I consider Salon to be among the worst offenders of the new pseudo-journalism, and I have long maintained a personal boycott of the website. I ask my publishers to ignore any requests from its editors for interviews or for review copies of my books. And on the rare occasions that Salon publishes good work—the articles of Jeffrey Tayler stand out—I decline to forward the links on social media. My reason is simple: Despite the work of a few blameless writers, Salon has become a cesspool of lies and moral confusion.
http://www.samharris.org/

Atheist author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says the best argument for God he's ever hard has to do with a deistic God as the fine-tuner of the universe.

Dawkins visited Google's office in Kirkland, Washington, to discuss his book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, after which he took a couple of readers' questions. He was asked in a video published on Monday what is the best argument in favor of God and the best argument against evolution that he has heard.

Dawkins prefaced his answer by making it clear that he is not "in any sense admitting that there is a good argument," and insisted that "there is no decent argument for the existence of deities."

He said, however, that the best argument he has heard of concerns a "deistic God, who had something to do with the fine tuning of the universe."

"It's still a very, very bad argument, but it's the best one going," he added, noting that a major problem with the argument is that it leaves unexplained where the fine tuner came from.

As for evolution, however, he said there is simply no argument at all that he can consider.

"There are reasons why people don't get it, such as the time scale involved is so huge. People find it difficult to grasp how long a time has been available for the changes that are talked about," the evolutionary biologist asserted.

Back in June 2011, Evangelical geneticist Francis Collins revealed that Dawkins had told him in a conversation the most troubling argument for nonbelievers he has heard concerns the fine-tuning of the universe.

Headteacher mocked on Twitter for claiming evolution is not a fact

Richard Dawkins weighs in on social media debate after Christina Wilkinson said there was ‘more evidence that Bible is true’

A primary school headteacher has been mocked on Twitter after claiming that evolution was “a theory” and there was “more evidence that the Bible is true”.

Christina Wilkinson, of St Andrew’s Church of England school in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, made the remarks in a tweet responding to London headteacher Tom Sherrington, who urged teachers to stick to science when teaching the origins of life.

Wilkinson wrote: “Evolution is not a fact. That’s why it’s called a theory! There’s more evidence that the Bible is true.”

Amid criticism and calls for her to resign on Twitter, Wilkinson issued a statement saying: “I’d like to make it clear that we teach the full national curriculum in school and that our pupils receive a fully rounded education.”

She also said her tweet was sent from a personal account and “represents my own views”. However, her Twitter handle was @WilkinsonHead, apparently referencing her role as headteacher. The tweet has since been taken down and the account closed.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/03/headteacher-mocked-twitter-claim-evolution-not-fact

Management for the 74-year-old author of The God Delusion said he had suffered a “minor stroke” in the UK last Saturday but had already returned home from hospital.

The health scare has caused him to postpone his tour, his management said in a message passed on to ticket holders on Friday.

“On Saturday night Richard suffered a minor stroke, however he is expected in time to make a full or near full recovery,” the statement said. “He is already at home recuperating.

“This unfortunately means Richard will be unable to make his planned Australian and New Zealand tour. He is very disappointed that he is unable to do so but looks forward to renewing his plans in the not too distant future.”

By Thursday he had recovered enough to use Twitter, plugging a book called God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, for which he had written the foreword.

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/12/richard-dawkins-has-stroke-on-eve-of-australia-and-new-zealand-tour

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Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.

In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.

Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.

Early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion

His book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth”.

It is a myth, he writes, which is “nurtured by both sides of the ‘new atheism’ debate. Adherents wish to present scepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent western world consumed by capitalism.

“Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/17/atheism-has-ancient-roots-claims-new-study

Alleluia... Gus has been harping on this concept for 4000 years, in various guises. Seriously, what happened is that some dickheads decided that the only way get people to behave like cannon fodder figuratively was to make them believe in a superior being , a dude in charge of having created the world to annoy the shit out of sinning humans. The amazing part is that people believed this shit. Well, repeat of the mantra and the threat of being quartered in bits helped a bit. What I have said for yonks is that atheists had to live under rocks and be quiet like church mice in order to survive in this climate of glorious religious imbecility.

The revival of atheism came with scientific development from the 16th century onwards, but it is a hard slog. eighty per cent of Swedish people do not believe in god, while in Yankeedom, ninety-five per cent of the population believe in god. This is why the candidates to the presidency are cavorting with the evangelical nutters, all of them being the biggest hypocrites on the planet.

Alleluia!... I mean Invictus!.

Steve Stankevicius published an article on salon.com, only for the editors to distort what he said and refuse to change it. This follows a worrying trend on a site that claims to be a serious media outlet, yet refuses to abide by some very basic rules of journalism.

BACK IN January, I had a strange week. The well-known news site, salon.com published my very first popular article under a title they chose to give it: ‘New Atheists Must Become New Vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders’ rather than mine: 'Why the New-Atheists need to become the New-Vegans'. 

Until then, my words had been constrained to my practically invisible blog, but Salon gave me the chance to suddenly amplify my whispers into bellows. For that I am very grateful. Unfortunately, what was meant to be a personally joyous moment was slightly soured by some insincere behaviour.

Understandably, many people seemed to think the piece implied that being an atheist automatically compels one to be a vegan. Of course this is not true. Atheism is not a belief system and people arrive (or remain) at this worldview for a wide range of different reasons.

The title "atheist" is largely vacuous and applies little pressure on most topics outside of religion, including the ethics of meat eating. Rather, I simply argued that the moral reasoning and critical thinking championed by many famous public intellectuals – including the so-called "New Atheists" (apologies to those who don't like that name) – leads to veganism. In other words, they argue for ethics, morality, rationality, and scientific reasoning: all the necessary ingredients for a vegan mindset.

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/letter-from-the-rubble-of-a-salon-article,8782

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Salon? Serious? Dear Steve... Salon has gone apeshit a long time ago... I rarely refer to it, nor do I go there. It used to have some spine until it was bought out by the MMMMMMM (Mediocre mainstream mad mass media de massive mierda). It's like the catholic church. Sciences are showing us the new reality... The catholic church tries to absorb sciences into its bosom of illogical dogma to make sure people stay on the belief treadmill. As I mentioned before this is not a new trick. Michelangelo painted pagan images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling under instruction from the pope, in order to corner the market of spirituality. Same with corporations. They buy into the sciences not for public knowledge but for profit, by making you addicted to consumption.

That Salon distorted your article is part and parcel of the "new thought police".

Meanwhile, Gus, a "new atheist", is not a "new vegan". In regard to animal protein supply, I try my best to source "organic, free range, and wild". That's me. It's not a religion nor an exclusivity — and I eat mostly ocean fish with roots, fruit, nuts and salads. I try to grow my own. I could not face a half-pound steak. I would find it gross and be sick for two days. A little kangaroo meat is okay. I am too old to go fishing myself, though I have done it in the past. Eating veges and nuts exclusively gives me stomach acidic problems. Some of our grains are not healthy. I used to make my own bread for a while. There is no sin, nor moral dilemma in this.

Steve, note that Peter Singer was on the animal liberation case many years ago (1975).

https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/why-the-new-atheists-should-become-the-new-vegans,8548

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Richard Dawkins has denied using “abusive speech against Islam” after a California radio station canceled a book event with the scientist, citing his comments on Islam which the station said had “offended and hurt...many people."

Dawkins, whose bestselling study of evolution, The Selfish Gene, was named the most influential science book of all time by the Royal Society last week, was lined up to speak about his memoir A Brief Candle in the Dark at an event hosted by Berkeley’s KPFA Radio in August.

But KPFA subsequently informed ticketbuyers that the event had been canceled.

“We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam – so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech,” said KPFA in an email to ticket buyers, which Dawkins later published on his website. “While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologise for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins’s views much earlier. We also apologise to all those inconvenienced by this cancellation.”

Dawkins, the author of anti-religious polemic The God Delusion, called the decision “truly astonishing” and a “matter of personal sorrow.” He had listened to KPFA “almost every day” when he lived in Berkeley for two years, he said, and had been grateful for its “objective reporting and humane commentary.”

“My memory of KPFA is that you were unusually scrupulous about fact-checking. I especially admired your habit of always quoting sources,” he wrote to KPFA in an open letter he shared on his website. “You conspicuously did not quote a source when accusing me of ‘abusive speech’. Why didn’t you check your facts – or at least have the common courtesy to alert me – before summarily cancelling my event?”

Read more:

http://www.alternet.org/belief/richard-dawkins-event-canceled-over-his-a...

Is questioning the validity of Islam in the same spirit as questioning the validity of Christianity constitute "abuse"? No, it does not. My guess here is than many of the people objecting to Dawkins are actually evangelical Christians whose little game of lies is exposed by Dawkins. What is wrong with these people? Dawkins expressed an opinion about Islam which is by no mean "abusive":

In a report about the cancellation, KPFA said it had been contacted by activists who had described Dawkins as “a very well-known Islamophobe” who had vilified Muslims. The radio station cited tweets from Dawkins including one that read: “I think Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today” and pointed to a recent Telegraph article in which Dawkins was quoted as saying that “if you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.”

But the station did not include the Telegraph quote in its entirety, in which Dawkins continues: “It’s terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else.”

KPFA general manager Quincy McCoy said he decided to cancel Dawkins’s appearance when the academic’s statements were brought to his attention.

I guess you have the inclination, but should you have the time:

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