If you visit the County-City Building in South Bend, Indiana, you’re going to see this pleasant holiday display… that will either put a smile or frown on your face after you read what it actually says... The sign, reading “Oh come all ye faithless” and (on the other side) “Even Heathens Celebrate the Season!,” was sponsored by the Northern Indiana Atheists. They took advantage of a policy, generally used to promote Nativity scenes, that allows outside groups to sponsor displays in the government building during the holidays.

With the death of President George H. W. Bush, I’ve seen a number of atheists circulating an alleged quotation of his for obvious reasons. As the story goes, in 1987, Bush said, “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.”

We know there are atheists in the military; about a third of active duty soldiers don’t have a religious affiliation. Yet many Veteran’s Day services include religious elements that are off-putting to many of the very people who are supposed to be honored. Johnny Pike, American Atheists’ state director in Kentucky and an Army veteran himself, has some excellent advice for anyone looking to honor soldiers this weekend.

Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?”

Twenty-four hours after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren shocked the political world with a five-minute video (and a mountain of documentation) aimed at putting to bed the controversy over her claims of Native American heritage, it's becoming increasingly clear the strategy amounts to a swing and a miss.

There are a lot of U.S. laws that privilege religious institutions over other non-profits, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation has been working to expose those differences and get the courts to put everyone on a level playing field. The most famous example of this involves a case in which FFRF’s co-presidents applied to the IRS for a tax break on their housing — just like the “Parsonage Allowance” that pastors receive.

The island country of 330,000 nestled in the North Atlantic is making big waves. No one under the age of 21 will be indoctrinated into any religion, sect, or cult. Iceland’s parliament, the Alþingi, passed the National Minimum Religious Indoctrination Act (NMRIA) overwhelmingly. No parent or caretaker may expose a person under the age of 21 to religion by bringing them to church, temple, or mosque. And no religious fables (The Great Flood, Passover, Mohamed riding on a Buraq) can be fostered onto young and impressionable minds.

Religious education in schools needs a major overhaul to reflect an increasingly diverse world and should include the study of atheism, agnosticism and secularism, a two-year investigation has concluded. The subject should be renamed Religion and Worldviews to equip young people with respect and empathy for different faiths and viewpoints, says the Commission on Religious Education in a report published on Sunday.

Traditional Christian values have long underpinned popular children's books such as The Chronicles of Narnia. But now Richard Dawkins wants to give youngsters a different perspective with a new book – Atheism for Children. The outspoken scientist, 77, hopes it will stop the 'religious indoctrination of children' by schools and family members.

"We want a day to clearly illustrate to you that there is no God, or any Supreme Being worth honouring and worshipping" That is a plea that has been made by Atheists In Kenya to the government as they seek to have a national holiday that will be devoted to them.

Americans are abandoning religion in droves, continuing a trend that has persisted over decades. Between 2007 and 2014, the number of Americans who didn't identify with any religion jumped from 36.6 million to 55.8 million, according to Pew Research Center. New data from a Pew survey of 1,300 non-religious people published Wednesday provides deeper insight into what is driving this phenomenon, as told by the non-religious themselves.

During Franco´s dictatorship Spain was a very Catholic country. After three decades of democracy, as the Catholic Church likes to say, Spain is not a Catholic country anymore. Loss of religion first became apparent with the legalization of divorce, contraceptives, and the promotion of sex ed all opposed by the Church. This was followed by the decriminalization of abortion, the acceptance of drug possession for personal consumption (drug users are not criminals in Spain...

Whether it's through meditation, yoga, or other alternative practices, Australians are adapting to meet their own spiritual needs outside of traditional religions. Located in the heart of Sydney's bustling CBD, Centred Meditation provides a space for workers to stop and meditate. For some, it's a chance to de-stress during their busy day, while others come looking for something more.

Five years ago this week marked a victory for atheists. It wasn’t a group of newly elected politicians affirming that they didn’t believe in God; those representatives are still few and far between. It wasn’t a handful of states finally purging anti-atheist rhetoric from their constitutions; we still have seven to go. And it had nothing to do with the Supreme Court; Greece v. Galloway would be decided the following year.

Sherif Gaber is an Egyptian blogger and activist who is well known for his views on atheism. After previous arrests and problems with the Egyptian authorities in 2013 and 2015, his whereabouts are now unknown. On May the 7th, Gaber tweeted that he is “4 days in hell. I'm free. Okay. In Egypt.” The way this tweet is written suggests that it may have been the Egyptian government taking over his twitter account.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll confirms what we already suspected about religion in the U.S. Protestants are on the decline, people with no religious affiliation are on the rise, and the trends show no signs of reversing anytime soon. The numbers show Protestants have dropped from 50% of the population in 2003 to 36% today. Christians overall? 83% in 2003, 72% today. And in the same time span, “the number of Americans who say they have no religion has nearly doubled, to 21 percent.”

It’s relatively well-known that the portion of the U.S. population with no religious affiliation has been steadily increasing recently. And for those paying attention to research, it’s also been obvious for a while that conservative evangelicals were beginning to lose “market share” after years of mocking their mainline Protestant cousins of “dying” because of insufficiently rigorous theology and moral strictures.

In 2015, CNN aired an hour-long special called “Atheists: Inside the World of Non-believers.” The goal was to introduce atheists to an audience unfamiliar with them (except for what they might hear in church). While there was so much they didn’t include — and couldn’t, given the time constraints — it was a fairly decent glimpse at what a handful of non-believers have to deal with.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. looks at Voltaire's early reflections on Buddhism and how, in his desire to separate the Buddha's teachings from the trappings of religion, the French Enlightenment thinker prefigured an approach now familiar in the West.

Iceland seems to be on its way to becoming an even more secular nation, according to a new poll. Less than half of Icelanders claim they are religious and more than 40% of young Icelanders identify as atheist. Remarkably the poll failed to find young Icelanders who accept the creation story of the Bible. 93.9% of Icelanders younger than 25 believed the world was created in the big bang, 6.1% either had no opinion or thought it had come into existence through some other means and 0.0% believed it had been created by God.