Christopher Hitchens, a sharp-witted provocateur who used his formidable learning, biting wit and muscular prose style to skewer what he considered high-placed hypocrites, craven lackeys of the right and left, “Islamic fascists” and religious faith of any kind, died Thursday from esophageal cancer.

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The finding that religion scarcely influences moral intuition undermines the idea that a godless society will be immoral, says Philip Ball. Whether it ‘explains’ religion is another matter.

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In an excerpt from his 2007 book ‘God is Not Great’, Christopher Hitchens recounts the “embarrassing” beginnings of Mormonism.

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Earlier this year, Andrew Zak Williams asked public figures why they believe in God. Now it’s the turn of the atheists – from A C Grayling to P Z Myers – to explain why they don’t.

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Chris, shares the story of the erosion of his faith, the recognition of the ways faith distorts experience, his emergence from Mormonism, and the effect it has had on his life.

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In this excerpt from his 1995 book, The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan offers his famous analogy of claims for the existence of a god.

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New York Times science writer Natalie Angier’s 2004 essay about scientists trying to accommodate religion.

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Richard Dawkins called him a “compliant quisling” for accepting the Templeton Prize. Here, Martin Rees explains his decision.

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Are there people who believe only somewhat that there are no supernatural entities in the universe - or only part of a god?

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Peter Gomes, a minister and theologian at Harvard who came out of the closet in 1991, pushed a campaign to rebut literal and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.

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Jeff Dee and Matt Dillahunty on the Austin, TX television call-in show respond to the fundamentalist caller with a withering analysis of his arguments for biblical literalism.

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Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn, focusing on its largest moon, Titan, and on frozen Enceladus, which seems to shoot jets of ice.

The 5 most outrageous and 5 most positive news stories/quotes about atheism, humanists, and non-theists in 2010.

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We round up our favorite irreligious quotes from our funniest atheists, from Woody Allen and Cloris Leachman to David Cross and Sarah Silverman.

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Actor and comedian Ricky Gervais on his atheism.

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A Taiwanese researcher has spent a decade mapping out the neurons in a fruit fly’s brain, the first step towards assembling a complete computer model of a complex brain.

Richard Dawkins answers questions submitted by Reddit.

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Frans de Waal examines how the behavior of primates sheds light on the origins of the sense of right and wrong in human beings.

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Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for the similarities between religions. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question…

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A Pew survey finds that atheists and agnostics in America are more knowledgeable about religions than religious people.

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