFX producer Ryan Greene. The video for the song Dear Jesus, released in 2005, was banned from UK TV. They released their latest album, titled The Assassination of..., in May 2006. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh (Hi this is Jesus I can't get to the phone right now But if you leave a message after the tone I'll get right back to you) Beep Dear Jesus I don't believe in you no more Dear Jesus I think you should know the score I never met you Cos you lived a long long time ago Not to upset you But there's not a lot to know Born in a stable Is the story we were told He had a beard And you wore a lot of shitty cloth...

By Alan M. Perlman, PhD I’ve been just as surprised as any liberally-educated secular humanist by the resurgence of religious superstition and fundamentalism in my lifetime. After all, we’ve had the brilliance of Greek and Roman civilization, then the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and, most recently, the dawn of the Information Age. After decades of painstaking research and observation, we have a theory of how things began: Big Bang (or some other equally momentous event), followed by the creation of simple, then more complex chemical elements, the solidification of planets, then just the right mix of circumstances to set up our blessed little globe for us. It took fifteen billion years or so, and there are perhaps billions of galaxies like ours. It took us a million years to go from hominids to the Internet. It’s all quite miraculous. And I thought that religious believers and modern, science-minded folks had reached accommodation on the q...

By Ian Hi Jesus. Jet me start out by saying F*** you. Yeah, that's right. F*** you. F*** you uncle f***er. What the f***? you ask. Allow me to explain. After careful consideration and a lot of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that you, as presented in the Bible and your followers, are a f***er. How so? Let's see. If people don't believe in you, you damn them to hell. Real nice and merciful. If you damn people to hell for not believing in you and thus harming your ego, then f*** you. If you damn people to hell for following Christianity, then f*** you. If you're going to damn ME for being a freethinker and a humanist, then you're a really psychotic son of God. Want to change your image Jesus? How about starting off by getting rid of all your spokespersons. Why not start with Billy Graham? He's a big motherf***er. I mean come on, wrinkly as a prune, thinks Satan is out to ruin the world, threatens us with hell if we don't believe, runs ...

By Atheist Mommy 1. Atheists hate Christians and Christianity. No, we don't. Personally, I do hate the atrocities that have been committed in the name of religion, the dishonesty of most religions, and the way that they encourage people not to think or question, and not to trust or use their minds. But I don't dislike someone just because of their religion. 2. Most atheists started out as Christians, and stopped believing because of some bad experience with other Christians. Or maybe we simply started to question, to wonder what happened when we applied the standards of logic, reason and burden of proof to religion, as we already did to everything in our lives. Or, perhaps, we were never believers at all. It happens, you know. 3. Atheists have no sense of morality, since morality comes from God. Ah, the old without fear of hell, there would be nothing to stop people from being bloodthirsty monsters argument. It may come as a surprise to most Christians, but there are reasons fo...