Heather Horn, writing in the Atlantic Wire, lists out some interesting articles about the Pew survey that finds that atheists and agnostics know more about religions than religious people.

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The Dalai Lama donates $50,000 to a research lab that is investigating whether meditation can promote compassion and kindness.

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When British science author Simon Singh wrote a book questioning the validity of alternative medicine, he was hit with a libel suit by the British Chiropractic Association.  Instead of folding, he fought and won.

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Four former members of a youth group Bishop Eddie Long runs have accused him of coercing them into homosexual sex acts, and of abusing his moral authority.

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Over 5,000 Bulgarians demonstrated Friday in Sofia to demand mandatory religious instruction in schools.

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Christopher Hitchens, suffering from cancer, is not participating in “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day”.

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Why can Australia elect an atheist as president and America cannot?

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What Christine O’Donnell, the Republican nominee for Delaware’s senate seat said about evolution in 1996.

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Members of a religious cult feared to be planning a mass suicide in a California desert were discovered hours after they went missing.

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A cartoonist in Seattle who promoted an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” last spring is now in hiding after her life was threatened by Islamic extremists.

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Robert Wright tries to show that the Koran is saying the same thing as the Bible.

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In a stunt posted on YouTube, an Australian burns both the Koran and the Bible, testing pages from each as rolling paper for a marijuana joint.

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The Independent writes about “honor killings”, mainly done in religious societies.

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A commission set up to investigate sexual abuse in the Belgian Catholic Church found pervasive abuse involving over 500 victims.

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The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

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Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail. But this dependence on fact does not make religious claims anything like hypotheses in the scientific sense. Hypotheses are not central. Rather, what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.

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Four-fifths of Scots believe the taxpayer should not be helping to foot the bill for Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain.

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Physicist Stephen Hawking writes in his new book, ‘The Grand Design,’ that God did not create the universe, because gravity means it would have happened on its own.

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Believers see vines growing on a power pole as a sign from God.

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For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law.

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