Humanists Launch First-Ever National Godless Holiday Campaign

Celebrating a new kind of holiday tradition, the American Humanist Association has launched a new advertising campaign similar to the one that ran in the nation's capital last year, which made headlines around the globe. Only this year, instead of the campaign focusing on a single location, ads will be blazoned across transit systems in five cities--including Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco--marking the first-ever nation-wide humanist holiday advertising campaign.

"No God?...No Problem!" proclaim the ads, featuring an image of several smiling, Santa hat-clad individuals. The ads will kick off in Washington, D.C. in time for Thanksgiving weekend, running inside 200 buses, fifty rail cars and on the side or tail of twenty buses. The campaign will continue with ads appearing on select buses in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco starting in early December.

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Godless Billboard Near Houston's George Bush Airport

"Don't Believe In God? You are not alone."

These words are part of prominent billboard slated to go up in Houston today. It will be located west of I-45 on Farm-to-Market Rd. 1960 near Ella Blvd. and will be viewable by westbound traffic. Sponsored by the Houston Freethought Alliance with funding from the United Coalition of Reason, the billboard's message is superimposed over an image of blue sky and puffy white clouds.

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Tulsa's Godless Groups Organize With Billboard, Book Tour

"Are you good without God? Millions are."

These words are slated to appear today on a prominent Tulsa billboard, located on I -44 West at Elwood. It will be visible to westbound traffic and is sponsored by Tulsa CoR, the Tulsa Coalition of Reason.

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Group Organizes To Be 'Good Without God'

Teresa Cherry was out running errands when she saw the question floating over Interstate 95.

"Are you good without God?" the electronic billboard asked. "Millions are."

The Baltimore woman does not believe in the existence of a supreme being. And in that moment, she did not feel so alone.

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Baltimore's Nontheistic Groups Organize with Billboard Campaign

Atheist Billboard Stirs God Debate

It was supposed to be a meeting for the Atheists of Florida to recruit more members, but it turned into a debate with Christians about whether or not God exists.

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Humanists Pleased With Inclusion Of Nontheists At Colorado Holiday Event

The American Humanist Association announced today they were pleased that nontheists were included in a government-sponsored holiday event in Colorado this past weekend. The Colorado Coalition of Reason (COCOR) was permitted by Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden to participate in the "Apparently Annual Politically Incorrect Christmas Tree Trimming Party," which was held outside the Larimer County Sheriff's Office Administration on Saturday. COCOR, with legal advice from the American Humanist Association, had asked to be included in the celebration amidst concerns that the event was going to unlawfully promote Christianity.

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Atheist Display at Sheriff Alderden's Nativity Scene

Atheists Need A Different Voice

We all know the names (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) of those angry white men who tend to antagonize the world's believers. But the most persuasive voices for the 'new New Atheism' tend to be women.

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We macho atheists need a little woman to calm us down

Social Scientists Build Case For 'Survival Of The Kindest'

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

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It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially. What's the evidence?

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The Chronic Dependence Of Popular Religiosity Upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions

Abstract: Better understanding the nature, origin and popularity of varying levels of popular religion versus secularism, and their impact upon socioeconomic conditions and vice versa, requires a cross national comparison of the competing factors in populations where opinions are freely chosen. Utilizing 25 indicators, the uniquely extensive Successful Societies Scale reveals that population diversity and immigration correlate weakly with 1st world socioeconomic conditions, and high levels of income disparity, popular religiosity as measured by differing levels of belief and activity, and rejection of evolutionary science correlate strongly negatively with improving conditions. The historically unprecedented socioeconomic security that results from low levels of progressive government policies appear to suppress popular religiosity and creationist opinion, conservative religious ideology apparently contributes to societal dysfunction, and religious prosociality and charity are less effective at improving societal conditions than are secular government programs. The antagonistic relationship between better socioeconomic conditions and intense popular faith may prevent the existence of nations that combine the two factors. The nonuniversality of strong religious devotion, and the ease with large populations abandon serious theism when conditions are sufficiently benign, refute hypotheses that religious belief and practice are the normal, deeply set human mental state, whether they are superficial or natural in nature. Instead popular religion is usually a superficial and flexible psychological mechanism for coping with the high levels of stress and anxiety produced by sufficiently dysfunctional social and especially economic environments. Popular nontheism is a similarly casual response to superior conditions.

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Creating God In One's Own Image

For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

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Dear God, please confirm what I already believe

More U.S. Christians Mix In 'Eastern,' New Age Beliefs

Elements of Eastern faiths and New Age thinking have been widely adopted by 65% of U.S. adults, including many who call themselves Protestants and Catholics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released Wednesday.

--snip--

The percentage of people who call themselves Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation, and so many people declined any religious label that the "Nones," now 15% of the USA, are the third-largest "religious" group after Catholics and Baptists, according to the American Religious Identification Survey last March.

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Entropy Alone Can Create Complex Crystals from Simple Shapes; Tetrahedra Packing Record Broken

Entropy is a measure of the number of ways the components of a system can be arranged. While often linked to disorder, entropy can also cause objects to order. The pyramid shape central to this research is the tetrahedron---a three-dimensional, four-faced, triangular polyhedron that turns up in nanotechnology and biology.

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Large Hadron Collider Makes History With 1.18 TeV Protons

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made history and become most powerful particle accelerator on the planet.

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Just After the Big Bang: Hubble's Deepest View of Universe Unveils Never-Before-Seen Galaxies

ScienceDaily -- The new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest image yet of the Universe in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are likely the oldest galaxies ever identified, having formed between only 600-900 million years after the Big Bang.

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The Big Dipper Gains a Star

Hunt for new worlds goes into overdrive

Black Hole Caught Zapping Galaxy Into Existence?

War On Solstice? Celebrate!

'Tis the season for celebrating, and we should all rejoice, according to American Atheists, Inc. As President Ed Buckner notes, "Claims abound that both Thanksgiving and Christmas are Christian in origin, but in fact both are grounded in non-Christian ideas and rituals that the churches have co-opted for their own purposes.

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'Tis The Season For Battles Over Holiday Displays On Public Property

This is the time of year when disputes over holiday displays on public property and be expected. Here is a sampling of the most recent.

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Atheists Take Softer Approach With Capitol Display

A Seattle-based atheists group asked state officials Friday for permission to display a placard outdoors on the Capitol Campus over the holidays.

Jerry Schiffelbein, the treasurer for Seattle Atheists and an activist in other "free-thought" groups that advocate for separation between church and state, said the sign's message is less provocative than those that the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation put up last year.

The proposed 18-by-30-inch sign says, "In this holiday season let us remember that kindness, charity and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion."

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Tenn. City Drops Bible Text Reading At Tree-Lighting Ceremony

MARYVILLE, TENN. -- Acknowledging it is "terrifying to stand and go against the courts," Samuel David Duck, a Maryville resident and father of two, did what city officials had decided not to do.

He read an account of the birth of Jesus Christ from the Bible at the city's tree-lighting celebration Monday night at the Greenbelt.

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How The Religious Right Stole Christmas

Every year during the holiday season, right-wing pundits and Religious Right groups rally their followers by claiming there is a "war on Christmas." These groups are outraged annually by holiday displays, parades, music and anything else that has to do with the December holiday -- unless a large dollop of Christianity is included.

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Uphill Political Battles In Washington Have Religious Right Leaders Foaming At The Mouth