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A Question for Atheists: The Book of God's Existence Atheists maintain that rejection of faith is superior to practicing faith. However, despite this commonly held view, one may at least force an atheist to admit he/she is capable of practicing faith. Simply ask this question: Suppose there exists a book simply titled "The Book of God's Existence" which, using formal logic and reasoning, proves the existence of God. However, if one who does not already believe in God reads this book that person is doomed to eternal damnation. Many prominent and vocal atheists have read the book intending to prove...

From Breitbart: MILITARY CENSORS CHRISTIAN CHAPLAIN, ATHEISTS CALL FOR PUNISHMENTA Christian chaplain in the military is being officially censored for engaging in free speech, and anti-Christian activists are demanding he be punished. Lt. Col. Kenneth Reyes is a Christian chaplain currently serving in the U.S. Air Force. He is stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. As an ordained clergyman whose duties are to provide religious instruction and spiritual counseling, he has a page on the base’s website called “Chaplain’s Corner.”Reyes recently wrote an essay entitled, “No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave All in World War II.” This common saying...

From the Daily Mail:Revealed: Buzz Aldrin took Holy Communion on the MOON (but NASA kept it secret)Former astronaut Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin may have been the second man to walk on the moon, but he was the first – and only – person to celebrate Holy Communion on it. Inside the lunar module just hours before following Neil Armstrong onto the heavenly body in 1969, Aldrin celebrated the Christian sacrament with wafers and a bottle of wine – a fact the U.S. government reportedly refused to make public at the time. The Apollo 11 astronaut’s plan to broadcast the religious...

She is a political analyst, blogger, columnist and commentator. She is a Democrat who regularly contributes to USA Today, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal among other publications. She formerly served under the Clinton administration from 1993-1998 and was appointed Deputy Assistant U.S Trade Representative for Public Affairs. In an interview with Focus on the Family, she shares how she converted from atheism to Christianity. She said: “I was not looking to be a Christian. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was a Christian. I had grown up as an Episcopalian,...

It began when the Pope paid his bill. The day after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named the leader of the world's billion Catholics, he asked his driver to go back to the hotel in the Vatican where he'd been staying during the Congress of Cardinals, to pay his bill. The payment was completely symbolic of course. That hotel belongs to the Church, and the Church belongs to him. The Pope paid "because he was concerned about giving a good example of what priests and bishops should do." Paying a bill is a small but vital gesture — it...

A LABOUR politician has defended his beliefs in extra-terrestrial life - after claiming to have fathered a child with an alien. Married father-of-three Simon Parkes, who represents Stakesby on Whitby Town Council, said his wife had rowed with him after revealing he had a child called Zarka with an alien he refers to as the Cat Queen. The 53-year-old driving instructor said he has sexual relations with the alien about four times a year. “What will happen is that we will hold hands and I will say ‘I’m ready’ and then the technology I don’t understand will take us up...

It's something most Christian parents worry about: You send your kids off to college and when they come back, you find they've lost their faith. The prospect of this happening is why many parents nudge their kids towards Christian colleges, or at least schools with a strong Christian presence on campus. But in many ways, the damage has been done long before our children set foot on campus. That's the message from a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly. My friend Larry Taunton of the Fixed Point Foundation set out to find out why so many young Christians lose their...

Rabbis, priests, bishops in Britain I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists. Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s...

The mainstream American right has remained almost entirely silent about the recent suicide of the French historian, Dominique Venner. The reasons for this, I do not know—perhaps it is a squeamishness about the symbolism of his final act, or a lack of understanding of it. Perhaps it is a refusal to see what the people of France already see, and are rising up against.Venner shot himself on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame on May 21st, 2013. The image of this act ought to make us pause in awe. The American left immediately dismissed him as a...

Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, among other American and European universities — included believers in God, agonistics, and atheists. It was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks universe,” in which both...

The untold story of the Communist destruction of the Our Lady of Consolation Trappist Abbey at Yangjiaping in 1947Part 1, Accusations“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” John 1:10I have just returned from another year in China where I have witnessed the Church grow. I have seen churches struggle to accommodate the crowds who come for Holy Mass, and I have listened to countless stories of Christian suffering under China’s Communist rule. Over the years I have traveled with, worshipped with, and prayed with Chinese Catholics. Priests have...

A direct descendant of Charles Darwin has become a Catholic apologist. Laura Keynes, a great-great-great-granddaughter of the English naturalist, has joined Catholic Voices, the project set up to speak up for the Church in the media She writes in this week’s Catholic Herald about how she returned to her childhood Catholic faith after a period of agnosticism. The daughter of an atheist father and a mother who had converted to Catholicism but later became a Buddhist, she was baptised Catholic. But she says she drifted into agnosticism in her teens and “away from any contact with the Church”. When she...

MOSCOW, June 13 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Physics and theology are hard to combine –and an attempt to open a theology department at a prestigious Russian nuclear physics institute has stirred up a storm of protest and verbal sparring between scientists and clerics, highlighting Russia’s increasingly tense religious-secular divide. The new department is due to open in the fall at Moscow’s National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI), ranked the third best institution of higher learning in Russia, according to a 2012 survey by the business weekly Expert. But the plan has numerous ardent critics, who call it an infringement on...

This is according to Fr. Lee Eun-hyung, General Secretary of the Catholic "Committee for the Reconciliation of the Korean People", who spoke to Aid to the Church in Need“We suspect that after the long period of persecution there are still about 10,000 people who will remember in their hearts their Catholic faith.” But “I find it difficult to believe that there is an organised underground Church in North Korea,” Fr. Lee Eun-hyung, the General Secretary of the Catholic "Committee for the Reconciliation of the Korean People", said in an interview with Aid to the Church in Need (the foundation that...

Starting today till Friday, a Vietnamese delegation led by Deputy Foreign Minister Bùi Thanh Sơn will meet Under-Secretary for Relations with States Mgr Antonio Camilleri. In recent months, the Communist state has cracked down on human rights activists, Catholics included.Hanoi (AsiaNews) - The fourth meeting of the Joint Vietnam-Holy See Working Group began this morning in Rome as part of ongoing talks between the Vatican and Hanoi to establish full diplomatic relations between the two sides. The Vietnamese delegation is led by Deputy Foreign Minister Bùi Thanh Sơn, who will meet Under-Secretary for Relations with States Mgr Antonio Camilleri, who...

Is it rational to believe in God?  Many people think that faith and reason are opposites; that belief in God and tough-minded logical reasoning are like oil and water.  They are wrong.  Belief in God is far more rational than atheism.  Logic can show that there is a God.  If you look at the universe with common sense and an open mind, you'll find that it's full of God's fingerprints. A good place to start is with an argument by Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th century philosopher and theologian.  The argument starts with the not-very-startling observation that things move. ...

People can believe a lot of crazy stuff nowadays and not be fired from their jobs, but a senior research associate at the Catholic University of Leuven learned that you better not believe that God can heal. The university is the oldest and largest in Belgium. It was founded in the 1400s under the approval of the Vatican. But as modern Europe has secularized, so has the University, and even here, faith has come under fire. Fernando Pauwels worked at the University's Research Institute for Work and Society for 11 years without a negative review when he was suddenly fired....

A Christian scholar and author has taken the experience of growing up under the influence of a stepfather who cherished the objectivism philosophy of Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) and his biological father who became a follower of Jesus Christ, to write a book about two world views that he feels can come together for the good of society. Mark David Henderson's book, The Soul of Atlas, begins by asking the question, "Do the two most influential books in modern culture, the Bible and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, share common ground?" Henderson has a unique closeness to the subject of Rand's...

A member of a Christian organization that posted a Decalogue outside a Florida courthouse said an atheist group posting a monument in the same location has the right to do so. American Atheists will soon be posting what is believed to be the United States' first atheist monument on public property outside of the Bradford County Courthouse later this month. Ken Weaver, member of the Starke, Fla.-based group Community Men's Fellowship, told The Christian Post about how he feels regarding the atheist monument bench. "Simply put, while we do not agree with the 'faith' of the American Atheists that disregards...

When children are desperate for attention they scream and cry, talk show hosts in need of attention make fun of Catholics. Actually "make fun" isn't the proper term. They hurl hate at Catholics with a smile on their face so they can accuse anyone who's offended of being humorless. Television host Bill Maher has long lost the power to shock because he's so consistently misinformed and hateful about religious people. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't take note of what is said by him and others like him. Sometimes when I write about anti-Catholic screeds from the media some see...

EDITOR'S NOTE: For the last half of the twentieth century, Antony Flew (1923-2010) was the world's most famous atheist. Long before Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris began taking swipes at religion, Flew was the preeminent spokesman for unbelief.However in 2004, he shocked the world by announcing he had come to believe in God. While never embracing Christianity—Flew only believed in the deistic, Aristotelian conception of God—he became one of the most high-profile and surprising atheist converts. In 2007, he recounted his conversion in a book titled There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His...

The American Atheists of Cranford, N.J., announced Friday they will be sending books on atheism to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to be placed next to Gideon Bibles inside every cabin and lodge at the state's parks. On April 28, Ed Buchner, the former president of American Atheists, a nonprofit organization that was founded by Madalyn Murray O'Hair in 1963, complained to the Department after he found "nine Bibles" inside his cabin, according to American Atheists. In a move to avoid controversy, and a potential lawsuit, the decision was made to remove all Bibles from the state's parks that...

[SNIP] The Church's predictions came as it launched an attack on plans by the First Minister, Alex Salmond, for a new class of “belief” ceremonies – alongside traditional religious and civil weddings. The Scottish Government is currently attempting to overhaul the marriage laws north of the border, primarily to introduce same-sex marriage. But the bill would also include a wider update of matrimonial laws including plans to create a “third way” to get married, through so-called “belief” ceremonies to accommodate those who do not belief in a deity but do but do promote a belief system. It follows the popularity...

On 10 May the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church was received by President Xi Jinping, leading to the creation of a new Moscow-Beijing axisThe overture to Patriarch Kirill’s official visit to China marked an important moment in relations between China and the Orthodox Church. Yesterday, in the Great Hall of the People, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church had the privilege of meeting Chinese President, Xi Jinping. “You are the first Patriarch of Moscow and the first supreme religious leader from Russia to visit our country,” Xi told Kirill, presenting this unprecedented event as a “clear sign of...

HOUSTON, TX (Catholic Online) - Finding that there is no law against what they were doing, a judge ruled that the cheerleaders violated no laws by holding banners during football games that made references to God. Koutnze Middle School cheerleaders say they have a tradition of making biblical and religious references on the banners which they hold at the end of halftime and the players run through when they return to the field. It's a widespread tradition practiced at schools across the nation. However, when the "Freedom from Religion Foundation" a litigious atheist organization whose purpose is to destroy any...

Brethren, Peace and Good to all in Jesus Christ. Many of you are already familiar with the different approaches to biblical interpretation. There are many because the Word of God is such a versatile collection of writings that no single approach is sufficient to fathom its riches.   Higher criticism and the Bible student Among the approaches developed in the 17th century that survives to this day is that of “higher criticism.” This approach is really a toolkit of techniques that requires seeing Holy Scripture and its constituent books as primarily literary works made by human beings. Theology and...

Famous atheist author Richard Dawkins has been named the world's top thinker in a global vote that counted 10,000 voices from over 100 countries."When Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, coined the term 'meme' in The Selfish Gene 37 years ago, he can't have anticipated its current popularity as a word to describe internet fads," said Prospect Magazine, which conducted the poll, in explaining the biologist professor's popularity."But this is only one of the ways in which he thrives as an intellectual in the internet age. He is also prolific on Twitter, with more than half a million followers – and...

In a potentially career threatening move, News Editor Paul Sims gets something off his chestI have a confession to make: I think I might be a fan of the Pope. Not what you’d expect to read from the News Editor of a godless magazine but, watching the coverage of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election to the top job, I couldn’t help thinking that I actually quite like the guy. Because really, what’s not to like? From the moment he stepped on to the Vatican balcony on the evening of 13 March, the new Pope Francis has seemed unusually down to earth...

Professor Richard Dawkins has claimed that forcing a religion on children without questioning its merits is as bad as 'child abuse'. In typically incendiary style, the leading atheist said he was against the 'indoctrination of religion' and teaching it as fact. The evolutionary scientist and Emeritus Fellow at Oxford University, speaking at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival yesterday, was repeating claims he made last year which were roundly condemned by charities and politicians. Professor Dawkins said at the festival that children should be taught religion but scorn should be poured on its claims. 'What a child should be taught is...

I am needing to gather information for a paper for my Philosophy course. The information needs to be gathered from other people's thoughts. Could you help me? - What is ultimate reality to you? God? Matter? An impersonal force? Something else? - Is truth absolute or relative? - Are moral values absolute or relative? - Let's go back to ultimate reality. Do you believe in God? If so, why? If not, why not?

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is struggling to get its estimated 100 million religious believers to banish superstitious beliefs about things like sickness and death, the country's top religious affairs official told a state-run newspaper. Wang Zuoan, head of the State Administration of Religious Affairs, said there had been an explosion of religious belief in China along with the nation's economic boom, which he attributed to a desire for reassurance in an increasingly complex world. While religion could be a force for good in officially atheist China, it was important to ensure people were not mislead, he told the Study Times,...

PASADENA, Calif. — Our universe didn't need any divine help to burst into being, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night. Many people had begun queuing up for free tickets to Hawking's 8:00 p.m lecture, titled "The Origin of the Universe," 12 hours earlier. By 6:00 p.m. local time, the line was about a quarter-mile long. A second auditorium and a Jumbotron-equipped lawn, which itself was jammed with an estimated 1,000 viewers, were needed to handle the crowd. At least one person was observed offering $1,000 for a ticket, with...

Over the past few years, evangelical atheists have switched places with fire-and-brimstone Christians: where once it was the Christians who brooked no disagreement, now it is the atheists; and it is the atheists, too, who perform cartwheels on the heads of pins. Christopher Hitchens once even managed to argue of the Reverend Martin Luther King, of all people, that ‘In no real as opposed to nominal sense . . . was he a Christian’. A weaselly self-righteousness is now the hallmark of the celebrity unbeliever. Meanwhile, it is the Christian who nods diligently in any discussion, taking pains to reassure the atheists...

Our Heavenly Father has taken dear Edith Schaeffer to himself. She passed away quietly in her sleep last night in Gryon, Switzerland where she has been living with her family. We cannot express how deep is our gratitude for her life and we thank the Lord that she is enjoying the Hope that she has so longed for. .....

Little has changed in China’s official attitude toward the Vatican since Chairman Mao famously described Christians and other religious groups as, “enemies without guns.” During the most intense years of the Maoist era, the Chairman praised the “life-and-death class struggle” between religion and the People, and continued: “The enemies without guns are more hidden, cunning, sinister and vicious than the enemies with guns.” While China’s rhetoric has softened somewhat since Mao, it still adheres to its position that the Catholic Church interferes in China’s affairs “under the cloak of religion.” China’s spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hua Chunying,...

An atheist "church" in London has modeled itself after the Christian church and plans to add more locations worldwide soon. Since its launch, The Sunday Assembly has heard from over 200 people who want to start their own location. The Sunday Assembly's website says that it is "a godless congregation that meets on the first Sunday of every month to hear great talks, sing songs and generally celebrate the wonder of life." They say that it is a service for anyone who wants to "live better, help often and wonder more." Atheist "church" co-founder and comedian Sanderson Jones says in...

Consider looking at the sky. One can often see a layer of clouds, where the sky is completely clear below a certain height, but the clouds seem to mushroom expansively, all emanating from the same height, as though resting on a great unseen glass shelf in the sky. In other, rarer, circumstances, one may happen to see a column of smoke rising, and abruptly halt and spread out horizontally, as though it has hit an invisible ceiling. The same thing happens in the mind: one travels along the paths of knowledge, absorbing information and learning all one can about a...

In the past few years, the number of affiliated student secular organizations has increased more than threefold This month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a select group of students will show their humanitarian spirit by participating in the Bleedin’ Heathens Blood Drive. On February 12, they will eat cake to celebrate Darwin Day, and earlier this year, they performed “de-baptism” ceremonies to celebrate Blasphemy Day, attended a War on Christmas Party, and set up Hug An Atheist and Ask An Atheist booths in the campus quad. These activities and more are organized by the Illini Secular Student Alliance...

In his most eloquent account of the relationship between faith and reason – the 2006 Regensberg address – Pope Benedict XVI argues that the modern understanding of reason that restricts rationality to the deliverances of the hard sciences is incapable of offering a rational justification of itself, and much of anything else that makes life worth living. “Modern scientific reason,� the Holy Father writes, “quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit [i.e., mind] and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.�...

The beginning of my religious conversion was a lonely time for me. I'd spent my whole life as an outsider to Christian circles, and it was hard to imagine that I could ever be comfortable being one of them, the Christians, the people whom I had firmly categorized in my mind as "Other." I'd come to believe in God on an intellectual level, yet I felt stuck, unable to move forward from there. Years of looking down on the entire concept of religion left me with a lingering impression that Christians and Christian culture were different from anything I'd ever...

Last month I stumbled upon an article about an atheistic “church service� in London. I didn’t even read the whole thing before I decided I had to go.The Sunday Assembly, as the group is called, meets once a month at The Nave in North London for “anybody searching for a sense of community, to meet and ‘turn good intentions into action.’�It is, all things considered, an atheistic church.Yes. A church for atheists.The Nave – new home to the atheistic church The Sunday Assembly This morning I woke up, sacrificed hearing Os Guinness speak at my own church, and ventured down to...

Colbert Report chaplain and envoy-at-large to the entertainment community, Jim Martin, S.J., has announced the very good news that Walter Ciszek’s With God In Russia, is now available on Kindle, courtesy of America Press. For anyone not yet familiar with Ciszek or this book, I urge you to get hold of it. You will be rewarded by encountering heroic sanctity, not through the hagiographic distancing of centuries, but in the searing light and existential detail of a time still very much our own. It is an opportunity to be with someone who loved God the way so many of us...

"I feel sorry for the church next door, waiting for their three people to trickle in," says Nick Julius, glancing at the small adjacent hall that will shortly be hosting its own gathering. There are still 40 minutes before the Sunday Assembly, an atheist service run by two standup comedians, is due to begin, but a queue of eager congregants is already forming outside a grand but crumbling former church in Islington, north London, hands shoved deep into pockets against the cold. Julius arrived an hour early, just to be sure of a place at the service, which is described...

TORONTO (RNS) Talk about an unlikely course in an unlikely place. The main chapel at Jesuit-run Regis College at the University of Toronto is adorned with stained glass windows, icons of Mary and Joseph, and the Stations of the Cross. The eight-week course, which meets every Wednesday afternoon, is on atheism. Or more precisely, “Responding to 21st-Century Atheism.”Atheism “has become militant, aggressive and proselytizing,” said Lewis, a Jesuit scripture scholar, who teaches the class with three other scholars. “It’s made great in-roads and is now socially acceptable. If you’re young and educated and believe in God, you’re (seen as) a...

Anyone on a faith walk will eventually ask the question, “How do I pray?” Except for the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, there is no easy answer, for prayer is a very personal and personalized pursuit. And, as with all pursuits, practice is the key to success and prayer is no different. You will soon discover the more you pray, the more you will find answers to difficult questions, along with mental or physical healing from various maladies, protection for you or your loved ones and comfort from any number of storms that happen to be raging in...

In a move that surprised many, Benedict XVI will receive today the secretary general of Vietnam's Communist Party. Nguyen Phu Trong will stop by the Vatican during a tour of European capitals. The audience with Benedict XVI is unusual for several reasons. The first is that Tuesday is usually a rest day for the Pope. In addition, papal audiences are usually reserved for heads of state, and not leaders of political parties.

General audience, Benedict XVI defines the Incarnation as "something unimaginable, the face of God can be seen, the process that began with Abraham is fulfilled." The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, he asks "for the great gift" to "proclaim together that Jesus is the Savior of the world."Vatican City (AsiaNews) - "The desire to know the face of God is in every man, even the atheists," but this desire is only realized by following Christ, in whom, in the Incarnation, "something unimaginable took place, the journey that began with Abraham is fulfilled. He is the Son, the fullness of...

Last week the New York Times published an opinion piece that offered atheism’s response to the evil/tragedy in which 20 children and six adults were murdered at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut. What prompted Susan Jacoby to write her piece was a colleague telling her that atheism “has nothing to offer when people are suffering.” She wrote the piece, “The Blessings of Atheism” (“It is Here and It is Now!” screams the subhead), to prove her colleague wrong by offering a consoling atheist alternative to religion’s consoling belief in an afterlife. Atheists cannot believe that there is any...

Susan Jacoby, an author and atheist wrote a column in last Sunday’s New Your Times entitled “The Blessings of Atheism.� In it she proposes that atheism has a lot to offer, especially in times of tragic loss and that it frees human beings from having to ask and answer difficult question. As you may imagine, I am not so sure that asserting a question can be avoided means that it has actually been avoided, or that what she calls blessings are in fact blessings.I would like to excerpt her article and make a few comments. Her original writing is in...

Raising your children as Roman Catholics is worse than child abuse, according to militant atheist Richard Dawkins. In typically incendiary style, Professor Dawkins said the mental torment inflicted by the religion’s teachings is worse in the long-term than any sexual abuse carried out by priests. He said he had been told by a woman that while being abused by a priest was a ‘yucky’ experience, being told as a child that a Protestant friend who died would ‘roast in Hell’ was more distressing. Last night politicians and charities condemned the former Oxford professor’s views as attention-seeking and unhelpful. The remarks...