Over the years I’ve found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can’t abide speculative thinking. And as the renowned Richard Dawkins has proved, they are also very annoyed by a nuisance named God.

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Logic alone is not enough to make good decisions. Neuroscience shows that emotions, intuition, and creative insight all have a role, as long as they are examined critically.

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From January to July of 2009, Dr. Matthew L. Goodwin lived and worked at an HIV/AIDS clinic in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  Here is a short piece he wrote detailing some of the struggles of the Haitian people, and more importantly, how religion can get in the way of reason. Thinking based on superstition or ritual might seem silly in everyday life, but when it infiltrates how patients view medicine (prayer instead of medicine), then patients pay with their health, their lives.

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Swiss voters pass a referendum to ban new minarets on mosques in the country.

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The Roman Catholic Church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin, according to a scathing report released Thursday.

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Just a few years ago, it seemed curious that an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn’t smite tormentors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They all published best-selling books excoriating religion and practically inviting lightning bolts.

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A rabbi, minister, and sheikh have formed a group that travels the country talking about the commonalities and contradictions among their faiths.  “Clearly, all three clergymen are in the liberal wing of their respective faiths.”

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President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math.

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As stigma declines, atheism finds niche — though confrontation levels vary.

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Secular campus groups are sprouting at universities across the U.S.

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A new curriculum for primary schools in maintained (publicly-funded) schools in England makes the teaching of evolution a mandatory topic in science lessons. On the other hand, the law still requires Religious Education to be taught, something that is routinely used as a tool for proselytising.

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The preaching of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni imam born in the U.S., may have played a role in motivating the Fort Hood killer and a group of Canadian Muslims who planned to attack the Canadian parliament and behead the prime minister.

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David Hamilton, Barack Obama’s first judicial nominee, has seen his confirmation stalled until last week in the U.S. Senate, in part because his opponents claim he’s a judicial activist for an opinion he wrote about God’s proper secular title. In a 2005 case, Hinrichs v. Bosma, Hamilton determined that those who pray in the Indiana House of Representatives “should refrain from using Christ’s name or title or any other denominational appeal,” and that such prayer must hereinafter be “nonsectarian.”

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Few companies excite such extreme emotions as Monsanto. To its critics, the agricultural giant is a corporate hybrid of Victor Frankenstein and Ebenezer Scrooge, using science to create foods that threaten the health of both people and the planet, and intellectual-property laws to squeeze every last penny out of the world’s poor.

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Amnesty International has condemned the stoning of a 13-year-old girl in southern Somalia. The human rights organization claims the teenager was stoned to death after her father informed the authorities that she had been gang-raped.

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New Zealand born evangelical Christian Ray Comfort, aka “the banana man”, has published a new 150th anniversary edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, complete with a 50-page creationist introduction. Working with child actor Kirk Cameron, Comfort and his lackeys will be distributing 50,000 copies of the book for free on 50 college campuses around the US tomorrow. “All we want to do is propose the opposing and correct view,” says Growing Pains star Cameron, who, as far as I can tell, has equally impeccable credentials in evolutionary biology as Comfort—meaning, of course, none whatsoever.

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It is not quite plastered on the bus but the outworking of last year’s Atheist Bus campaign has made its way onto a wall in Belfast.

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Psychologist Valerie Tarico challenges the moral standing of the Catholic bishops and discusses her abortion.  She asserts that moral decision making is a right and responsibility for each person, independent of religious authorities.

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The Church of Scientology faces the prospect of a police investigation in Australia after being accused of torture and embezzlement and of forcing employees to have abortions.

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Hitchens points out that the military leadership, in its call to “not jump to conclusions about Major Hasan”, are all bending over backwards to avoid linking Hasan’s religious faith to his killing spree.  He then duly lists out several obvious reasons to conclude that Hasan was, in fact, driven to his crime by his religion.

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