"I am in a strange situation and I need some advice as to how I should go about navigating it. For years and many months, I have been trying to craft a way to prove God using the scientific method since no one seems interested or convinced that it can be done."

I'm trying to make peace with the idea that, in almost every struggle I care passionately about, I am going to live the rest of my life without winning.

Every faithful or once faithful member of their respective religion should be familiar with the idea of a “trial of faith”. When hardship and tragedy strike, we are told that God is testing us. We are expected to endure and remain faithful through our trials, and after… AFTER… we will be blessed. There are many explanations for why the troubling experiences we have supposedly bring us closer to God. Mostly though, God just wants to see how much he can fuck with you before you give up on him.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) wrote: Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us. This is the famous observation by Epicurus, later echoed by Mark Twain and thousands more, that “when I’m dead I won’t care that I’m dead.”

In 1933, the first Humanist Manifesto was crafted to communicate a need to transcend the limitations of religious belief systems. Those who penned and signed this comprehensive document on humanism affirmed the necessity of establishing “conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few.”

Henry Rollins speaks at Soka University of America about the importance of being a global citizen.

Do you hear the whispers in the church hallways? Those sinners got what was coming to them. Sooner or later the price of sin must be paid. You are free to choose, but not to choose the consequences of that choice. In any discussion I have had where I have pinned down the believer and forced them to look squarely at the core morality they hold the comeback is always the same. You’ll get yours, God’s gonna damn you for such insubordinate behavior!!!

The religious often see our lack of belief as a rejection of belief, which is true, but not in the way they say it. I reject the concept of heaven because I think it’s untrue, not because I know it’s true and I just don’t like it. When I say I don’t believe in heaven or souls or the afterlife, I don’t say that out of anti-religious spite. I don’t believe in it. There’s nothing to believe in.

This claim is meant to sound paradoxical to most of my readers–but it shouldn’t. It’s no more paradoxical than the statement that that the Civil Rights era in the United States was not a golden age of racial equality. The Enlightenment was an era when many people were arguing loudly for religious an intellectual freedom–but they spent so much time arguing for it because religious and intellectual freedom wasn’t something they had yet.

To strengthen the humanist presence in social justice movements, today the American Humanist Association launched the Black Humanist Alliance, an adjunct organization that will promote racial justice and solidarity between the Black and humanist communities. In conjunction with the launch, the American Humanist Association is also relaunching its women’s rights adjunct, the Feminist Humanist Alliance, and its LGBTQ adjunct, the LGBTQ Humanist Alliance.

What is hell? Is it a literal place of torture and torment? Is it separation from a god? Is it annihilation? Is there anything real behind the threats? Which religion's hell should we avoid? What is this concept doing to people?

The moral argument for god’s existence is one of the most common arguments apologists will use in debates with atheists. It also tends to be one of the most misunderstood arguments, which I think contributes to its persistence in sticking around despite having been debunked a long time ago.

Youngstown City Schools did not answer questions about why they are using Adnan Oktar’s materials in science class, but they probably weren’t aiming to promote Harun Yahya Islam. Most creationists in America are Christian, and the majority of the religious materials that the Youngstown is using are Christian.

The minister in charge of Tooting Bec Methodist Church asked me a theological question of such directness that there was simply no room for equivocation. “Would you believe in God,” he asked, “if at this very moment Jesus were to walk through that door?”

Dan Dennett talks about how religions in many cases offers an "goldenplated excuse to stop thinking" and that people have got to stop playing the "faith card" in debates. I think he puts it brilliantly.

Craig would remain a Christian even if he found that all his arguments fail and that some atheistic arguments succeed. And why? Because he has a strong inner feeling (which he interprets as the ‘Holy Spirit’) that it is true. (Of course, Craig must ignore all the others who have a strong inner feeling that other gods exist, which they interpret to be something like ‘the self-authenticating witness’ of those gods.)

Biblical numerology, gammatria, Bible codes and other attempts to identify mystical patterns and messages in ancient texts and in the fabric of reality...are we actually finding something real, or just what we're looking for?

When it comes to legal cases, the courts are reluctant to get involved in whether a person’s religious beliefs are sincere or not and usually take sincerity as a given because making judgments about whether a person’s religious beliefs are genuine gets them involved all manner of messy theological issues that they would much rather avoid.

“Would you willingly lie to your children?” asks Rabbi Adam Chalom, Ph.D. “Would you say this is what happened when you know this is not what happened? There’s an ethical question there.” The lie Rabbi Chalom is referring to is the continued maintenance of the popular belief that the Jewish foundation narrative detailed in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) chronicles actual historical events...

Recently, Charisma magazine, a major media outlet for evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, published an open call to genocide. The article in question, titled "Why I Am Absolutely Islamaphobic" [sic] and written by Gary Cass, begins with the premise that "every true follower of Mohammed" wants to "subjugate and murder" non-Muslims, and therefore it's impossible for Christians to live together peacefully with them.