I’ve heard a number of explanations: it’s a private conversation with the supernatural emperor of the universe, or possibly a moment of communion with all-that-is, or even just a quiet personal centering of the self. These are all lies. As we all know, prayer is actually an opportunity to posture publicly, promoting one’s own piety.

**Submitter's Note: browse in Privacy/Incognito mode.** THE population of nonreligious Americans — including atheists, agnostics and those who call themselves “nothing in particular” — stands at an all-time high this election year. Americans who say religion is not important in their lives and who do not belong to a religious group, according to the Pew Research Center, have risen in numbers from an estimated 21 million in 2008 to more than 36 million now.

I intend to share ways in which you can avoid eternal punishment, and what to expect should you be unfortunate enough to land yourself in the fiery pits of hell once you depart this earth.

I wanted to talk for a minute about Smullyan’s logic puzzles in order to illustrate a point about religious arguments.

C.S. Lewis popularized the trilemma of "liar, lunatic or lord" and Josh McDowell, and others, ran with that in order to firm up a foundation that may seek to exclude other options.

The Godless Mom tackles Billy Dyer's assertion that "Atheism, as a worldview, has a common forbidden fruit and that is asking the question, 'Why?'"

Let’s consider the challenge that we have Christianity to thank for creating universities and nurturing them as they developed into the centers of education and research that they are today.

Amy Roth makes me sad with her perspective on the history of involvement with skepticism and atheism. How do you destroy a movement? By making enemies of the people who care about it.

The new atheists decry religion as a poisonous set of lies. John Gray asks what if a belief in the supernatural is natural?

“We’re in a bad fix in America when eight evil old men and one vain and foolish woman [on the Supreme Court] can speak a verdict on American liberties…Our nation from this day forward is no better than Russia insofar as expecting the blessings of God is concerned. You no longer live in a nation that is religiously free.”

Defenders of the Christian faith love to move discussions about their religion from objective matters to subjective ones, from measurable things to the immeasurable, and from quantifiable subjects to those which are completely nebulous—or more to the point, unfalsifiable. This is a telling compulsion, and every time it happens it reminds me why I eventually lost my ability to believe their grand narrative. I recognize these tactics because I practiced them first on myself.

Clearing the dusty shelves of old unanswered things. One such is the Lowder-Barnes critique of my application of Bayesian reasoning to reverse the fine tuning argument into a case against God, rather than an argument for God. Actually this is not my argument. It is the argument of three prominent mathematicians in two independent studies.

There’s nothing “new” about “the New Atheists”. Just as, at some point, we’d stopped using Vespucci’s “New World” label to denote the western hemisphere, it’s probably time to abandon the adjective ‘new’ when referencing the above-mentioned trailblazers, especially now that the trail has been well-traveled, paved over, widened to four lanes, and features a Starbucks at every off-ramp.

Whenever a theologian talks about how beautiful it is that Christ came to earth and died, not to appease God’s wrath, but instead, as the image of God who suffers with us, even to the point of death on the cross, I imagine that, if it were real, it would be the worst episode of Undercover Boss ever.

The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods — ancient, medieval and modern. We can divide it into rival traditions (empiricism versus rationalism, analytic versus Continental), or into various core areas (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics). It can also, of course, be viewed through the critical lens of gender or racial exclusion, as a discipline almost entirely fashioned for and by white European men.

There are many theories as to how religious thought originated. But two of the most widely cited ideas have to do with how early humans interacted with their natural environment, said Kelly James Clark, a senior research fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

I first encountered Kent Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments* when I was a high school freshman and I immediately loved them, got a hold of a poster with them on it, hung it on my wall so they would face me straight across the room whenever I was propped up on my bed facing forward, and read them countless times throughout high school.

Madras high court has ordered temple authorities in Tamil Nadu to refuse entry to people in jeans, shorts and other garments

This Pat Bagley cartoon appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday, Jan. 7, 2016.

I have to say that it is utterly exhausting to have to defend my own morality day in and day out, but these questions illustrate how faith thieves people of their class, respect for other people and empathy. What sort of human being goes around demanding that others, who’ve done no wrong as far as they can tell, explain how they know right from wrong? This is biblical morality? Am I supposed to be impressed? ‘Cause I’m not impressed. Like, at all.