So, I was wondering about Satan. You know, the little red angry guy with the horns and off around the world corrupting it 'n all that and I started wondering. I mean, has the guy really been given a chance? We're told he lives in a place called hell which is where we all go if we don't follow "da roolz" after we're dead but if we do (follow "da roolz") we're good and off we po to some place called Heaven. I mean, do we? I mean, is this bloke Satan really all that bad?

Science represents our best effort to understand the universe around us and, regardless of whether the understanding it engenders is used for good or ill, that knowledge is a good thing. I want the human race to reach as high as we can. I want us to leave this lonely planet in this far-flung corner of what may well be a lonely galaxy and throw ourselves outwards exploring and finding out more about the universe. IMO, the further we throw ourselves the greater we ensure our survival.

One of the biggest charges laid at the door of science by creationists is that the Theory of Evolution requires as much faith as a belief in a god and, as such, the "theory" of creation should be taught in schools alongside evolution as a science.

This article demonstrates that the Theory of Evolution fully adheres to scientific principles and that creation, and particularly, creation "science" cannot be considered as a science at all.

I am an atheist. I'm proud of being what I am because, to my mind, it implies a certain amount of intelligent consideration of the issues surrounding religions and their claims. However, I don't usually start discussions on atheism or religion because of what I am ... more often than not, something or someone will bring up the subject. That's in public but mostly it's online where I have frequently been as to why it is, I am an atheist.

We've all heard the stories. A guy's down in the dumps, life's shot, no money, no future, in pain from some sort of medical problem that he can't afford to have fixed, probably in trouble for some reason or another beyond that… and then, one day, that person finds God. It's from such ideas that the comfort of the "salvation" story seems to arise.

A recent poll suggests that Americans see religion as increasingly important in their lives. Another shows numbers visiting British churches are on the rise for the first time in decades. However, this is interpreted, the sheep are clearly flocking. It seems the reason is far from shrouded in obscurity, on this occasion there is no movement in mysterious ways, it is caused by the change in attitude following the atrocity of the eleventh of September 2001.

The late, great George Carlin died, as we all must do, in 2008 but left behind him a legacy of intelligent humour and a loyal fanbase. The article printed here enshrines Carlin's view on religion and was a part of "You Are All Diseased" show, recorded live at New York City's Beacon Theatre on February 6, 1999.

In 2002 two young British girls went missing from the house of one of their parents. As a father of two young (at the time) girls, I followed the story to its inevitable conclusion with the girl's bodies being found in shallow graves near an airbase in Surrey and a couple in their home village being arrested for their murder.

Despite being an atheist, I had always accepted the existence of a man called Jesus Christ as actual but Freke and Gandy's "Jesus Mysteries" forced me to re-evaluate my view. Although I did not believe Jesus was the son of any god, I had envisaged him a s real, perhaps a Jewish leader, perhaps a "freedom-fighter", perhaps wise, perhaps soft-spoken and the kind of man around which legends are built ... a kind of early-day Robin Hood if you like. In their book, the authors reveal the mystery religions, whose various dying & resurrecting godmen they refer to as "Osiris-Dionysus", as showing a great degree of similarity in their multi-level teachings that were interpreted more literally by the uninitiated and allegorically by the initiated.

The big bang is decidedly at odds with fundamentalist interpretations of the bible as outlined in Genesis and creationists typically maintain that this theory is, at best, hard to believe as no known cataclysmic events have ever formed order out of their chaos. In lay terminology, the big bang theory describes how the universe started from a huge "explosion" many billions of years ago and that all the material subsequently thrown from it eventually condensed to form galaxies, stars and planets. In this article, I hope to demonstrate what happened following the big bang, provide evidence supporting this theory of the origin of the universe and answer some of the questions/criticisms usually levelled at it by creationists.